Haryana orders internal probe into missing pages

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, December 19

Haryana has instituted an internal inquiry into the disappearance of pages from a file linked to the controversial Robert Vadra-DLF deal from government records. Chief Secretary PK Gupta said efforts are on to reconstruct the file.

IAS officer Ashok Khemka has sought an FIR after an RTI filed by him revealed official notings pertaining to the setting up of a three-member committee by the previous Hooda government, which gave a clean chit to Vadra’s firm, were “missing” from the main file.

Gupta said: “This is a fact that one page of the file, which has two numbers (1 and 2), is missing. I examined the file today and this page is missing. For this we are instituting an inquiry... if somebody is found guilty, we will take action.”

“We are trying to reconstruct the file. Somebody, other than Ashok Khemka, had sought information under the RTI around six months ago. The information was provided to him... We are approaching the Information Commissioner’s office to see if a copy of that is available with that office,” said Gupta.

Khemka called it a “serious matter” that needed to be probed. “How can the notings suddenly be untraceable?” he said.

“The file noting is a very important piece of record which would establish that the three members were specifically appointed to an illegally constituted committee by the then political executive — where the only remedy to an aggrieved party was to file a writ petition in the high court — with the pre-determined objective to accord a clean chit to black-marketing of colony licence by M/s Skylight Hospitality, a company belonging to Robert Vadra, and to discredit my action of cancelling the land mutation from M/s Skylight Hospitality to M/s DLF,” Khemka alleged in a letter to the Chief Secretary yesterday. State Public Information Officer DR Wadhwa, in an affidavit before the State Information Commission a week ago, has mentioned that despite efforts to locate page Nos. 1 and 2 of the noting, these remained untraceable and therefore these pages could not be provided to Khemka.
The whistleblower, whose action to cancel the mutation in October 2012 had raised a political storm, had sought the documents to ascertain how the official committee, which later on gave a clean chit to Vadra, was constituted.
Khemka wrote to the Chief Secretary that under the RTI the former had been informed that the noting related to the committee constituted on October 19, 2012, barely a week after the mutation was cancelled, “by the then political executive to give a clean chit to Skylight Hospitality and to discredit my action of cancelling the mutation is detached from main file and is denied to me under the RTI Act”.
“This is serious, now there can be no scrutiny of the matter as to how Krishna Mohan, KK Jalan and Rajan Gupta became members, what were the terms of reference and what occasioned the constitution of the committee when the parties were not aggrieved against my orders and the only remedy against the order was to approach the high court,” he wrote.
The Hooda government had constituted the committee after Khemka cancelled the mutation and IAS officers Krishna Mohan, KK Jalan and Rajan Gupta were part of the committee.
“If the two important pages are actually missing as alleged, I request you to order an FIR against all persons in the office of the then Chief Minister to whom the file should not have been sent ordinarily as per the work distribution in the then Chief Minister's Office,” Khemka further wrote.
“The Personnel Department must have noticed the violation of some instruction of the state government on the file before framing the said charge. Please allow me access to the said instruction of the state government, if any, in order to effectively reply to the charge,” Khemka, who is currently Transport Commissioner and Secretary to Government of Haryana, Transport Department, said in his letter.
Congress spokesperson and former Haryana Minister Randeep Singh Surjewala said he failed to understand why the issue was being raked up.
“Question arises whether inquiry committee's report is in the file, it is very much so, was an inquiry committee constituted and was inquiry held, facts pertaining to this are on the file. So where have things been impacted?" said Surjewala. Haryana’s Health Minister Anil Vij said an inquiry would be conducted and those found guilty would not be spared.