To clarify :-
1. I'm not an Air India employee.
2. I do not know the persons involved well, except at a professional level. If there's gossip behind this (e.g. the pilot who sent the email has an axe to grind with AI, something I got to know not so long ago), it is still not clear what exactly happened.
3. The incident was brought to light in an email sent to everyone except OPS involving a contractor, their pilot and the management.
4. The de-rostered pilot has denied anything of that sort every happened, and it was a full deck that day and it seems like everyone is on the same page except the one who sent the email.
5. The incident was reported so far out that there is little anyone can do at this stage to nail things down.
6. IN MY OPINION (please note the caps), by bringing up things like this especially when you have an issue which is turning ugly is highly unprofessional. You'd be better off, if you didn't report it at all, because you neglected your duty earlier by not reporting the incident, and now you bring it up in a way that its your word against the others, rather than have data.
7. Being a govt. run airline, it is not unusual to find ourselves at the butt of things no matter how ridiculous.
Again, like I said earlier, AI has room for improvement..... LOTS of it.... But its not as bad as its made to sound either. Give the devil its due. The maintenance is good (hey qantas has been blowin it all over), being a government run airline, documentation is taken care of well, pilots are treated well (remember this whole story of AI blowing up $10k/mnth for putting up expats in 5 star hotels), and no one is outside the envelope.
I would request that we close this thread out and open a new one if it is generic to AI rather than specifically for this incident, which is a "it might have happened, but we cant prove it".
Happy Landings.