India PM urges police to act ‘without fear or favour’

India: India’s Premier Manmohan Singh Saturday urged the country’s top police agency to investigate a series of corruption scandals embroiling his Government “without fear or favour”. Singh’s statements came as his Congress-led coalition reels from a host of controversies, with his own reputation for probity on the line amid charges that he has allowed graft to go unchecked during his seven years in office.

He noted the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) was probing several high-profile corruption cases that have attracted wide public attention.

“The handling of these cases constitutes a litmus test for you,” Singh said at the opening of a new CBI headquarters in New Delhi.

“The CBI should act without fear or favour and bring to book all those who are guilty, irrespective of their position or status,” he said. “Whoever transgresses the law of the land, however mighty, has to be brought to book.”

At the same time, Singh said there “should be no vendetta, no witch-hunt and no harassment of the innocent.”

Singh’s government has been in the eye of a storm over allegations that telecom licences were sold at cut-rate prices in 2008 in exchange for kickbacks, depriving the treasury of as much as $40 billion in revenues. It also faces a second high-profile graft scandal over last October’s Delhi Commonwealth Games.

Last week the CBI arrested senior Congress lawmaker Suresh Kalmadi, who was the top organiser of the $6 billion Games, on corruption charges.

Earlier, it had arrested Singh’s former telecoms minister A. Raja, government officials and telecom company officials over the telecom scam.

The main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), meanwhile, accused Singh and the then finance minister P. Chidambaram of “direct complicity” in corruption in the telecom case. The allegations came as the government and opposition clashed over the contents of a parliamentary committee report into the scandal.

“There was complete abdication of responsibility by the prime minister,” said senior BJP lawmaker Yashwant Sinha, a member of the Public Accounts Committee, in the most direct opposition attack yet on Singh. “In India’s history there is no precedent of this kind. Nine out of 10 decisions taken by (then telecom minister) A. Raja were with the knowledge of the prime minister,” Sinha said.

The report, which was critical of the government and had been narrowly rejected by the Public Accounts Committee, where government supporters hold a majority, was sent to the parliamentary speaker by the BJP on Saturday.

“The government is trying to cover up corruption instead of tackling it. The public has a right to know what has happened to its hard-earned money,” committee head and BJP veteran MP Murli Manohar Joshi told a news conference.

Singh “remained a mute spectator” in the telecom scandal, added Joshi.

Congress has accused the BJP of seeking to “destabilise” the government. It fears the controversies could lead to a repeat of the 1989 “Bofors scandal”, when Congress was voted out of office over a weapons deal involving associates of then premier Rajiv Gandhi, who were accused of taking kickbacks.

New Delhi, Sunday, AFP