An Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) officer, suspended last year for not carrying out changes in a counter reply to the Supreme Court on the Ram Sethu project, has filed a case against Culture Minister Ambika Soni and her senior officials for making him a “convenient scapegoat” to save herself from the public furore that ensued.

Seeking to quash the chargesheet against him, Chander Shekhar, Director (Administration) in the ASI, has told the Central Administrative Tribunal that the “purpose and motive of issuance of chargesheet is oblique and aimed solely at providing cover to the respondents in respect to the situation, which are their own creation, resulting in political fallout causing serious consequential repercussion to them”.

Shekhar, along with Assistant Director (Monuments) V Bakshi, was suspended in September 2007 for not incorporating corrections in the counter affidavit that set off a political storm, with the BJP accusing the UPA Government of hurting religious sentiments of Hindus in stating that there was no historical or scientific proof about the existence of Lord Ram.

Soni had then said her officers had made corrections, including deleting paragraph 20, which argued that mythological texts Ramayana and Ramcharitmanas could not be called historical records that “incontrovertibly prove(d) the existence of the characters or the occurrence of the events, depicted therein”. 

According to Shekhar, the ministry’s Chief Public Information Officer Roopa Srinivasan, while replying to an RTI appeal for information on who carried out the changes, wrote: “No such information is available”.

“Thus, after one year of carrying out the claimed corrections in paragraph 20 of the draft affidavit, the ministry has now accepted that there is nothing on record to establish as to who carried out these claimed corrections in paragraph 20,” says Shekhar’s petition, which also names former culture secretary Badal K Das and ASI Director General Anshu Vaish as respondents.

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