Documents under probe swapped in govt office

MUMBAI: Shouldn''t a government office that is supposed to watch over the affairs of 400,000 charity trusts in Maharashtra be vigilant enough to at least keep vital documents safe? Shockingly enough, the answer is no—as Qamar Sadruddin Qazi, a trustee of the Anjuman Taraquiwa Tanzeem Achra, discovered to his detriment.
In the midst of a long-running feud with a breakaway faction of the trust headed by Prof A.A.Kazi, Mr Qazi applied in March to the charity commissioner''s office for fresh copies of a no-confidence motion passed against him in 1999. On receiving the papers two days later, he discovered to his horror that two vital documents had been substituted.
The missing documents were by no means innocuous. In fact, one of them was under investigation by the Dongri police on the orders of the Mazgaon court. This document—201 signatures of trust members who''d allegedly voted for the no-confidence motion—was completely spurious, said Mr Qazi, who pointed out some of the holes therein: six purported signatories were bedridden at the time of the election, ten were living abroad, four were minors, six were fictitious, six were duplicated, and four were dead.
Mr Qazi''s suspicions of forgery were borne out by the report of Mahesh Wagh, a handwriting expert and additional chief state examiner of documents in the CID. The police, on their part, interrogated 46 signatories, of whom 32 denied having attended the meeting at all. The police also went to Room 13, Essac Manzil, where the meeting was allegedly held, and stated that the 230-sq-ft room could not possibly hold 201 people at one time. A prima facie case that forgery had taken place was then made out.
It was this controversial list of signatures that the charity commissioner''s office accepted from Prof Kazi along with his request to replace the old trustees with his own people. This process of replacing names (known as a change report) has been known to take years, and even decades, in this office. Yet, Prof Kazi''s change report was processed in a miraculous five weeks. Mr Qazi''s appeal against this, backed by police documents and other proof of fraud has been ‘under investigation'' for the last four years.
How this investigation will now proceed without the critical document is something that only the charity commissioner''s office can answer. While the Kazi vs Qazi accusations and counter-accusations continue, the internal inquiry into the missing papers, set up after Mr Qazi complained on May 6, is almost nonchalant in its tone. "It goes without say both the Exhibits came to be substituted," says the report prepared by deputy charity commissioner D.B. Mahale. "..It is rather difficult to find out that who is the mischief-monger who played the mischief in substituting Exhibit 5 and Exhibit 6..In my opinion, the arrow of doubt goes to the direction towards the party which would be benefited in view of substitution of both exhibits."
Apart from the fact that vague sentences like "the party which benefits" indict no one, the report is equally casual about the office''s own role in such vital matters as the substitution of documents. Will the charity commissioner''s office accept responsibility? That is the question it—or the law ministry, under which it falls—needs to answer.