Government has no fig leaf to hide behind
Even a Government as brazen and shameless as the Congress-led UPA has become, should hang its head in disgrace after the Supreme Court's scathing observations on Wednesday. In fact, it won't any longer do for the regime to be just ashamed; heads have to roll, now that the apex court has severely castigated the Government for blatantly interfering in the inquiry the Central Bureau of Investigation is conducting into the coal block allocation scam.
Going by the court's observations, the buck can no longer stop with Mr Ashwani Kumar or the Union Minister for Coal or the CBI Director or even the Government's senior law officers. It goes right up to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who has some serious explaining to do on how a senior official of the Prime Minister's Office could visit the probe agency's office to peruse the status report on the investigations the CBI is conducting — including into the period when the Prime Minister was also the Coal Minister and when the controversial allocations had been done.
The Prime Minister cannot ignore the anger that the apex court has expressed in dealing with this serious transgression, when it demanded to know as to “what business” the Joint Secretary in the PMO (along with a Joint Secretary in the Coal Ministry) had to drop in at the CBI offices in early March this year on two occasions and study the status report, especially when the acts of omission and commission of these very departments are under the scanner. And, “what on earth”, the apex court wanted to know, were these two officials engaged in when they did not even form part of the investigating team.
The country is asking the same questions. Of course, given Mr Manmohan Singh's track record of refusing to take any responsibility for the various scams that he has presided over in recent years, it could well be that he will discover some silly reasoning to wash his hands of this scandalous interference too. For instance, he may claim that the Joint Secretary in his office attended a meeting with the CBI officials and saw the status report without keeping him informed. But it is difficult to believe that a Joint Secretary-level officer can, without clearance from the very top, dare to visit the CBI office and go through a status report pertaining to a sensitive matter involving the Prime Minister himself. Even more difficult to believe is that the officer should then proceed to hold back this secret from his boss all these months. In any case, the defence of ignorance by the Prime Minister will be taken with a pinch of salt, given that he had taken a similarly untenable stand over the 2G Spectrum issue. Nobody believed him then; none will now.
The Supreme Court's observations also directly singe Mr Ashwani Kumar, a colleague whom the Prime Minister — who, according to his apologists, is an “honourable man” — has spiritedly defended from the day the scandal broke out in the public domain. The court said that while a law Minister can enquire from the CBI about the status of investigation, he cannot “interfere” in the process of the probe. But interference is exactly what Mr Kumar indulged in, as the affidavit which the CBI had filed before the apex court on May 6, itself indicates. Can there be a harsher indictment by the court than that!