Jain panel report may spell trouble for Govt

NEW DELHI, Aug 20: Retired High Court Chief Justice Milap Chand Jain is expected to make scathing remarks about the Government's delay in h...

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NEW DELHI, Aug 20: Retired High Court Chief Justice Milap Chand Jain is expected to make scathing remarks about the Government’s delay in handing over secret documents and files in the interim report he will be submitting to the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) later this month.

Official sources say that many of the documents yet to be filed before the Commission figure in the list of 18 documents which Congress President Sitaram Kesri had asked the United Front Government to submit in January this year.

The Jain Commission was set up in August 1991 to inquire into the sequence of events and the conspiracy behind the assassination of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi.

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Meanwhile, the government has approved another six-month extension for the Commission, official sources said today. This is the 12th extension being granted to the Commission.

There are three important sets of documents which Justice Jain has been demanding:

— Files pertaining to the February 10, 1994 Cabinet meeting where the winding up of the Jain Commission and Librahan Commission (inquiring into the demolition of Babri Masjid) was discussed. The Government had first sought privilege on these files. After Kesri raised the matter, they arrived at a “compromise” with Justice Jain.

Last month, the Commission’s standing Government counsel, B Dutta, was asked to examine the file in the MHA and prepare a summary. Dutta told The Indian Express that he had given the summary to the MHA three weeks ago and that it had still not been returned for being shown to Justice Jain.

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— Files of the MHA pertaining to the two Special Leave Petitions (SLPs) filed by the Government in the Supreme Court in early 1996 for limiting the scope of the inquiry to exclude the pre-1987 period. The decision to file the SLPs is said to have been taken by the present Finance Minister, P Chidambaram, who was briefly handling affairs of the Jain Commission in the Rao Government, but it obviously had the approval of the then Prime Minister.

Ritu Sarin

Ritu Sarin is Executive Editor (News and Investigations) at The Indian Express group. Her areas of specialisation include internal security, money laundering and corruption. Sarin is one of India’s most renowned reporters and has a career in journalism of over four decades. She is a member of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) since 1999 and since early 2023, a member of its Board of Directors. She has also been a founder member of the ICIJ Network Committee (INC). She has, to begin with, alone, and later led teams which have worked on ICIJ’s Offshore Leaks, Swiss Leaks, the Pulitzer Prize winning Panama Papers, Paradise Papers, Implant Files, Fincen Files, Pandora Papers, the Uber Files and Deforestation Inc. She has conducted investigative journalism workshops and addressed investigative journalism conferences with a specialisation on collaborative journalism in several countries. ... Read More