Defend CAG, BJP urges President

The BJP was stung by Congress spokesman Manish Tewari’s remark that there was a congruence of views between the CAG and the BJP, indirectly implying that Comptroller and Auditor General Vinod Rai was a BJP-oriented man. It has expressed its unhappiness that prime minister Manmohan Singh had found fault with the CAG performance audit on coal block allocations in his written statement to Parliament.

Senior BJP leaders LK Advani, Sushma Swaraj, Murli Manohar Joshi and Arun Jaitley met President Pranab Mukherjee on Wednesday and implored him in a petition to intervene to defend the dignity of constitutional bodies like that of the CAG.

In the letter, the BJP leaders noted with “anguish and profound concern” that “motives, including having political ambitions, have been openly attributed to the CAG”. The BJP leaders also pointed out that the prime minister’s open criticism of and challenge to the CAG “is in fact converting a bipartisan discussion in the PAC (public accounts committee) into a highly polarised partisan debate.”

The letter cited the observations of India’s first President Rajendra Prasad, second President S Radhakrishnan and first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru on the importance of the CAG. Prasad had said in July 1954: “At the present moment when the government is incurring a huge expenditure on so many welfare projects...it is essential that every rupee we spend is properly accounted for. This important task – I am afraid, a task not always very pleasant – devolves upon the comptroller and auditor general and his office. In accordance with the powers vested in him, he has to carry on these functions without fear or favour in the larger interests of the nation.”

In June 1954, Radhakrishnan said: “If I have one advice to give and if I am presumptuous enough to give any advice to the officers of the audit and accounts, it is this: ‘Do not shrink from the truth for fear of offending men in high places’.”

And in 1952, Nehru observed: “He (the CAG) is responsible to the Government and it is open for him to criticise the Government in reports. For him to be criticised on the floor of the House would tend to undermine the special position that has been granted to him to discharge his duties without fear or favour.”

In 1960, the then Lok Sabha speaker Anantasayanam Aiyangar pulled up defence minister VK Krishna Menon – the BJP’s letter does not mention the names – for describing the CAG report as a “malicious overstatement”. Menon had to apologise. Aiyangar said “nothing shall be said against his remarks, whatever he might say, and however strong the language that might have been used by him (CAG)”.

Asked about President Mukherjee’s response, Advani said, “He promised to look into it.”