Natwar Singh, Sanjaya Baru and now Auditor General Vinod Rai is ready with his book to put more stains on his white kurta.
It seems that ex-Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has become some sort of punching bag which delivers nirvana.
Bureaucrats from UPAI and UPAII have been punching this silent bag and trying to take their hands off from responsibilities clearing karma.
If the recent books of former Congressman Natwar Singh and media advisor to ex-PM Sanjaya Baru were not enough biting for Manmohan Singh, former Comptroller and Auditor General Vinod Rai is ready with his book to put more stains on his white kurta.
Rai’s tell-all book, titled “Not just an Accountant”, is ready to hit stands soon. In an interview to Times Now ahead of the release, he said that ex-PM could have easily prevented high-profile scandals like 2G spectrum allocation scam, coal blocks allocation scam and the Commonwealth Games scam, had he used his stamp of authority.
In fact, Rai claimed that our ex-P f 10 years “chose not to stop” the problems in the telecom sector and that the Congress leaders had sought to pressurise him to keep out PM’s name from the audit report brought out by his office.
He said some ministers in the Manmohan Singh’s cabinet had been writing to him about problems in the telecom sector.
“I found that minister of his own council who were writing to him again and again, saying that problems are (there) or there is talk about developments in the telecom sector. I quoted Kamal Nath writing to the prime minister and expressing concerns about the development in the sector. I have written about the finance ministry expressing concerns, I have written about the law ministry expressing concerns. Now, all these things went to the prime minister,” Rai said.
He claimed that Manmohan Singh had given only a “template reply” to letter written to him by by former communications minister A. Raja of the DMK.
Rai, whose loss estimates in 2G spectrum and coal block allocations pushed the then UPA government into a corner, also referred to “compulsion of coalition politics” in the decision-making by the Manmohan Singh government.
Asked about reports that he had faced pressure by politicians concerning his report, Rai said that he had mentioned in his book that during the course of meetings in the Public Accounts Committee or the sidelines of the JPC (Joint Parliamentary Committee), “a large number of people told him to keep this out and that out”.
“And I mentioned in the book that after the PAC meeting on the 2G, Congress MPs did tell me that keep the prime minister out of this,” he said.
Asked about the MPs, he said: A”There were 3-4 Congress MPs, they aren’t Congress MPs anymore. So its very easy to find out who are they.”
Pressed further, he said: “I can’t recall the names just now, but the Congress MPs who were present in those meetings were Sanjay Nirupam, Ashwini Kumar, Sandeep Dikshit. Now which of them were at the lunch telling me to do that, I really can’t tell you,” he said.
Rai’s book is expected to be released Sep 15.
But this is not the only concern. The concern is how much can Manmohan Singh take? What are these compulsions which let him take blow by blow silently?
There was a time when Manmohan Singh would be called calm and innocent. In fact, despite knowing that he was heading a corrupt government, the Indian media, people of the country and even his critics defended Manmohan Singh when Times Magazine put his face on its cover with the words ‘The Underachiever’ splashed across it in bold font.
Then Baru came out with his book with a title that silenced all for they looked like fools defending Manmohan Singh. The Accidental Prime Minister was a tale of a thick skinned man who did not need defending. However, his masters (read Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi) defended him.
But when Natwar Singh came out with his book, hurling abuses (he called the former PM a ‘ghatiya insaan‘), even then ex-PM refused to say anything. So when his daughter Daman Singh came out defending her father through her book ‘Strictly Personal: Manmohan Singh and Gursharan Kaur’, we expected some words from him. But the ex-PM and the book by his daughter maintained the same steely silence.
Now we are left to Natwar Singh’s words that Manmhan Singh “does not have a stiff spine”, until he breaks his silence with his own book.
