Supreme Court seeks Lok Sabha response on plea of employee sacked for 'spying'

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.