New Delhi, May 6: The Congress leadership, which appeared to have altered its stand that anybody facing corruption charges would be asked to step down, today indicated it would be wrong to presume the party was determined to brazen it out come what may.
While law minister Ashwani Kumar would definitely be sent packing if the Supreme Court took a grim view of CBI assertions that he meddled with the coal allocation status report, many leaders denied that Pawan Bansal had been given a clean chit.
The railway minister, sources said, may still have to go if the CBI finds evidence of his complicity in the bribery scandal that has embroiled his nephew Vijay Singla.
The sources said it would have appeared odd if Bansal was sacked yesterday while the party waited for Kumar’s fate to be decided by the Supreme Court.
They said the core committee was alive to the lack of clarity on Bansal’s wrongdoing, though his nephew had been caught allegedly accepting a bribe to secure a plum post for a senior railway official. But the mess created by Kumar was largely perceived as unacceptable.
While it is rare to see CBI affidavits exposing the government, what is shocking, the sources added, was Kumar misled the party too.
The law minister had on May 1 claimed before a group of senior leaders that he had not altered the status report at all at a meeting with the CBI chief in early March.
Kumar had said the controversial meeting was to decide whether the status report should be submitted in the form of an affidavit or in a sealed envelope. He said that when the CBI chief had on his own wanted to show the status report on coal block allocations, he had just given a casual glance and suggested a few grammatical changes.
He had also claimed that the meeting had been arranged at the instance of attorney-general G.E. Vahanvati who wanted to resolve differences with his deputy Harin Raval, who has since resigned.
“The confidence of the law minister was amazing,” a leader, who attended the May 1 meeting, told The Telegraph. “He almost convinced us that he did no wrong and was well within his rights to be present at that (March) meeting. We all thought why so much noise (was being made) if he had done this little, just trying to sort out differences between two law officers. The CBI affidavit today, if it is correct, shocked us. One of the two is obviously lying — the CBI or the law minister.”
In his earlier affidavit, the CBI chief had said the report had been shown to the law minister “as desired by him”. In today’s submission, he listed the changes made to the report.
Asked about the Congress’s alleged double standard in dealing with questions of probity, spokesperson Renuka Chowdhury said: “Leave it to us how we deal with issues. We don’t have double standards on any issue. Let us wait and see how things unfold. Investigations are on and it is premature for us to judge anybody at this stage. Don’t jump the gun.”
This was a milder form of defence of the two ministers barely hours after the categorical rejection of the BJP’s demand for their resignation last night. The scenario, however, might change within the next few days.
While the law minister’s fate will be decided on May 8, when the apex court hears the case, there will be a review on Bansal if the probe into the bribery controversy unearths more incriminating evidence.
