BJP government using CBI to target rivals: Congress
Surjewala said the Congress would not be cowed down by “such political vendetta”. (Express photo by Purushottam Sharma/Archives) Surjewala said the Congress would not be cowed down by “such political vendetta”. (Express photo by Purushottam Sharma/Archives)
The Congress on Saturday accused the BJP government of using the CBI as a “captive puppet” to target political opponents to divert attention from governance paralysis, a day after the CBI approached the Supreme Court to reopen the Bofors case and the agency named Haryana Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda in a land scam chargesheet.
While former Law Minister Ashwani Kumar said the CBI’s decision to move the Supreme Court in the Bofors case is an unprecedented negation of the sanctity of the considered legal opinion of the Attorney General weakening yet another constitutional institution, Congress communication department head Randeep Surjewala said BJP government was keeping the issue alive to defame the Congress.
“The move is a brazen infraction of judicial norms and the settled principle of jurisprudence that criminal prosecution must not be allowed to prolong endlessly and there should be a finality to litigation. The law of limitation cited by the Attorney General in support of his opinion is based on this principle. The reason given for reopening a case 12 years after the High Court decision is utterly untenable,” Kumar said.
He said “the ex-facie self serving statement by a foreign private detective to a TV channel cannot displace the voluminous record of investigation and the well considered judicial verdict in the matter” argued “the politically motivated decision of the government is a gross act of malice…The question that begs itself is whether this is a case of lawful prosecution or political persecution.”
Surjewala said the Congress would not be cowed down by “such political vendetta”. Referring to the chargesheet against Hooda, he said the Manesar land was released in 2007. The BJP government in Haryana lodged an FIR after eight years in 2015 “against unnamed persons, which was then handed over by a predetermined design to CBI”. Congress leaders will fight these conspiracies and false criminal cases with full rigour,” he said.
He said the ED too filed a chargesheet against former Himachal Chief Minister Virbhadra Singh in February. “This is being done purely with a view to divert attention from paralysis of governance and is part of conspiracy hatched by Narendra Modi government and BJP leadership for their vested political interests,” he said. “There is public outrage against the Modi government in the country. The government wants to throttle opposition voice,” the Congress leader said.
In Lucknow, senior Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad, who is the party’s UP affairs in-charge, said that while earlier the BJP used to set up campaign committees to contest elections, it is now using central agencies such as the CBI, ED and Income Tax department to harass opposition leaders.
Indicating former PM V P Singh, Azad told mediapersons on the sidelines of a party meeting, “Those who had come to power at that time by linking former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s name with it (Bofors case) used to show a chit threatening that it had the names of those involved…but they never revealed it even when they were at the helm. Now Bofors is being talked about again. This is nothing but a move to gain cheap publicity.”
Inputs from ENS, Lucknow
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