Patna: Under fire from the Opposition,
Bihar government on Tuesday said there was procedural delay in
granting extension to the one-man judicial commission probing
the police firing at Forbesganj which claimed four lives,
including a child and a woman.
"There has been a precedural delay in extension of
term of the judicial commission headed by justice Madhavendra
Saran as the finance department proposal in the matter could
not be put up for cabinet approval," Deputy Chief Minister
Sushil Kumar Modi told reporters here.
"The proposal for extension of the judicial
commission's term will be put up for approval at the next
cabinet meeting," he said a day after the main opposition RJD
raised a hue and cry charging the state government with being
biased against the minority community.
Modi said there were precedents of judicial
commissions being given extensions with retrospective effect
and said that the Saran commission was as such carrying out
its hearing and recording statements in the June 3 firing.
The opposition should not try to seek undue political
mileage on the status of the judicial commission as the state
government was in the process of extending of its term, he
added.
Senior RJD leader and Leader of Opposition in the
state assembly, Abdul Bari Siddique had yesterday claimed
that the one-man judicial commission probing the incident had
ceased to exist on December 23 as its term was not extended by
the state government.
The one-man commission, set up on June 22 last year,
now has no legal or constitutional sanction to go ahead with
its probe in the incident, he had said and reiterated RJD's
demand for a CBI probe in the matter.
PTI
First Published: Tuesday, January 17, 2012, 18:23