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 Sushil Kumar Shinde said his Ministry was not exploring the option of bringing a bill in Parliament for the purpose.
“No, we have no such proposal,” Mr. Shinde told PTI when asked about the possibility of bringing a law for setting up National Counter Terrorism Centre (NCTC).
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Asked whether the government was planning to issue an executive order for 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 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 to the revised proposal of NCTC.
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Holding that the revised draft order on 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 NCTC will be taken only after a full consensus.
A political consensus even on a watered-down proposal for NCTC is unlikely any time soon and the anti-terror hub proposal seems to have gone into deep freeze.