Report naming Congress leaders and Dawood not being made public by government

Officials who have seen the content of the N.N. Vohra committee report, and were involved in its preparation, are wondering why the present BJP-led NDA government is following in the footsteps of the previous Congress-led UPA government and refusing to make public a report which named senior Congress leaders as having direct dealings with criminal and terror mastermind Dawood Ibrahim. The report, according to officials who have read it, had named senior Congress leaders, top bureaucrats and police officials who were working for or under the influence of the Mumbai underworld. The underworld was led by India’s most wanted criminal, Dawood Ibrahim during the late 1980s and early 1990s.

These officials claimed that the report had alleged that certain senior Congress leaders were colluding with Dawood, who at the time was involved in hawala, land-grab, drugs and smuggling of weapons. The authenticity of these claims could not be verified by this newspaper independently. These officials claimed that of the leaders who were named, at least a couple are still “very active” in politics.

“We can understand that why successive Congress governments did not make the committee’s findings public, but it is beyond our comprehension why even the present government is following in the Congress’ footsteps. What do they have to lose? Some of Congress’ top brass might be embarrassed if the report becomes public, but it is unlikely to do any damage to any top BJP leadership. In this situation, one can only assume that the present government too has been pressurised successfully to keep quiet,” said one of the few officials closely associated with the report.

According to them, the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) and other concerned departments within the MHA and Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) had a copy of the report and it was wrong to say that the report was “untraceable”. The officials were responding to this newspaper’s query if the report might have got misplaced, as the MHA, while replying to the RTI query of this newspaper in June last year, had stated that the “minutes of the meetings related to the N.N. Vohra committee report were not available in the offices”.

“The government should understand that matters of national security cannot be used as a political tool.