The Congress on Friday said the exposure of “conspirator-in-chief” Vinod Rai’s “lies” had also exposed others who had joined him in maligning the Manmohan Singh government and aiding Narendra Modi’s rise to power.
Party spokesperson Pawan Khera identified these others: “Anna Hazare, Baba Ramdev, Arvind Kejriwal and Kiran Bedi.”
He left out Prashant Bhushan and Yogendra Yadav, two other members of India Against Corruption who later conceded that its campaign against the UPA-II government had been propped up by the RSS-BJP. Both are trenchant critics of the Modi government.
Khera said a look at where some of the key players of the anti-corruption movement were today was enough to reveal their motivations and commitment.
Khera said: “Anna Hazare is comfortably nestled in his village, forgetting everything about Lokpal and corruption. Baba Ramdev has become Lala Ramdev, with a flourishing business, thanks to the blessings of the BJP.”
“Kejriwal is enjoying power, running a government in tandem with the Centre. The BJP tried to make Kiran Bedi the chief minister of Delhi but (after failing to do so) appointed her lieutenant governor of Puducherry. Gen. V.K. Singh became a central minister. All of them had publicly vowed never to join politics.”
Khera’s comments came against the backdrop of former CAG Rai offering an unconditional apology for incorrectly accusing former MP Sanjay Nirupam of pressuring him to remove Manmohan’s name from his report on 2G spectrum allocation.
“Vinod Rai was the conspirator-in-chief. You call him the main puppet as strings were pulled by the political master,” Khera said.
“If he has any sense of shame, he should relinquish whatever comforts and perks he got from the grateful Modi government. You can imagine what kind of lies he resorted to. The court itself dismissed all the charges in the 2G scam and acquitted everybody.”
Khera said a conspiracy had been hatched against the Manmohan government to destabilise a booming economy.
“The CBI gave a clean chit to Manmohan Singh on September 21, 2015, in the coal allocation case. The CBI’s counsel told the Supreme Court there was no dishonest intention whatsoever on the part of Singh,” he said.
“The media and the BJP created a political storm over the CAG reports. Where are the CAG reports today? Forget media, they are not even discussed in Parliament.”
Khera said Rai, appointed Banks Board Bureau chairman in 2016 by the Modi government, had not uttered a word on the Rs 11,500-crore scam in the Punjab National Bank despite his media image as an anti-corruption crusader.
