New Delhi: Severely reprimanded by the Supreme Court for influencing the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) in the coal scam, Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh on Tuesday constituted a Group of Ministers (GoM) to decide the plan of action to secure the autonomy of the investigating agency.
The ministers’ group would be headed by Union Finance Minister P Chidambaram and will include Law Minister Kapil Sibal, External Affairs Minister Salman Khurshid and Minister of State for Personnel V Narayanasamy.
Dr Singh has directed the senior ministers to bring a Cabinet proposal on the law that needs to be drafted to give more autonomy to the CBI and help formulate an affidavit that will be submitted in the Supreme Court about the proposal.
The Supreme Court last week had called the CBI “a caged parrot” which “speaks in its master’s voice” after the investigating agency admitted in an affidavit that Ashwani Kumar, who quit as the Law Minister on Friday, and senior officials of the Prime Minister’s Office and the coal ministry had made certain changes in the report on the allocation of coal blocks.
During the hearing, the Supreme Court had asked the Centre whether it was contemplating a law to make the working of the CBI independent and insulate it from extraneous intrusion and interferences.
The country’s top law officer, Attorney General GE Vahanvati, who is also smeared by the coal scandal for seeing a draft of the CBI’s report, had agreed with the Supreme Court in giving more autonomy to the agency. (Agencies)