CBI force government on to back foot

New Delhi: India’s ruling Congress party has decided to stand by its under-fire ministers as the deadlock over corruption accusations continued.

The Congress party is afraid that if the opposition’s demand to sack law minister Ashwani Kumar and railway minister Pawan Kumar Bansal is accepted, the opposition will demand the resignation of prime minister Manmohan Singh.

While Bansal’s nephew was last weekend arrested by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) for accepting a bribe of Rs9 million to get a senior railway board member transferred to a lucrative post, both Kumar and Singh are facing the heat in the Rs1.86 trillion coal block allocation scam. Singh was the minister in charge for the coal ministry when coal blocks were allocated at throwaway prices to private and public sector companies. Kumar is accused of interfering with the functioning of the CBI.

The CBI in an affidavit informed the Supreme Court on Monday that Kumar, attorney general G.E. Vahanvati and representatives of the prime minister’s office and the coal ministry not only saw its status report on the coal block scam but also made three significant changes to it.

Kumar called on prime minister Singh soon after the CBI filed the affidavit. Sources said that he did not offer to resign but explained that he did no wrong and would emerge clean in the case.

The Congress party said that its ministers cannot be forced to quit merely on the basis of allegations and feels that it would not be prudent to act against its ministers, pointing out that though the party removed Ashok Chavan as Maharashtra chief minister in November 2009, nothing substantial has come out against him yet in the Adarsh housing society scam.

In case of Kumar, the party said that since the issue is sub-judicial, it would go by whatever the Supreme Court says.

Kumar said that as the law minister of the country it was within his rights to summon the CBI director and see the report and claims he made no changes to it.

According to the CBI affidavit, filed on behalf of its director Ranjit Sinha, the law minister deleted its finding on non-preparation of broadsheets or charts by the screening committee and a sentence on finding on scope of inquiry on the legality of coal block allocation.

The apex court had asked the CBI to state what changes the political executive had made in its status report. The only sigh of relief for the beleaguered Kumar is that CBI informed the court that the central theme of the status report was not changed. The Supreme Court has fixed Wednesday as the date for the next hearing, when it will discuss the CBI’s statement.

The Supreme Court had last week come down heavily on both the CBI and the government by terming the CBI’s admission that it had shared its status report with the government as a massive breach of trust, while saying that the premier investigation agency must be liberated and should not be controlled by its political masters.