We have had a rash of anti-Manmohan Singh and anti-Congress writings by people who held senior positions when Dr Singh was Prime Minister. The latest is the forthcoming book by Vinod Rai, a retired bureaucrat who was Comptroller and Auditor General, the government’s principal auditor. The product of
Mr Rai’s efforts is not in the public domain yet, but as part of pre-launch publicity his publishers have arranged media interviews in which much of the old ground of the Singh era is covered with dramatic flavour.
The CAG’s reports on government accounts go to the Public Accounts Committee of Parliament, the most significant parliamentary committee. Under Mr Rai, the reports on the 2G spectrum allocation and the allotment of coal blocks found their way to news organisations in dribs and drabs before heading for the PAC, whetting the appetite for sensation, and then all hell broke loose. The UPA and the Congress paid the price in the Lok Sabha election. The reasons for the defeat were many, but it is generally agreed that — thanks to the two CAG reports — the Manmohan regime came to be associated with deep-going corruption and the PM himself came to be seen as nothing more than a wimp who was personally clean.
Given the mood of the nation brought about by the negative impact of a sustained price rise of essentials under UPA rule, and the fact of polls coinciding with the downturn in the business cycle which led to withholding of investments and the falling of employment and availability of goods and services, no one bothered with the fact that exactly the same policy had been followed on spectrum and coal allotments by Dr Singh’s predecessor, Mr Atal Behari Vajpayee.
Mr Rai’s recent interviews suggest that Prime Minister Singh was in the know of what the corrupt in his dispensation were up to, but did not summon the energy to set things right. Alas, this is old wine. True, the PM was a victim of coalition compulsions in that Dr Singh did not straightway sack D. Raja from the Cabinet for the spectrum-related shenanigans. The former CAG says this now. But he does not say that Mr Raja was eventually not only dropped from government but also went to jail, and in the process the DMK — his party — pulled out of the UPA, effectively speaking.
All this is now old hat. Some trivia have also been asserted in Mr Rai’s book — such as his assertion that some Congress MPs urged him (then CAG) to keep the PM’s name out of the 2G report. But this can’t be true as the report had by then been submitted to the PAC. All in all, just a little attempt to rev things up.
