‘CM has opened clean chit window’

The principal opposition Congress and Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) took turns to hit out at the Devendra Fadnavis-led state government over corruption and tainted ministers during debates in both the Houses of the state Legislature on Thursday. Opposition leader Radhakrishna Vikhe Patil took to blaming the chief minister by stating that he has opened a ‘single window’ system to give a ‘clean chit’ to tainted ministers while exposing corruption cases of 20 ministers. He demanded that there should be an enquiry under the Commission of Enquiry Act and the investigation be conducted by a sitting judge of the Bombay high court.

Beginning the debate over corruption, Mr Vikhe-Patil said, “Mr Fadnavis is differentiating between tainted ministers. Eknath Khadse was forced to resign, whereas ministers who are under the CBI and CID scanner have been given clean chits even before the investigating agencies reached a conclusion.”

He said that before the state government completed two years in power, 20 of its ministers were found involved in corruption.

The opposition leader said that these ministers have mistaken the meaning of ‘ease of doing business.’

Mr Vikhe also brought out a list of ministers who have been charged with corruption, which included names like that of MoS Ravindra Chavan, Ravindra Waikar, Jaykumer Rawal, Sambhaji Nilangekar, Vishnu Savra, Girish Mahajan, Diwakar Raote, Eknath Khadse, Dr Deepak Sawant and Vinod Tawde.

On cue, senior NCP legislator Jayant Patil also

asked the CM to advise his ministers to keep away from corruption. “Otherwise at the end of the tenure of your government, all ministers will be found involved in corruption,” said Mr Patil

Mr Vikhe-Patil as well as leader of opposition in Upper House Dhananjay Munde also demanded an inquiry by the anti-corruption bureau (ACB) and a sitting high court judge against ministers who have been accused of corrupt practices.

Raising the issue in the council, Mr Munde said, “The BJP-Sena government had come to power with a slogan of ‘zero tolerance against corruption’. But in the last 20 months, many scams involving BJP-Sena ministers have emerged.” He further said, “While investigations have been ordered, their results are yet to be announced. Despite this, the CM has been giving clean chits to ministers.”