Vinod Rai attacks Manmohan Singh; says Congress leaders brought pressure

NEW DELHI: Former CAG Vinod Rai has said that records indicated that the then telecom minister A Raja had kept prime minister Manmohan Singh in the loop on the course of action he planned to pursue in allocating 2G spectrum and that the PM’s reluctance to chart a different course could be construed as "dereliction of duty".
Rai also speculated that coalition compulsions might have prevented Singh from heeding requests from cabinet colleagues to refer the spectrum issue to a Group of Ministers.

In an interview with Arnab Goswami of Times NOW on Thursday, Rai also said he had apprised the then FM Pranab Mukhejree of what was due to come in the report on coal. Later Mukherjee and Rai jointly met the PM to indicate the findings of the CAG report.

However, Rai refused to lay the entire blame on the former PM for the series of scams that rocked the UPA government. "I think we are laying too much of blame only on the prime minister because there are large number of functionaries who did not perform the role that their oath of allegiance they had taken to the constitution," he said.

Rai said two letters written by Raja to the PM in 2007 – on November 15 and December 16 – showed that Singh was well aware of what the DMK leader was planning to do.

"…If he had put his foot down, probably the fate and the course of UPA-2 would have been different. If he had put his foot down and stopped this process from unfolding… It could have been any other process, we are not prescribing a process… but this process was faulty in a large number of ways. And the govt has also accepted that rules and regulations were not being followed, goalposts had been shifted…" Rai said in the interview. In the months before the controversial allocation of telecom licenses in January 2008 -- at a price fixed in 2001 -- the finance ministry had pitched for auction of spectrum.

Ministers such as Kamal Nath had expressed concern at the goingson in the telecom ministry had called for a GoM to be set up.

Rai, whose controversial reports on spectrum allocations and coal block allotments had put the UPA government in a spot, is releasing his autobiography 'Not just an account, the diary of a nation's Conscience'.

With regard to Air India’s purchase of aircraft during Praful Patel’s term as the civil aviation minister, Rai said ministry officials came pleading "at any level" to remove a reference that the minster had "nudged" Air India to buy more planes than it had asked for.

In the Rai appeared to criticize Patel, saying that the former minister had taken considerable interest in the details of Air India’s purchase, though decision such as the number of planes ought to be taken by the Air India board.

"And we took a decision to remove the word nudge because normally audit follows a very structured formulation and nudge was not a word appearing in our documents," Rai said.

Elaborating on the aftermath of the November 2010 CAG report ---which famously clamed a loss of Rs 1,76,000 crore to the exchequer---the former CAG said then Congress MPs Sanjay Nirupam, Ashwini Kumar, Sandeep Dikshit had approached him to keep the PM "out of it". But these conversations was after the report had been published.