PM knew of vested interests, failed to act
While Prime Minister Manmohan Singh goes around giving himself a clean chit on the coal block allocation scam and bravely declaring that he is willing to face a probe by the Central of Investigation, he must explain why he did not tackle the coal mafia which had infiltrated deep into the Union Coal Ministry. Then Coal Secretary PC Parakh had brought the matter to the Prime Minister's notice, telling him that the pitch for a transparent system to allot the blocks had been blocked by then Union Minister for Coal Shibu Soren and others in and outside the ministry. Mr Parakh had faced such tremendous harassment because he was opposing opacity that he offered to quit, but the Prime Minister persuaded him to stay on. If Mr Parakh relented, it must have obviously been on the basis of some assurance that the Prime Minister gave him. Yet, as we know now, nothing changed in the functioning of the Coal Ministry. Far from taking action against the deeply-entrenched interests, Mr Singh allowed the flawed system to flourish, which only resulted in more irregularities. Also, it's not as if the Prime Minister came to know of the issue only after Mr Parakh met him with the offer to resign. Mr Parakh had written a damning letter to then Cabinet Secretary BK Chaturvedi, listing the massive illegal activities that the coal mafia had been indulging in. The then Coal Secretary named Mr Soren directly for blocking transparent measures. Mr Soren had apparently asked for the details of the meeting of the screening committee which was going into the allocation of the coal blocks, although, not being a member, the then Minister had no business to access those records. It was Mr Parakh's reluctance to play ball that had led Mr Soren to demand his Coal Secretary's ouster. The Prime Minister was all through the sordid episode aware of the machinations that had been set in motion to harass the Secretary, yet he failed to intervene and assist a bureaucrat who was struggling to do his job in a fair manner. Was this another instance of the Prime Minister's impotency, like in the case of the 2G Spectrum scam, where Mr Singh cited the ‘compulsions of coalition politics' for his inactionIJ
Until now, a few Congress leaders had been ridiculing Mr Parakh for speaking out after the CBI named him in its First Information Report in one of the cases of allocating a coal block to Mr Kumar Mangalam Birla's Hindalco. A Congress politician disparagingly called him a “Sheikh Chilli”. But Mr Parakh's letter to the Cabinet Secretary after Mr Soren's offensive, and details of his meeting with Mr Singh, appear to have vindicated the former Secretary's position. Instead of hammering away at Mr Parakh, the Congress and the Government it leads at the Centre should concentrate on the core issues which he has raised. That they are unwilling to do so is because the Prime Minister stands exposed. Mr Singh had hoped to get away by explaining away the Hindalco issue as being above the board. But the scope of the controversy is larger. We knew that as Coal Minister, Mr Singh allowed the allocations to happen without competitive bidding. Now, shockingly, we also know that as Prime Minister, he looked the other way while vested interests manipulated the Coal Ministry.