NEW DELHI, DECEMBER 5: Don't tell this to Satyendra Dubey’s family. One full year before he blew the whistle on the Prime Minister’s showpiece project and two full years before he was killed, there was a Whistle Blower Act for India on paper. That paper gathers dust but what is even more telling—and a stark coincidence—is the genesis of this proposal.

For, nothing could be more appropriate a match for Dubey’s case as this.

The Law Commission of India, right on the first page of its 121-page report calling for the Whistle Blower Act, justifies it by referring to a speech by Prime Minister A B Vajpayee himself.

Commission chairman and former Supreme Court judge Justice B P Jeevan Reddy invokes the speech ‘‘condemning rampant corruption and highlighting the principle of ‘zero tolerance’ not only from the demand side of public servants but also from the supply side.’’ In other words, he was referring to zero tolerance for bribe-givers and bribe-takers.

Evidently, Dubey shared the Prime Minister’s conviction: he had zero tolerance from the ‘‘demand side’’. And it was to expose the ‘‘supply side’’ that Dubey wrote the letter to the Prime Minister.

Justice Reddy says that Vajpayee’s speech has been referred to him by the then Central Vigilance Commissioner N Vittal. Vittal had asked the Law Commission to draft a Bill ‘‘encouraging public servants to disclose corrupt practices on the part of public functionaries.’’ The reason Vittal gave for seeking a law protecting whistle blowers is starkly similar to the reason Dubey gave for disclosing his identity in the letter to the PMO and then requesting it to be kept confidential. In his letter to the Law Commission, Vittal said he had ‘‘banned actions on anonymous/pseudonymous complaints which had been lodged by disgruntled elements to blackmail honest officials resulting in their demoralisation.’’ As a corollary to this, Vittal told the Law Commission that he had set up a system in the CVC in which an honest public servant sending a complaint of corruption or maladministration would be assured of his identity being kept confidential. But, since such an arrangement does not exist in the Government, Dubey’s identity was leaked out despite his request to keep it confidential.