Under Congress, truth didn’t matter to CBI
Whatever the Congress may say, the fact is that a Special Court has severely rapped the Central Bureau of Investigation for “fabricating false charges” in a supposed telecom scam that took place during the NDA regime. The Congress cannot escape responsibility because it was in its tenure that the CBI had fabricated the charges against a former Telecom Secretary, who has now been honourably exonerated. It is difficult to believe UPA's Minister for Telecommunications Kapil Sibal’s contention that his Government had no role to play in the episode and that the responsibility rests entirely with the CBI. Given how the Congress-led regime had been micro-managing the CBI — with one of its Ministers even once reading an affidavit he had no business reading, and suggesting amendments before it was filed in the court — Mr Sibal's claim does not hold water. It is common knowledge that, when it was stung by the 2G Spectrum scam, the UPA regime had gone overboard in dragging the Atal Bihari Vajpayee regime in similar muck. It had directed the CBI to open up telecom cases of the Vajpayee regime after hand-picking a retired judge to ‘unearth the scam'. The country's premier probe agency had obliged, with some of its officers in their zeal to please their political masters, even going to the extent of concocting evidence against a high-ranking Government official and three cellular operators.
Now that the court has ordered an inquiry into the conduct of the CBI's investigating officer of the time, the truth of who actually pulled the strings from behind, should be revealed sooner than later. But material available even now points strongly to a Congress hand. The Special Court was unsparing in its observation that “an attempt has been made to create an impression that everything was done on a single day in the dark hours of evening of March 31, 2002. There is no doubt that the charge-sheet has been filed for extraneous reasons”. It is for the Congress to tell the nation what those ‘extraneous reasons' had been, just as it must answer why the CBI, during its tenure, presented “distorted facts” to the court. And not just that, the court also observed that an “attempt to mislead” had been made. Surely, the CBI would not have resorted to such brazen adventurism without the blessings of the Government of the day.
It is useless for the Bharatiya Janata Party to expect an apology from the Congress on the issue; that'll never come. Mr Sibal's caustic comment that a Minister does not write the charge-sheet, is indication enough that his party will brazen it out. But the Congress cannot escape from the serious damage that the Special Court's ruling on Thursday has done to its image. It is evident that the Congress especially, and the UPA regime as a whole, had indulged in a conspiracy to malign the Vajpayee Government in a bid to deflect attention from its own monumental wrongdoings.