Talabira coal: No clean chit to Naveen yet

Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik may have got a respite for the time being by citing the observations of a special court in New Delhi that there is nothing to suggest that his Government had entered into a criminal conspiracy to hand over the Talabira-II coal block in Sundargarh district to the Aditya Birla Group company Hindalco, but his troubles seem far from over.

What the Chief Minister conveniently skipped was the other observations of the court that put him in the dock. It said the letter by him “cannot be termed to be a mere coincidence in view of the fact that the claim of Hindalco for the coal block was negated at the PMO and Ministry of Coal (MoC).”

The letter written by Patnaik in August 2005 provided a ‘fresh lease of life’ to the company’s bid for the coal block that had already been rejected by the screening committee, the court said.

“Prima facie it appears that the letter from the Odisha Chief Minister was procured primarily to scuttle the adverse notes being made by the junior officers in the MoC and the PMO,” the special court observed. As if all this was not enough, the court also said the company, through a carefully crafted plan devised “by the representatives of Hindalco to tap its bureaucratic and political channels, managed to convince the Odisha Chief Minister to write such a letter to the Prime Minister recommending their case for allocation of Talabira II coal block.”

Much as Patnaik and his supporters would want the Hindalco case off their back, it could come back to haunt him in future, given the flip-flop manner in which the investigation has progressed in the last one and a half years. After all, the CBI had filed a closure report in the case in October last year going well beyond its brief and saying the decision to allocate the coal block to Hindalco was taken ‘in the larger interests of the nation’. It is another matter that the court did not buy this specious argument, threw out the closure report and asked the CBI to probe the case afresh.

During the course of this ‘fresh probe’, the CBI, which had found no evidence of wrongdoing against former Prime Minister Manmohan Singhand had sought to close the probe earlier, found enough evidence for Singh to undergo the ignominy of appearing as an ‘accused’ in a court of law. There is nothing to suggest that a similar fate will not befall on Patnaik in future. Coming as it does at a time when he was just about beginning to breathe easy after the visible slowdown in the ongoing CBI probe into the mega chit fund scam in the state, the Talabira case is bound to give Naveen Patnaik sleepless nights.