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29 March 2024

Singh asked to depose on alleged inaction

Dr Manmohan Singh. (AFP)

Published
By AFP

India's parliament adjourned in uproar Friday over a massive corruption scandal that has ensnared Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, whose popularity partly resides in his "Mr Clean" image.

India's chief auditing body ignited a firestorm earlier this week when it announced that the botched sale of 2G telecom licences in 2008 at a small fraction of their value had cost the country up to $40 billion.

Ahead of the announcement, tainted Telecom Minister A Raja, whose ministry was raided by police in October last year, was finally persuaded to step down after his position became untenable.

The opposition has been blocking parliamentary business all week, calling for an all-party investigation into the scandal. Proceedings were adjourned on Friday until next week after angry MPs stormed the well of the house.

On Thursday, India's Supreme Court upped the pressure on Singh by asking him to depose a sworn statement before the court by Saturday explaining his "alleged inaction and silence for 16 months."

The court said Singh had failed to reply to a request to approve the prosecution of Raja, a low-caste politician from a regional party that is in the coalition government headed by Singh's Congress party.

"The telecom scam is the most serious crisis faced by the government in the last six years," respected political analyst Mahesh Rangarajan told AFP, referring to the start of the present coalition in 2004. "It has now become a question of credibility."

Opposition parties say Raja, who presided over the world's fastest-growing mobile market, gifted the lucrative wireless spectrum licences to firms that he favoured.

The auditors found that 85 of the 122 licences issued in 2008 were given to ineligible companies, while the opaque procedure in which applicants were given little time to submit their files was also criticised.

Raja says he is innocent and his decision to sell licences on a first-come-first-served basis, even to companies with no telecom experience, was in line with the policy of his predecessors.

The licences would have raised several times their sale price in an auction.

The story of the so-called "2G scam" has been splashed across all newspaper front pages, becoming the focal point of anger against official corruption that has seen a number of high-profile figures toppled in recent weeks.

Suresh Kalmadi, the chief organiser of October's Delhi Commonwealth Games, which was also mired in corruption, was forced to step down from a senior position in the Congress party earlier this month.

Two of his aides have since been arrested as police and investigators probe a series of murky deals and suspected kickbacks in the multi-billion-dollar event.

On the same day as Kalmadi stepped down, the chief minister of western Maharashtra state, Ashok Chavan, resigned over a housing scam involving apartments reserved for war widows that were sold to politicians and military officers.

Chavan is also from the Congress party headed by supremo Sonia Gandhi, the widow of assassinated former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi.

Rajiv Gandhi lost the 1989 election largely due to public anger over the "Bofors" scandal in which he was alleged to have taken kickbacks in a military deal to supply field guns to the army.

"Public opinion at large is the biggest worry for the government now," said commentator Rangarajan.

"One cannot justify the delay in action as a compulsion of a coalition government. Coalition government is a political reality and the government cannot ignore corruption just to appease a coalition partner."

Singh and other Congress rulers are said by commentators to have been unwilling to risk the fall of the ruling coalition by upsetting Raja's DMK party.

India's chief auditor, the Comptroller and Auditor General office, said Tuesday that the cost of the "2G scam", in which spectrum was sold off for mobile phone services, could reach 39 billion dollars.

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) recommended Thursday the cancellation of 69 licences of six operators who have failed to meet the criteria to run a 2G network.