EX-DGP wants list of smugglers, their associates revised

Jupinderjit Singh

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, June 15

With the first list of police officials and bureaucrats close to drug smugglers going missing, former DGP Shashi Kant has asked various security agencies, through the Punjab and Haryana High Court, to revise the list and prepare a second one.

Kant claimed that the list prepared by him in 2007 when he was posted as the ADGP (Intelligence) Punjab was never made public.

He had in an affidavit before the Punjab and Haryana High Court on May 23 demanded that the state and national security agencies should prepare a new list as the previous one needed to be updated. It seems that nobody has seen the list. Even Kant does not have its copy. The court has asked the governments of Punjab, Haryana to respond to his affidavit.

Referred to as “The Shashi Kant List”, the list was first acknowledged publicly by Kant before the Punjab and Haryana High Court in September 2013. In the affidavit, Kant had claimed that he had submitted the list to the government. But the latter denied receiving any such list. He had said, “I am ready to give in a sealed cover and to the best of my memory the list of drug smugglers and their associates prepared by the intelligence wing way back in 2007.”

He added, “This (new list) is required because smuggling is ‘profitable’ and chances are that several new players must have been added, with a few being deleted.”

The High Court has asked the state government, besides Haryana and the UT, to file a response to his affidavit.

Kant claimed: “I had submitted the list directly to the former Chief Minister and had to bypass the DGP office and the Home Department.”

But the former CM had refuted the claim. Harcharan Singh Bains, who was Adviser to Badal, told The Tribune that Badal never backed the claim of Kant. Navkiran Singh, human rights lawyer, said there were only talks. Nobody seems to have seen the list.