Nagarwala case: mystery returns after three decades
Sidharth Misra
by Krishnadas Rajagopal Dec 21, 2008 Indian Express
New Delhi: Last week, Chief Information Commissioner Wajahat
Habibullah directed the concerned ministry to provide one of the
witnesses of the Nagarwala case the transcripts of his testimony
within the next 10 days.
The voice of Nagarwala has come back to haunt public memory 30 years
after it fooled a chief cashier at State Bank of India to part with Rs
60 lakh.
Rustom Suhrab Nagarwala, an ex-army captain and intelligence officer,
for reasons still unknown, called the bank's Parliament Street branch
on May 24, 1971. On the other end of the line was chief cashier Ved
Prakash Malhotra, who heard the "voice of Prime Minister Indira
Gandhi" instructing him to withdraw Rs 60 lakh and hand it over to a
"Bangladeshi". Times were tense, with India on the threshold of a war
with Bangladesh. Malhotra did not cross-check before following the
voice's instructions.
Alarm bells rang for Malhotra when he learnt of the impersonation at
the PM's residence, where he had gone to get a receipt for the sum
withdrawn.
Nagarwala was nabbed for "mimicking the voice" of the PM and the money
was recovered on the same day after intelligence officials swung into
a manhunt on the advice of the PM's principal secretary P Haskar.
The incident became a political scandal with Opposition claiming
Gandhi's hand behind the fraud. The case took a mysterious angle with
the death of its investigating officer, D K Kashyap, in a car crash.
Nagarwala died in prison the same year, reportedly of a heart attack.
Even more thought-provoking was the report of a Commission of Inquiry
set up by Janata Party under Justice P Jaganmohan Reddy on June 19,
1977, which said: "There were several lacunae and to supply an answer
to these would force me to leave the safe haven of facts which
required to be established by evidence and enter the realm of
conjectures and speculation."
Interestingly, one of the four lacunae pointing to the improbability
of the popular version of the incident was that Gandhi reportedly did
not have an account in that particular bank.
The case which inspired the author Rohinton Mistry in Such a long
journey and made into a movie by Sturla Gunnarsson in 1998, is now
material for an RTI application for retired senior police official
Padam Rosha, one of the witnesses who testified on July 19, 1978.
Rosha had sought the disclosure of the transcript of his testimony.
But the ministry had refused him, quoting the antiquity of the case.
"The information desired by you is more than 30 years old. In terms of
Section 8 (3) of the RTI Act, 2005, there shall be no obligation to
give any citizen any information relating to any occurrence, event or
matter which has taken place, occurred or happened 20 years before the
date on which any request is made," Under Secretary J S Phaugat
replied to Rosha.
Noting that the RTI Act 2005 specifically makes it mandatory for
public authorities to part information over 20 years old, Chief
Information Commissioner Wajahat Habibullah directed the ministry on
December 16 to provide the transcripts within the next 10 days.
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