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Journalism of Courage
As US federal prosecutors named Vikash Yadav as the Indian intelligence official behind the plot to kill pro-Khalistan separatist Gurpatwant Singh Pannun and charged him with “murder-for-hire and money laundering”, a senior Congress leader Friday said it was time for intelligence agencies and law enforcement structures to be subjected to parliamentary oversight.
While the Congress has officially refrained from weighing in on the issue, Trinamool Congress (TMC) leaders took potshots at the government. TMC Rajya Sabha MP Sagarika Ghose said the charges were serious and the government must inform Parliament.
Congress Lok Sabha MP Manish Tewari told The Indian Express, “Parliamentary oversight over India’s intelligence structures is an idea whose time has come. All across the world, every intelligence agency in every democracy has been provided with a proper legal architecture and is subjected to robust parliamentary oversight.”
Tewari said he had way back in 2011 moved a Private Members’ Bill seeking parliamentary oversight of intelligence agencies. “Unfortunately, it lapsed when I moved to the government. In the Winter Session of 2021, I tabled an updated version of that Bill. Unfortunately, it never got marked up for discussion and subsequently lapsed when the Lok Sabha was dissolved in 2024. I have moved that bill again in August.”
“The reason why I have been pursuing this particular initiative is because it is incumbent in democracies that both intelligence agencies, as well as law-enforcement structures, must be subject to Parliamentary oversight. If this idea would have been accepted, either way back in 2011 or in 2021, the kind of international embarrassment that we are facing now would have been avoided most definitely,” he said.
Asked about the latest developments, he said, “Ultimately there are criminal trials that will play themselves out both in the US and Canada. Those criminal trials would be subject to judicial adjudication. But suffice to say, the very legitimate concerns that India has had over the past four decades with regard to cross-border terrorism or even cross-continent terrorism or at least the financing and the organisation of cross-continent terrorism also are concerns which were never really taken cognizance of or never really addressed in the holistic manner in which they should have been as certain other countries have addressed their own security concerns by going to faraway lands and having a very long-boots-on-the-ground presence there.”
In a post on X, TMC MP Ghose said, “The name is finally out. The US names former RAW official Vikash Yadav (“CC1”) and charges him with murder for hire. The question is: Is Vikash only the fall guy and who were his handlers? Great nations act according to a rules based world order. The Modi government must inform Parliament on these serious charges.”
Her party colleague and Lok Sabha MP Mahua Moitra said, “Now RAW official indicted in extra judicial killing in the US. What is wrong with our country …”
