The latest example is law minister Ashwani Kumar’s blatant interference with the Central Bureau of Investigation’s inquiry into the allocation of coal blocks (or Coalgate), in which Attorney General Goolam E Vahanvati also became complicit.

CBI director Ranjit Sinha told the Supreme Court on oath that he “shared” the agency’s confidential report on the coal scam with Mr Vahanvati, Mr Kumar, and officials in the coal ministry and the Prime Minister’s Office. Four “significant” changes to the draft were made at their behest, including one that alters the scope of the inquiry. He also said that coal ministry and PMO officials were “in regular interaction” with the CBI officers conducting the inquiry. This clearly indicates that Messrs Kumar and Vahanvati’s earlier statements before the Court were false.

All this is so utterly revolting and violative of elementary democratic norms that all those involved must be summarily sacked. Law minister Kumar had no business whatsoever to ask to see the CBI chief and alter “the heart” of its report. In democracies, ministers must leave police agencies alone so that they can do their work impartially. Mr Kumar fragrantly breached this cardinal principle.

Mr Sinha demeaned his agency by answering Mr Kumar’s summons and by willfully permitting “regular interaction” between its officers and PMO and coal ministry officials. Under the official rules of business, a minister may ask to see an officer not belonging to his department—in this case, the ministry of personnel under which the CBI administratively falls—but cannot issue orders to him. This applies with even greater force to police agencies like the CBI.

Yet, the CBI allowed itself to be dictated to by the coal and law ministries. The conflict of interest couldn’t be more odious given that the principal target of the CBI’s investigations was none other than the coal ministry’s decisions on coalfield allocations, which caused a massive loss to the exchequer, estimated at Rs 1.86 lakh crores by the Comptroller and Auditor General.

It’s futile to claim that the concerned ministers/officials committed no impropriety because they didn’t remove the names of suspects or accused from the CBI’s draft. They had no business to see the report in the first place, leave alone change it. They must be punished for this.

What of the Attorney General himself? His is a high Constitutional office. He is meant to offer independent and sagacious advice and legal opinion to the government as its topmost law officer, not act like its hatchet man. The AG holds a very special position. He has an office on the second floor of the Supreme Court building and the right to be heard in any court in the country. He is the only unelected official who can address Parliament.

But what Mr Vahanvati did is simply unpardonable for someone who is meant to be the government’s conscience-keeper. He interfered with, and compromised, the CBI’s independence. By vetting its draft report, he subverted the rule of law.

Lest it be thought that India has always had only hatchet men as AGs, it is relevant to recall luminaries like MC Setalvad, CK Daftary and Niren Dey in the pre-Emergency era. It’s only later that highly compromised or partisan individuals were appointed to the office.

They included K Parasaran (responsible for the ghastly Bhopal settlement and silence over the Bofors scandal), G Ramaswamy (who covered up corporate scams under the Chandra Shekhar and Narasimha Rao regimes), and Soli Sorabjee (who appeared for the Bharatiya Janata Party in the Babri case after having earlier represented Muslim groups in that matter, and who agreed to be nominated as AG by the BJP-led government in 1998 after having been first so appointed by the VP Singh government in 1989—an impermissible action).

Mr Vahanvati is considered close to various politicians with dubious reputations, including Messrs Sharad Pawar and Ahmed Patel, as well as shady business houses. He is believed to have tailored his legal opinion to suit the government’s objectives, as in the disproportionate assets matters concerning Mr Mulayam Singh Yadav and Ms Mayawati, not to speak of cases involving powerful corporate groups.

Mr Vahanvati had the distinction of being India’s first AG to be grilled in the witness box—in the 2G telecom scam case, by former minister A Raja’s lawyer!

Mr Vahanvati’s defence in the Coalgate issue—that he doesn’t possess a copy of the CBI draft—is palpably flimsy. This is equivalent to former US President Bill Clinton’s claim, [I smoked marijuana], “but I didn’t inhale”, and must be treated with utter contempt. The only honourable course left for the AG, if “honour” is the right word for merely averting further disgrace and ignominy, is to resign.

Yet, the UPA, in particular the Congress party, is adopting a cynical attitude towards these scandalous disclosures, despite its sacking the tainted ministers and officials. It still believes it can brazen out gross wrong-doing on their part, as with Mr Ashwani Kumar and in the bribery case involving railway minister Pawan Kumar Bansal’s businessman nephew Vijay Singla.

Mr Singla was caught red-handed by the CBI accepting Rs 90 lakhs as the first instalment of a Rs 10-crore bribe from Railway Board Member (Staff) Mahesh Kumar for being appointed Member (Electrical), a position that yields control over thousands of crores in contracts for the purchase of costly equipment and funding of lucrative public-private partnership (PPP) projects.

One such project proposed by Mr Kumar is a Rs 19,000-crore part-elevated part-underground railway line from South Mumbai to Virar, a distance of 80 kilometres, in which the private partner would be guaranteed super-profits and compensated for all delays. This is hideous private gain at public expense, with a vengeance!

After all, the CBI comes under Dr Singh’s administrative charge as minister for personnel. Dr Singh also held the coal portfolio during the allocation period. He is finding it difficult to refute Mr Raja’s charge that he was fully kept in the picture on the 2G spectrum allocation. Nor has the Joint Parliamentary Committee accepted Mr Raja’s offer to depose before it.

Some Congress leaders cite former Maharashtra Chief Minister Ashok Chavan’s ouster in the Adarsh housing society case, and contend that no firm evidence has yet crystallised against him. In other words, no minister should ever resign unless proved guilty beyond doubt by a court. This makes nonsense of the democratic principle that holders of public office should resign once a prima facie case has emerged against them, and not wait for their final humiliation by the law courts.

All these recent scams are serious. But by all accounts, Coalgate is even greater in magnitude than 2G—because the Rs 1.86 lakh crore loss isn’t merely notional, as in the telecom case, but a real quantifiable drain on the exchequer. As many as 194 coal blocks were allotted to private companies for captive consumption for power projects—without competitive bidding, at throwaway prices.

All recent governments, including the BJP’s in 1998-2004, have been guilty of underselling public resources, including coal, telecom and airwaves. So the BJP is being sanctimoniously hypocritical in claiming that the UPA is uniquely culpable. Worse, it has adopted a deplorable policy to disrupt Parliament’s working, which doesn’t serve the public interest or promote a serious inquiry.

Yet UPA-2 is reprehensible both for the staggering number of scandals that have broken out since 2009, and for the way it has subverted the CBI and other institutions in covering them up. This especially applies to Coalgate because of the high offices involved, including Constitutional ones like the AG’s. (IPA Service)