MUMBAI: Two days after Congress member and former Union home minister Sushilkumar Shinde said no proposal to ban the Sanatan Sanstha had reached him when the Congress-NCP was in power in Maharashtra, another Congress member Prithviraj Chavan said that when he was CM of Maharashtra from November 2010 to September 2014, his government had suo moto submitted a plea to the Centre for a ban on the right-wing outfit “in view of its dangerous activities”.

“I had prolonged discussions with the then home minister R R Patil. In view of the dangerous activities of Sanatan Sanstha, we submitted a proposal to the Central government in April 2011. We then urged the Centre to immediately ban the group. This was much before rationalist Dr Narendra Dabholkar was shot dead in Pune in August 2013,” Chavan told TOI.

Chavan said that when the proposal was submitted to the Centre, Congress leader P Chidambaram was the Union home minister, so Sushilkumar Shinde was not associated with the matter in any manner. “After we submitted the proposal, Chidambaram asked for more information on the activities of Sanatan Sanstha. All the information sought by him was submitted to the Centre.”

Chavan said that it was the view of the Congress-NCP government that the mindset and ideology that killed Mahatma Gandhi was responsible for the killing of rationalists such as Dabholkar and Govind Pansare. “There is absolutely no change in the view of the Congress on the proposal to demand a ban on the Sanstha,” he said.

In addition to submitting a proposal to the Centre, Chavan said, the state government led by him had submitted crucial information to the Bombay high court in connection with a petition pending before it. “The petitioner too had demanded a ban on Sanatan Sanstha. The plea is still pending before the high court,” he said.

When the issue of a ban on the group was raised in both houses of the state legislature by the Congress, the BJP-led state government was non-committal. However, BJP has now changed its stand in view of recent developments, particularly the disclosures made by the CBI and ATS before the courts. “Now the state government says that it will recommend to the Centre that it should ban Sanatan Sanstha,” Chavan said.

Chavan said the information submitted to the Centre was based on factual reports gathered by law-enforcing agencies and the Anti-Terrorism Squad.

