Not really a great innings as home minister
If loyalty to the Congress’ first family was not the criterion, the going would have not been so easy for Mr Shivraj V Patil. His track record as Union home minister over the last three years is marred by judicial raps over key decisions related t...
By TNN |
NEW DELHI: If loyalty to the Congress’ first family was not the criterion, the going would have not been so easy for Mr Shivraj V Patil. His track record as Union home minister over the last three years is marred by judicial raps over key decisions related to his ministry.
The dissolution of the Bihar assembly in 2005 and notification of rules under the Foreigners Act with a view to bring back the scrapped IMDT Act through the backdoor on poll-eve in Assam. The biggest embarrassment was, arguably, the midnight dissolution of the Bihar assembly on May 23, 2005, based on a wishy-washy report by the then governor, Mr Buta Singh, citing “attempts at horse-trading.”
Though cautioned by senior ministry officials that the evidence quoted by Mr Singh was not enough, making the report rather “weak,” Mr Patil allegedly pushed for Central intervention in Bihar in what was seen as an attempt by the UPA to keep JD(U)’s Nitish Kumar from staking claim to form a government in Patna.
The Supreme Court, while quashing the dissolution of the Bihar assembly as “illegal and unconstitutional,” had not only indicted the governor for sending a misleading report to the Centre on horse-trading in Bihar but rapped the Union cabinet for accepting his recommendation without cross-checking the veracity of Mr Buta Singh’s claims.
Given that the Cabinet relied on the home ministry’s view accepting Mr Singh’s report at face value, Mr Patil — who had, after the dissolution, told mediapersons that “some politicians from the state had kept the government of India informed about the happenings in Bihar “ — cannot escape the blame for government having acted in haste.
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Mr Patil’s response to the Supreme Court’s quashing the IMDT Act, timed “inconveniently” ahead of assembly polls in Assam, was equally inept: the home ministry, in a blatant attempt to bring the IMDT through the back door when the apex court had clearly directed transfer of all cases to Foreigners’ Act tribunals, amended the rules under the Foreigner’s Act to shift the onus back on the complainant of proving a person a foreigner. The decision, coming as it did on poll eve in Assam, hardly left the real motive in doubt: to gain an electoral edge for the Congress. This may have just been the case as chief minister Tarun Gogoi romped home for a second term. Soon after, however, the Supreme Court applied the brakes and in its judgement on December 5, 2006, quashed the freshly notified rules terming them as “unreasonable, arbitrary and invalid.”
Mr Patil, who insists on calling Naxalites as well as insurgents his “brothers and sisters led astray,” has not been too deft in handling attempts at entering into a dialogue with them. The Union home minister, who had hailed the talks initiative of the YS Reddy government with the CPI(Maoist) in 2004, changed tack soon after it fell through. In fact, he admitted that allowing the terrorists to carry arms for the talks sessions was a mistake.
The Naxalites, however, used the peace period in Andhra Pradesh to regroup and rearm and are now a force to reckon with more than 180 districts across 16 states. Left-wing extremism has grown in the absence of a uniform counter-strategy by the MHA. More recently, a similar half-baked peace move with Ulfa fell flat on its face.
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Though initiated by the PMO and national security advisor M K Narayanan in 2006, the parleys with Assam’s leading insurgent group, subsequently anchored by the MHA, remained half-baked and never moved beyond the mediators. The Centre tried to negotiate with an invisible Ulfa leadership and, understandably, failed to bring it on board. The Ulfa happily regrouped during this period and has killed over 100 civilians in the first three months of this year. Download
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