Senior BJP leader Arun Jaitley says PM is using silence as a weapon
In a scathing attack on the Prime Minister in connection with missing coal allocation files, senior BJP leader Arun Jaitley has said Dr Manmohan Singh uses silence as a weapon of concealment.
The buck stops with the PM who was in charge of the coal ministry between 2006 and 2009, said Mr Jaitley on NDTV's The Buck Stops Here, just a day after Dr Singh invited top BJP leaders for a dinner meeting to try and end the coal stand-off in Parliament.
The BJP alleges that a lot of the missing files relate to coal block allotments made during the PM's tenure. The CBI, which is probing "coal-gate" says precious coal blocks were allotted arbitrarily to beneficiaries close to the government, allegedly costing the country thousands of crores.
"After the files disappear, the (coal) minister comes and makes an inaccurate statement saying, all these files are pre-2004 allocations. We now find out that the crucial files are between 2006 and 2009. Then the Prime Minister resorts to his ultimate weapon, that which is silence, because the cruelest of concealments can be made through silence. He resorts to that weapon," Mr Jaitley told NDTV.
"Who are the targets of investigation? Either the beneficiaries or the decision makers. The decision makers could be in the PMO, they could be in the Coal Ministry, they could be in the Screening Committee, or they could be the minister. Now between these so called targets of investigation, who is the person who has made these files to disappear?"
The remarks come on the back of reports that a CBI investigating officer, KR Chaurasia, had documented the "requirement" to question the Prime Minister, but the agency's Director, Ranjit Sinha, said it was unnecessary at this stage.
In Parliament on Tuesday, Dr Singh, who had earlier defiantly said that he is "not the custodian of files", said in a statement, "at this stage, it would be premature to say that files are missing or that there is something fishy."
The opposition said the PM had been "economical with the truth."
"The PM should volunteer himself for CBI questioning so that the truth comes out," said Sushma Swaraj, Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha.