Face value the revelations

29/05/2015

If one were to take at face value the revelations that Mr Pradip Baijal has made in his self-published book with a rather long-winding title, The Complete Story of Reforms: 2G, Power and Private Enterprise — A Practitioner's Diary, the story that emerges goes beyond the by now well-documented helplessness of then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. The former Telecom Regulatory Authority of India Chairman says that Mr Singh had directed him to cooperate with Minister for Telecommunications Dayanidhi Maran on the 2G Spectrum issue and warned him of consequences in case he did not fall in line. This, he says, was an assertion of an earlier ‘threat' that Mr Maran had issued to him, and that which the Central Bureau of Investigation too had given.
It does appear from the former TRAI chief's charges that the political system, from the Prime Minister down to the then Cabinet Ministers Kapil Sibal and P Chidambaram, was conspiring to fix him in case he did not do the Government’s bidding. Mr Baijal has been repeatedly questioned in the 2G Spectrum scam — something which he now explains away as the price paid for not playing ball with the Congress-led UPA regime. This apart, if indeed the then Prime Minister had asked the senior bureaucrat to do the Telecom Minister's bidding and warned him of the fallouts of not doing so, it is a grave matter. Since there is no direct evidence by way of an audio recording, for instance, of the relevant conversation between Mr Singh and Mr Baijal, one has to either take the latter's word or simply dump it.
The Congress has been doing exactly the second one, having called the charges “imaginary, false and baseless”, and hinted that the former TRAI chief was levelling them to escape personal scrutiny and ingratiate himself with the BJP-led Government at the Centre. But nobody can deny that Mr Baijal's accusation fits in with the larger picture of the murky episode that marked the first big scam of the Manmohan Singh regime. It also adds up to the then Government's mishandling under pressure of the coal block allocations. In both cases, coalition pressures and Mr Singh’s pusillanimity — Mr Maran had, according to Mr Baijal, referred to himself as the ‘Prime Minister of Telecom' and directed Mr Baijal not to meet the Prime Minister on telecom issues such as the one at hand — played the lead roles. Congress leaders may be angry and Congress allies may be upset by the former bureaucrat's tirade, but the general belief is that, after all that the people have learned about the 2G Spectrum racket, nothing anymore seems to have any shock value for them.
Mr Baijal has levelled a few other serious allegations that, if true, reveal the extent to which the Congress-led regime was manipulating the country's premier probe agency. He said that the CBI had wanted him to “implicate” former Minister in Mr Atal Bihari Vajpayee's NDA Government, Mr Arun Shourie, and noted industrialist Ratan Tata in the disinvestment and the spectrum cases. This again is not surprising; the media has been reporting on corporate battles and the involvement — direct or indirect — of members of the previous Government in such confrontations.

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