UPA lies to court, CBI crawls before regime
Now that the Central Bureau of Investigation Director Ranjit Sinha has let the cat out of the bag, the Congress-led UPA Government cannot keep denying that it has not interfered in the probe agency's investigation into the coal block allocation scam. Mr Sinha told the Supreme Court on Friday that the CBI had “shared” the status report on the inquiry with Union Minister for law and Justice Ashwani Kumar “as desired by him”, before it submitted the document to the court. This is shocking because the law Minister had no business even to have a look at the status report, leave aside make the “grammatical corrections” which he claims to have done. The CBI is conducting investigations into the coal scam under the direct supervision of the Supreme Court and is accountable only, and only, to the apex court in this matter. That the Minister should have so openly appropriated to himself the right to study a report meant strictly for the eyes of the apex court, constitutes a serious breach of conduct. Because Mr Ashwani Kumar's continuation as law Minister has become completely untenable after this incident, the Prime Minister must ask him to quit. The Minister himself has so far refused to budge and said that his detractors must wait for the case to be heard in the apex court on April 30 before demanding his scalp. But, regardless of the outcome on that day, the basic fact that he vetted the status report will remain unchanged — and so will the fact that he did so without any authority. The Congress does not appear to be in a hurry to seek his resignation, though it may be left with no alternative but to do so if the Supreme Court passes adverse remarks against the Minister on Tuesday. The party fears that the matter will not end with Mr Ashwani Kumar's exit. After all, the law Minister is not the only one to have transgressed; senior officials of the Union Ministry of Coal and the Prime Minister's Office too attended the meeting that Mr Ashwani Kumar had called to vet the report. It is not a coincidence that these officials belonged to the very same departments which are under the scanner over the massive irregularities in the allocation of coal blocks.
Equally shocking is the fact that the Government had earlier lied to the Supreme Court, with its law officers assuring the judiciary with a straight face that the CBI's status report had not been shared with Government authorities. (Had the Congress-led UPA kept these officials in the dark, or were the officials also lying before the judgesIJ) But for the expose of this falsehood by a section of the media, which subsequently compelled the CBI to admit the truth before the apex court on Friday, the Manmohan Singh-led UPA regime would have got away with its devious gameplan. Meanwhile, the role of the CBI throughout this episode should be a matter of utter shame for the country's premier probe agency. That it is a handmaiden of the Congress-led UPA Government is known. But surely, here, it could have put its foot down on the pretext that, because this was a court-monitored probe, it simply could not share the contents of the report. But the CBI showed remarkable alacrity — not generally evident when it is investigating sensitive cases — to please its bosses in the Government.