Govt interfered in CBI probe: SC

Agencies/New Delhi

The Supreme Court yesterday accused the government of interfering in a police investigation into the allocation of commercial coalfields, in a damning indictment of political control over the country’s top law enforcement agency.

The finding was a new blow for a government battered by a seemingly unending series of corruption scandals, and overshadowed a rare election victory for the Congress in the southern state of Karnataka.

The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) is investigating alleged irregularities in the awarding of mining rights potentially worth billions of dollars to private companies. The opposition has demanded the resignation of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who was coal minister for some of the period under investigation.

Parliament has been repeatedly paralysed by graft scandals throughout Congress’s term, and Lok Sabha (lower house) Speaker Meira Kumar called the early adjournment “a betrayal of the trust of the people who elected their representatives to raise their issues.”

The adjournment comes after revelations that the law minister and officials in Singh’s office meddled in a police probe into alleged illegal awards of coalfields at cut-rate prices.

The government has also been hit by the arrest of the railway minister’s nephew for allegedly demanding a $160,000 bribe to arrange a plum promotion for a railway official.

Singh’s fragile coalition has been ruling as a minority government since two allies pulled out. The drama will only intensify speculation over whether it will limp on or call an election, otherwise due by May 2014, before the end of the year.

The CBI has been under fire since its director, Ranjit Sinha, told the Supreme Court last week that Law Minister Ashwani Kumar and other senior officials, including one from the Prime Minister’s Office, had amended a report that the court had requested on the CBI’s Coalgate investigation.

This week, Sinha said no major changes had been made, but yesterday the Supreme Court disagreed.

“The heart of the report was changed on the suggestions of government officials,” Judge R M Lodha said, ordering the CBI not to share any further reports during the investigation and urging the government to strengthen the agency’s independence.

“The CBI has become the state’s caged parrot. Only screaming, repeating the master’s voice,” Lodha said.

The court was hearing a petition by anti-corruption campaigner and leading lawyer Prashant Bhushan to have the investigation transferred from the CBI to a Supreme Court-monitored team. Bhushan has said the agency lacks the independence to investigate “Coalgate” properly.

The court was scathing about the lack of progress in the investigation, which began last year, and ordered the CBI to replace the officer in charge of the inquiry, which is focusing on a number of private companies and coal ministry officials.

Asking the government to make the investigating agency impartial, the court said it needs to be ensured that the CBI functions free of all external pressures.

“If the CBI is not made independent, we will step in,” the court said.

It also said that the “job of CBI is not to interact with government officials but to interrogate to find the truth.”

The court said the agency “must know how to stand up against all pulls and pressures by government and its officials.”

The three-judge bench slammed Attorney General G E Vahanvati, former additional solicitor General Harin Raval and officials of the PMO and coal ministry. “How on earth could the Joint Secretaries of the PMO and the coal ministry attend the meeting, see the report and suggest changes to it?” the court asked.

“It pains us to see the credibility of the CBI getting affected. The CBI is doing a collaborative probe,” the angry judges said.

Vahanvati,who was present in the courtroom, however, passed the buck to the law minister. “My meeting with CBI officials took place only on suggestions of the law minister,” he told the court.

Between 2004 and 2009, India, which has the world’s fifth largest reserves of coal, allocated 142 mining blocks through a government panel, in a bid to boost electricity production and reduce the chronic power cuts that have held back the economy.

India’s auditor general last year questioned the decision not to auction the blocks, leading the CBI to investigate possible collusion by officials to give blocks at low prices to companies, some of which never developed them.

Putting up a brave face, Congress spokeswoman Renuka Chowdhury said: “We are sensitive to what the court is saying... we remain conscious of the parameters that have to be maintained even as we continue with the act of governance.”

The Congress-led coalition, in power since 2004, has been on the back foot over a raft of scandals over the allocation of billions of dollars’ worth of military contracts and resources ranging from coal to mobile telephone spectrum.