Wajahat Habibullah

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Wajahat Habibullah (born 30 September 1945) is the former chairperson of the National Commission for Minorities.^[1] Prior to this, he held the position of the first Chief Information Commissioner of India.^[2] He was an officer of the Indian Administrative Service (IAS) from 1968 until his retirement in August 2005.^[3] He was also Secretary to the Government of India in the Ministry of Panchayati Raj (Local Government).

Habibullah belongs to a prominent and progressive Taluqdari (Saidanpur taluqa, Barabanki district) family of the United Provinces. He is the son of General Enaith Habibullah, a former commandant of the NDA, Khadakwasla, and Hamida Habibullah, a parliamentarian and educationist.^[4][5] He was Divisional Commissioner of eight districts of the Kashmir Division in the state of Jammu and Kashmir between 1991 and 1993, which was abruptly terminated by a near fatal road accident, while negotiating with militants occupying the Hazratbal shrine in Kashmir. His children Amar Habibullah and Saif Habibullah are prominent businessmen and his wife Shahila Habibullah is a social worker.^[6] He was appointed as a member of the World Bank's Info Appeals Board in July 2010.^[7]

He studied at Welham Boys School then known as Welham prep school and later joined the Doon School at Dehradun, from where he also did his Senior Cambridge in 1961; Bachelor of Arts (Honours)History from St Stephens' College, University of Delhi in 1965; and Master of Arts (History) from University of Delhi in 1967.^[8] He was a member of Indian Administrative Service.^[8][9][10]

• Member, Advisory Council, Brookings Doha Center
• Member, International Advisory Council, Doha, Qatar
• Member, Advisory Council, USIP Education and Training Center, Washington DC
• Chairman, Board of Governors, National Institute of Technology, Srinagar(J&K)

• Rajiv Gandhi Award for Excellence in Secularism-1994
• Gold Medal for Distinguished Service; Governor of Jammu & Kashmir-1996
• Lala Ram Mohan History Award; Delhi University-1967^{[citation needed]}

• The Problem Kashmir Today, a Symposium on a Troubled State; Seminar 392-April 1992, New Delhi
• Kashmir 1947; Burdens of the Past, Options for the Future: Five Perspectives; Offprint from the Center for Asian Studies, the University of Texas at Austin, 1997
• Kashmir, Rajiv Gandhi's India Vol. I Politics Ch. I the Problem Areas pp. 58–60, UBSP
• The Islands, Rajiv Gandhi's India Vol. I Politics, Ch. II The Geographic Periphery pp. 237–39, UBS Publishers, 1998, New Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, London
• Siege: Hazratbal, Kashmir 1993, India Review, Vol. 1, No. 3 July 2002, pp. 73–98, Frank Cass, London
• The Protection of Human Rights in a Disturbed Situation, Searching for Common Ground in South Asia. Center for Pacific Asia Studies, Stockholm, 2003 pp. 31–42
• The Political Economy of the Kashmir Conflict, Special Report 121, USIP Washington DC June 2004
• "Kashmiris and the Kashmir Conflict" Review Essay, India Review, Vol 3, No. 3 July 2004, pp. 230–253. Frank Cass, London
• "Government to Citizens Relationship in the Changing Economic Scenario", Promise of e-Governance-Operational Challenges ed MP Gupta pp. 1–4, Tata McGraw Hill, New Delhi, 2004
• "My Kashmir-Conflict and the Prospects of Enduring Peace" USIP Press, Washington DC, May 2008

• CIC web site, Government of India
• Wajahat Habibullah on Jaswant Singh
• Wajahat Habibullah's articles for The Wire