M A I N   N E W S

No movement on NCTC, says Home Minister

New Delhi, June 9
The much talked-about NCTC may be a non-starter but the government has rejected the demand of non-Congress Chief Ministers for a law to set up the anti- terror body.

Home Minister Sushilkumar Shinde said his ministry was not exploring the option of bringing a Bill in Parliament for the purpose.

"No, we have no such proposal," Shinde said when asked about the possibility of bringing a law for setting up the National Counter Terrorism Centre (NCTC).

Asked whether the government was planning to issue an executive order for the NCTC, the Home Minister said, "We are not doing anything now. We brought a proposal before the Chief Ministers. But some of them opposed it. So, there is no further movement now".

Those who are opposing a watered-down proposal for the NCTC include Chief Ministers Mamata Banerjee (West Bengal), Nitish Kumar (Bihar), Jayalalithaa (Tamil Nadu), Narendra Modi (Gujarat), Raman Singh (Chhattisgarh), Shivraj Singh Chouhan (Madhya Pradesh) and Punjab Deputy Chief Minister Sukhbir Singh Badal. Even Congress Chief Ministers Prithviraj Chavan (Maharashtra), Siddaramaiah (Karnataka) and Tarun Gogoi (Assam) have expressed reservations on the revised proposal of the NCTC.

Holding that the revised draft order on the NCTC suffers from several "serious flaws" and "arbitrary" provisions, the Bihar Chief Minister had asked the Centre to seek Parliament's nod through a wider debate for creating the anti-terror hub. Sources said that in his concluding remarks at Wednesday's Chief Ministers' conference on internal security, the Home Minister had said a decision on setting up the NCTC will be taken only after a full consensus.

A political consensus even on a watered-down proposal for the NCTC is unlikely any time soon and the anti-terror hub proposal seems to have gone into deep freeze. — PTI