Chidambaram moves to nail 'leak' allegations

Under fire for the alleged leakage of the Liberhan Commission report, Union home minister P Chidambaram called the home secretary, a joint secretary and a few other officials to his residence to establish that he wasn’t responsible.

Chidambaram called his top officers on Monday to break the seals and open four boxes of documents which were annexures to the main report. These were all kept in a secured corner of his official residence ever since they were handed over to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh by retired judge M S Liberhan five months earlier.

Top Congress sources told Business Standard that while Chidambaram had an “impressive record” in tackling terror and other issues as the home minister, on this issue he faced an embarrassing situation both outside and inside the party.

The party brass had enquired from him how the report got leaked, given the fact that only two copies — with Justice Liberhan and Chidambaram — were available.

Altogether, Chidambaram had used five boxes to keep the whole report of the Liberhan Commission. The home minister told the party leadership that so far he had opened only one box — of the main report — and the annexure was kept sealed before it was sent to North Block’s ‘Budget Press’” for printing.

The party believes the home minister and has already rejected the Opposition’s demand to probe the leakage.

The BJP, trying to shift the attention from the content of the report to the leakage has sharpened its attack on Chidambaram.

“Earlier, we were saying the report has been leaked from the home ministry but now we are saying it has been leaked by the home minister,” BJP’s deputy leader in Lok Sabha Sushma Swaraj alleged.

Chidambaram says it would be very foolish on his part to leak the report.

He had to answer another awkward query, though, from the party high command: how had he prepared the Action Taken Report (ATR) when four out of five boxes of the report were kept sealed?

Chidambaram is understood to have said that he was told the sealed boxes only contained evidence collected by the Commission, so there was no need to refer to them during the drafting of the ATR.