New Delhi: The Supreme Court has sought
response of the Lok Sabha Secretariat on a petition
challenging the dismissal of an employee, Mithilesh Kumar
Singh, for allegedly supplying certain official documents to
Pakistan High Commission.
A bench of Justices D K Jain and A K Patnaik issued
notice to the Secretariat after Singh claimed his services
were terminated despite the inquiry committee not establishing
the allegations of espionage.
The allegations against Singh, who was a Class IV
employee, was that he unauthorisedly supplied official papers
to intelligence operatives of the Pakistan High Commission for
pecuinary benefits.
On August 18,1997, the Counter Espionage Cell of
Delhi Police conducted a raid on his residence at R.K. Puram,
during which certain unauthorised documents were seized from
his possession.
After a departmental inquiry, he was dismissed from
service on October 10, 2001.
Singh appealed in the Delhi High Court claiming that
the inquiry was not conducted in a proper manner and that he
was dismissed despite the charge being not established.
A single judge dismissed his plea and the division
bench refused to interfere with the order on the ground that
it would not go into the technicalities of the inquiry as the
allegations of espionage were serious in nature.
An aggrieved Singh, through counsel Dushyant Parashar,
filed a special leave petition in the apex court claiming that
the High Court had taken an erroneous view in dismissing his
appeal.
The accused employee claimed that the inquiry
conducted by the then Joint Secretary P D T Acharya, held that
though Singh was in possession of "unauthorised" documents,
yet, the same were not in the nature of "classified documents"
as specified under Section 5 of the Official Secrets Act.
According to the counsel, Singh had ignorantly taken
the documents unauthorisedly for use as rough sheets for his
son.
It was argued that the inquiry committee did not
establish any guilt of espionage but the High Court, instead
of going by the findings, had merely dismissed the appeal on
technical grounds.
-PTI
