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Conflicting views are emerging over the proposal to ban Sanatan Sanstha, a right wing group allegedly linked to the killing of Left leader in Maharashtra Govind Pansare and 2009 Madgaon bomb blast in Goa.
While former Maharashtra chief minister Prithviraj Chavan said that a proposal was sent to the central government in 2011 for declaring Sanatan Sanstha as an outlawed outfit, former Union home secretary R K Singh said Maharashtra government had never got back to the Union home ministry on certain queries related to the proposal.
"We had decided to send a proposal to the union government requesting it to ban Sanathan Sanstha under Unlawful Activities Prevention Act. That proposal was sent to the Union home ministry on April 11, 2011," Chavan, the then chief minister of Maharashtra, told reporters.
Singh, now a Bharatiya Janata Party MP from Bihar, countered it and said declaring an organisation outlawed under UAPA needs sufficient evidence against the outfit showing its involvement in terror activities.
"We had written to Maharashtra government asking certain queries related to the proposal. But they never got back," he said.
The former home secretary claimed the then home minister P Chidambaram had observed in the file that there seems to be no evidence against Sanathan Sanstha to declare it as a banned organisation.
Singh's predecessor, former Union home secretary G K Pillai, who demitted office on June 30, 2011, said that he did not remember any file, with the proposal to ban Sanathan Sanstha, coming to him.
Pillai said "see, what I guess, the communication was sent from Maharashtra government to the Director, National Integration Council, which deals with organisations that indulge in communal harmony or disharmony. To the best of my knowledge, it could have gone to the concerned section and from the section to IB and others for their comments".
"I retired in June (2011) and I do not remember any such file coming to me. But I am sure after the comments of IB and others, the matter might have been brought before the Home Secretary and the home minister," he said.
Maharashtra police arrested Sanatan Sanstha member Samir Gaikwad on September 16 in connection with the murder of Pansare.
Looking for possible links, Karnataka police, probing the murder of Kannada scholar M M Kalburgi, on Tuesday questioned Gaikwad in Kolhapur.
Pansare, 82, and his wife, Uma, were shot at by two youths on February 16, 2015, near their home in Kolhapur.
Pansare died four days later at the Breach Candy Hospital in Mumbai. His wife survived the attack but suffered injuries that have crippled her.
The National Investigation Agency had probed the involvement of Sanatan Sanstha members in Madgaon bomb blast case in Goa in 2009.