Report on criminal, politician nexus ‘lost’

The Sunday Guardian: New Delhi: Sunday, June 04, 2017.

Officials working in the Ministry of Home Affairs continue to hide the findings and the contents of the report of the N.N. Vohra Committee, which was constituted more than 24 years ago to unearth the criminalisation of politics and the nexus among criminals, bureaucrats and politicians. The MHA (Internal Security Division), while replying to an RTI query, has stated that the minutes of the meetings related to the N.N. Vohra Committee are not available with it. This has led to speculation that the 100 plus pages report might have been “misplaced”. The MHA has declined to share the file notings of the committee meetings, terming them as “secret”.

This reporter had filed an RTI query with the Ministry of Home Affairs (Internal Security Desk) seeking the details of minutes of the meetings and the file notings, related to the N.N. Vohra Committee report that had become a part of the government record since 1 May 2009.

However, in its reply, the MHA, while refusing to share the details, stated that “minutes of the meetings related to the NN Vohra committee report are not available in the offices of which the undersigned is the CPIO. As regards the file notings is concerned, it cannot be provided as required document is a classified/secret document under section 8(1) (h) of the RTI act, 2005.”

What the MHA has termed as “secret”, according to officials familiar with the development, is nothing but the details as to how politicians and bureaucrats helped criminals, including underworld don Dawood Ibrahim to commit crimes, including the 1993 Mumbai blast.

Senior intelligence agency officials, who had followed Ibrahim, said that the findings of the N.N. Vohra Committee report were “very explosive” as it had found out and named senior politicians and bureaucrats working for Dawood.

The Committee, led by former Home Secretary N.N. Vohra, who is presently the Governor of Jammu and Kashmir, was constituted in July 1993 soon after the March 1993 Mumbai serial bomb blasts “to take stock of all available information about the activities of the crime syndicates/mafia organizations which had developed links with, and were being protected by Government functionaries and political personalities.”

The findings of the Committee were submitted to the government in October 1993.

However, it was not until August 1995, when the Central government, facing the heat in the Naina Sahni murder case, agreed to table the report before Parliament. However, the government, under political compulsion, refused to share the major findings of the report and later went to the Supreme Court and took a stay order from making the findings of the report public.