New Delhi, Sep 28: The CAG has come under fresh attack from Congress with Law Minister Salman Khurshid and party spokesperson Manish Tewari questioning its functioning. Khurshid, writing in the latest issue of the party mouthpiece Congress Sandesh, accused the CAG of computing losses in a “callous manner” and noted that the Rs 1.86 lakh crore figure of undue benefits to private players in coal block allocation arrived by the audit body will stick in public mind.
Coming down heavily on the CAG, Tewari in his article “Why The CAG Is Wrong” said “the CAG does not have the constitutional or legal mandate to make its own policy prescriptions and then utilise them to compute notional or even mythical loss or gain”.
“Even when it chooses to do so, it ends up getting it grievously wrong. Headline hunting is a volatile vocation --- perhaps it is time to end this parody”. In the editorial, too, the journal says that the CAG has not taken the trouble to highlight that these are notional figures of possible profits that the government could have made if an alternate process had been followed.
“Actually the CAG's report on coal block allocation is hypothetical. Nowhere has the CAG quantified the actual loss or even presumptive loss,” it said.
The journal also features Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's statement on coal block allocation as well as analysis done by the party on the CAG report.
The latest issue of Congress Sandesh came a day after the Supreme Court yesterday held that auction is not the only method for allocating natural resources to private companies and made it clear that its 2G verdict was confined to spectrum and not to other resources.
At the AICC briefing, party spokesperson Renuka Chowdhary today said that it will be good even for the CAG to see what the apext court had had said. “CAG should introspect on what they have observed,” she said.
In the evening, party top brass including Prime Minister manmohan Singh and party chief Sonia Gandhi had deliberations at the Core Group meeting, the first after the court order on auction.
