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Congress, Marxists to make Staines murder a poll issue

M I Khan in Bhubaneswar

The Congress and the Communist Party of India (Marxist) are planning to make the murder of Australia-born missionary Graham Stewart Staines an electoral issue.

The Congress plan has received a boost from a recommendation made by Gopal Subramanium, the government counsel and senior Supreme Court advocate who assisted the Justice D P Wadhwa Commission that probed the murder.

Subramanium has called for a thorough investigation into the alleged links of the main accused, Dara Singh, with the Sangh Parivar. He felt that no organisation should be given a clean chit in the murder without further inquiries.

Taking the cue, the Congress and the CPI-M have decided to try and highlight the involvement of the Bajrang Dal and Sangh Parivar in the murder.

"The Wadhwa Commission report is an effort to cover up the gruesome activities of the Bajrang Dal and the Sangh Parivar," said Janardan Pati, state CPI-M secretary.

A CPI-M release said the report had tried to protect the Bharatiya Janata Party by giving a clean chit to the Sangh Parivar in the murder of the missionary and his two minor sons on January 22 at Manoharpur village of Keonjhar district.

"The Wadhwa Commission report is going to be one of our main electoral planks in the Lok Sabha election," confirmed Orissa Pradesh Congress Committee president Hemanand Biswal.

The Congress has decided to target the Bharatiya Janata Party and its ally, the Biju Janata Dal, by questioning the credibility of the commission's report, which exonerated the Bajrang Dal of any culpability.

Biswal said the Congress would make it a point to highlight the lapses in the report. Though clear links were visible between the main accused, Dara Singh, and the Hindu fundamentalist outfit, they find no place in the report, Biswal said.

Former chief minister J B Patnaik, who was replaced after the murders, also insisted that the Sangh Parivar was behind the killings. "This was the handiwork of a fanatic Hindu mind. The prime accused Dara Singh was very much involved in the RSS and Bajrang Dal's activities," Patnaik said.

According to him, the commission's finding was not based on the evidence produced before it. This fact can be exposed only if the commission's report becomes an election issue, he said.

The BJP, on the other hand, has not only welcomed the report, but also demanded an inquiry into the circumstances in which the first information report on the killings had blamed the Bajrang Dal.

BJP politicians said it was unfortunate that the government counsel had made such a submission when a Supreme Court judge had put the report together.

Senior BJP politician Prasant Nanda said the Congress was trying to make it an election issue because it had no other issue to highlight.

He said the ploy would boomerang on the Congress government because the commission has made it clear that the FIR in the case was a doctored document.

Another senior BJP politician, Shyamanand Mahapatra, went to the extent of alleging that the FIR was tampered with only after then chief minister Patnaik visited the place.

"Patnaik was a co-conspirator in the doctoring of the FIR and he wanted to make political capital out of it," Mahapatra said, and demanded a judicial inquiry into the matter.

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