Coal allocation: SC must dig deeper
The Central Bureau of Investigation is part of the government and is administratively overseen by the Prime Minister’s Office. To expect neutrality from it in the investigation of a matter like the coal allocation allegations when for a time the department of coal was directly under the Prime Minister may ordinarily be unrealistic.
In this particular instance, however, the investigation was being done under the Supreme Court’s direction. Therefore, the agency was expected to resist moves by Union law minister Ashwani Kumar or PMO and coal department officials to show them the draft of the report meant for the apex court. But could it have done so under our administrative and constitutional scheme?
This is a question the Supreme Court will perhaps address on April 30 when the CBI’s final report will be presented to it. If the top court finds that material changes were indeed made at the behest of the law minister or others, then it cannot but note that the investigation itself was sullied, vitiating the purpose for which the agency was charged by the apex court to undertake the investigation.
Virtually every significant political entity at the Centre and in the coal-bearing states, including those who are in the Opposition in Parliament at present, have run the same system of coal block allocation over the past quarter century, and one party is as culpable as any other, if culpability attaches to the process. (That the Supreme Court is to determine in the wake of the CAG’s findings.) But the case of the UPA-1 regime stands out as the PM himself was in charge of the coal portfolio for a period, and Dr Manmohan Singh did not change the existing system of allocations.
Should he have? That again is a question the court has to look into. However, the allegation that coal blocks in several cases were given to commercial interests that did not possess basic eligibility criteria for their exploitation is a serious matter, particularly when the department was with the Prime Minister. Is it this aspect which interested the law minister and others when they sought to go over the CBI’s draft?
At the moment this episode has got clubbed with several political questions rocking Parliament in an election year as the Opposition seeks to paint the government into a corner. It is this aspect which has made the issue more sensitive than might have been the case. Otherwise, the law minister looking at the government investigator’s report to the top court to check for meticulousness might be par for the course. The only way to get out of this syndrome is to bring about constitutional changes giving the CBI working autonomy.
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