Monday, August 25, 2014

Any guess on UPA ministers, bureaucrats who requested Vinod Rai to drop names from CAG reports?

THIS photo shows former Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG) Vinod Rai (standing left) with three UPA ministers: P Chidambaram, Pawan Kumar Bansal and SS Palanimanickam (of the DMK). Rai was the then the banking secretary, and he posed for this official photo ahead of one of Chidambaram’s budgets during UPA-I. Bansal and Palanimanickam were then the MoS, Finance, and in hierarchy Rai was junior to all those three ministers. But days before the release of his supposedly tell-all book, “Not Just An Accountant”, speculations have risen about the names of the UPA ministers who had visited his home with a request to…
drop some people and protect some others in connection with the CWG and coal allocation reports, as Rai himself told to the press. Former CAG, however, has not revealed the names of those politicians as yet. BoI wants to make it clear that this photo does not say anything beyond the fact that all these three ministers knew Rai personally.
After The Times of India front-paged an article on Sunday quoting Rai on what all he could tell in his forthcoming book, expected to be released on mid-September, “Vinod Rai” began to trend in social media sites. Many asked him to reveal those names of UPA ministers or politicians.
Meanwhile, the BJP has asked him to reveal the names of the UPA politicians who allegedly pressurised him. Significantly, Rai’s reports turned highly controversial and damaged the Congress politically. Senior Congress leader Manish Tiwari calls Rai’s new disclosure as “sensationalism” and wondered why he did not reveal any such thing then and there. Aam Aadmi Party leader Arvind Kejriwal appeals Rai to reveal the names of those people, as he believes, they should be punished.
But UPA politicians were not alone. Rai said, his colleagues, meaning bureaucrats, were encouraged to talk to him in this regard. And that will start another guesswork: who are the bureaucrats who came to Rai with a request to drop names in CAG reports? But the question comes: Did any bureaucrat succeed in convincing him?

1 comment:

  1. The Ministers are there in the picture. Cant you see the writing on the wall?

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