Vinod Rai brought credibility to CAG’s office
Whichever way one may choose to look at it, Mr Vinod Rai's tenure as the country's Comptroller and Auditor-General has been a game-changer, and will be a difficult act to follow for his successors. Much like Mr TN Seshan, who as Chief Election Commissioner showed for the first time that the Election Commission had a voice independent of the Government, Mr Rai demonstrated in his five-year term that the CAG was not to be taken for granted as a spineless organisation which did the Government's bidding. In fact, as Mr Rai has shown, the country's premier audit body is not just an accountant but is also vested with the task of red-flagging dubious schemes and expenditures of the Government. If his predecessors did not activate that mandate, it was because they were content with following the Government's diktats. Mr Rai changed that comfortable arrangement, and came under fire. It is to his credit that he did not buckle in the face of sustained pressure to ‘see reason' and not ‘exceed his mandate'. Indeed, while the Opposition in one voice and civil rights activists expectedly applauded his conduct, even some senior members of the Government privately appreciated the manner in which he had revamped the sorry image of the CAG. His credibility was dented not one bit by the sustained public, and venomous, campaign which some Ministers in the Congress-led regime like Mr Kapil Sibal and Mr Manish Tewari, and senior Congress leaders such as Mr Digvijaya Singh, launched against him. On the contrary, Mr Rai emerged as a hero before the people who had previously barely heard of an organisation by the name of the Comptroller and Auditor-General of India. It was the CAG under his leadership that exposed Government wrongdoing in the massive 2G Spectrum licence scam and the even more massive coal block allocation scam, not to talk of the Commonwealth Games lootfest. These continue to haunt the UPA regime to this day, with the Supreme Court making matters even more catastrophic for the Government by directly monitoring many of these probes.
While the Congress-led Government will naturally be happy to see Mr Rai's back now that he retires, it will find it difficult to mould the CAG back to the pre-Rai days. The incoming Comptroller and Auditor-General of India will be under tremendous public pressure to sustain the legacy which his immediate predecessor leaves behind. Now that the people know what the CAG can actually do, they will not be fooled by cover-ups. In any case, there is no reason for the incoming CAG to seek truce; if he does his duty without fear and favour, he is certain to win the support of the people at large and of parties cutting across the political spectrum. The Congress-led regime is on its last legs, and it will look to the CAG to not embarrass it further with new revelations. The new Comptroller and Auditor-General of India need not oblige the Government.