E.N. Rammohan, retired director general, Border Security Force(BSF), believes that the recent central information commission order directing the BSF to disclose information about a man who went missing from police custody, will only make para- military forces accountable.

Rammohan headed the one- man enquiry committee which probed the killing of 76 security personnel by Maoists in Chattisgarh on April 6. “The forces are answerable to the government and the court even without the RTI act. I don’t see anything wrong in this decision,” Rammohan told Governance Now.

“If we check the general diary of that BSF unit, we should get to know the details of that youth,” he added. Prakash Singh, another IPS officer who headed BSF, says that this is a case where RTI is being misused. “Information commissioners throw their weight around by passing such judgments without realizing their consequences. Also, the RTI applicants should focus on other issues rather than asking inconvenient questions from the forces,” said Singh.

The case relates to the suspected disappearance from police custody of Mohammad Ashraf Yatoo of Badipora, Chadoora who went missing after allegedly being arrested by BSF 80 battalion in December 1990 during a crackdown. He was a store keeper in the food and supplies department, government of J&K.

In 2007, Kashmir based RTI activist Muzaffar Bhatt had filed an application under the right to information act with the BSF headquarters, asking details of the said crackdown and prison where Yatoo who was 35 at the time of arrest was kept. However, the BSF headquarters returned his RTI application along with the application fee. Bhatt then filed a complaint before the CIC.

"Nevertheless it is conceded by all parties that in the present case the request is an allegation of disappearance in custody of a civilian working in a government department in the state of Jammu and Kashmir, and therefore amounts to an allegation of human rights violation, which makes the BSF answerable," Chief Information Commissioner Wajahat Habibullah said in his order.

"In the normal course, the BSF Headquarters should have taken recourse to section 6(3)(ii) of the RTI Act whereby the application should have been transferred within five days of receipt to the public authority to which the subject matter of information sought is more closely connected," Habibullah said.

The Commission asked Bhatt to produce details of FIR and other relevant documents to BSF within a week and gave another 15 days to BSF to disclose all the information on the issue.