In a move that observers have expected for several months now, the Modi government has initiated procedures to set up a Department of Clean Chits, which will function under the authority of the Ministry of Home Affairs. The new department’s mandate will be to alleviate the many criminal cases in which those in government, or loyal to it, have been previously embroiled, are currently embroiled, or may go on to be embroiled. This may extend to enabling individuals accused of economic offences—such as misappropriating funds intended for a cricket tournament—to bypass travel restrictions, thus ensuring that the foreign minister’s personal intervention is not deemed necessary.

Prominent recent clean chits to be approved by the government include those handed out on 8 June 2015 to the former Intelligence Bureau officer Rajinder Kumar and three other bureau officials. The home ministry denied the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) sanction to prosecute the officers in the alleged fake encounter of Ishrat Jahan. The procedures to issue these and earlier clean chits were determined to be a significant drain on the ministry’s resources, and added further impetus to the plan to formally set up a new department that could focus on this work. “It was beginning to be felt that the sheer load of clean chit managing was drawing home ministry resources away from important internal security issues, such as NGOs,” said one high-level home ministry official. “So the prime minister felt it would be better to delegate the clean-chit work to a separate department.”

The new department is expected to oversee all denials to law enforcement agencies that want to prosecute government officials; it will also oversee all judicial and quasi-judicial bodies that may be constituted from time to time to investigate crimes involving those in or loyal to the current dispensation, to ensure that such bodies expedite the processing of clean-chit outcomes.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi is said to be the main proponent of this new department. His enthusiasm is believed to be a result of past experience, given that he has himself been the beneficiary of clean-chit procedures, such as in 2012, when the Supreme-Court-appointed Special Investigation Team (SIT) issued him a clean chit with regard to the Gulbarg massacre case in the 2002 Gujarat riots.