Congress did its worst to contain former CAG
Former Comptroller and Auditor-General Vinod Rai’s revelation that the Congress-led UPA regime had used the Central Bureau of Investigation to rein him, in the aftermath of the 2G Spectrum case, comes as no surprise. If anything, the revelations point to the UPA’s desperation. little else explains its almost farcical attempt to pressure Mr Rai by linking him to a former colleague who just happened to share his last name. The actual charge against Mr Rai was quite frivolous — he had supposedly hastened his former colleague’s exit from Government service so that the latter could take up a plum posting elsewhere. But it was the insinuation that Mr Rai had done his colleague this ‘favour’ because the two were related, that was supposed to put the former CAG in the dock. The Government had desperately hoped that the taint of one Rai would somehow rub on another. This would have had a two-fold effect: The CAG would lose credibility, and he would also step back from the offensive so as to prevent other supposed skeletons in the UPA’s closet from falling out. When the 2G scam was exposed by Mr Rai in 2010, the UPA was already wasting away — previous corruption scandals had taken a huge toll on it but it was the multi-crore telecom scandal that effectively put it on the deathbed. Unsurprisingly, there were other instances of the UPA attacking Mr Rai and his office, described as the Government’s accountant, as well.
Indeed, the Congress’s decade in power, from 2004 to 2014, has been characterised not just by poor governance and bad policies but also a sense of moral bankruptcy. The party and the Government it led had no qualm in eroding state institutions and structures that form the very bedrock of this nation (to give just a few examples, think of how it sought to influence the judiciary, scuttle the Central Vigilance Commission and weaken the federal framework) so that it could hold on to power. To that end, its attack on a constitutional authority such as the CAG was just the latest addition to a long list of wrongdoings.
As for the CBI, it had been a pliant but potent political tool in the hands of the then ruling Congress. Not for nothing had the country’s premier investigating agency been nicknamed the ‘Congress Bureau of Investigation’. Using the CBI as a stick to beat up rivals and recalcitrant allies alike has been a matter of routine; and on the flip side, protection from the Central sleuths for political partners and party loyalists was considered to be one of the best perks for being in the Congress’s good books. In the rough and tumble of Indian electoral politics, the winds change direction often — and so do CBI investigations against non-Congress leaders, from Ms Mayawati to Mr Mulayam Singh Yadav, Ms J Jayalalithaa to Mr Jagan Mohan Reddy; their cases open and shut and twist and turn with astonishing frequency.