New Delhi : Prime Minister Manmohan Singh avoided releasing a documentary CD on the CBI’s major investigations while inaugurating a 3-day international anti-corruption conference organised by it here on Monday.
CBI director Ranjit Sinha was shaken when the PM ignored his request to release the 30-minute CD that the CBI has produced at a cost of Rs 2 crore with the recordings in the voices of Amitabh Bachchan and Kabir Redi. Minister of State for personnel V Narayanasamy, under whom the CBI functions, however, saved the CBI chief’s embarrassment by releasing the CD himself on behalf of the government.
Sources said that the PM was alerted by his aides to keep away from the documentary CD since it contained political ammunition that may rake up the controversy as it had the cases of A Raja, Mulayam Singh Yadav, Mayawati and Sibu Soren among the many investigations conducted by the CBI. There was nothing on the coal scam that is also being probed by the agency with the needle of suspicion also against the PM, but still he chose not to give credence to the CBI investigations.
Absence of National Security Adviser (NSA) Shiv Shankar Menon as also that of Intelligence Bureau chief Syed Asif Ibrahim at the inaugural session also raised the eyebrows. Though the CBI’s official line was that they were tied up with other important engagements, there were murmurs that they were registering the protest in their own way as the CBI was trying to implicate the IB officials in the terror cases in the recent days.
Both Menon and Ibrahim have a reason to be angry with the CBI as it was just a week after it had resorted to interrogating one associated with them in the Sadiq Jamal Mehtar fake encounter case of Gujarat. The person interrogated was N S Sandhu, who is linked to Menon as the deputy NSA and also to Ibrahim as his predecessor as the IB chief.
