If 2G verdict had come earlier, Gujarat poll results would have been very different

Rajya Sabha MP Kanimozhi (left) arrives at the Patiala House court for the 2G scam verdict on Thursday. | PTI Photo

Former Comptroller and Auditor General Vinod Rai and the BJP need to apologise to the nation, says Congress spokesperson.

Vinod Rai, the former Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) of India, needs to stand up and publicly apologise to this country.

He was the author of that baseless Rs 1.76 lakh crore theory, which started this entire circus around the 2G spectrum. I recall cross-examining him in the Joint Parliamentary Committee, and we had completely demolished the theory at that point in time. It was evident that there was no basis to those absolutely presumptive numbers that he had thrown out. Similarly, the special court acquitted those people accused in the case because there was no evidence. Rai tarnished the CAG position with those accusations.

The BJP also needs to apologise to this country. I remember they wiped out an entire Parliament session in November 2010 on the basis of this hocus-pocus, which Rai had put out in the public space. And so eventually, seven years later, the truth has finally prevailed.

There was no scam, it was a figment of the CAG’s imagination, and if this verdict would have come out a week ago, the results of the Gujarat election would have also been very different.

One man who would have the broadest smile on his face today is Kapil Sibal, who had then said that there was “zero loss”. A lot of our leadership who were debunking Vinod Rai and the BJP’s nonsense at that point in time are personally vindicated today by the court decision.

The political ramification of this verdict is that the BJP needs to apologise to the country. Arun Jaitley was the leader of the opposition in the Rajya Sabha, and Sushma Swaraj was the leader of the opposition in the Lok Sabha, when they wiped House sessions on the basis of these mythical numbers. Rather than take responsibility for running a cabal for the last seven years, they are now trying to fire off the shoulders of the Supreme Court.

It’s extremely unfortunate. A trial court which has scrutinised all the evidence that was there on record, has finally come to the conclusion that there was nothing at all. It was a theory which had no basis in law, and eventually, that’s why it collapsed like a house of cards. They built this entire campaign claiming that the UPA was deeply corrupt; the truth is now coming out.

Somebody should seriously consider filing malicious prosecution cases against all the investigative agencies which had filed these completely unsubstantiated charge sheets. Somebody should also consider filing defamation cases against all those media houses that besmirched the names of innocent people.

Rai’s accusations damaged the institution of CAG, because this is not the only report he came out with. He came out with another report saying that there had been a presumptive loss of over Rs 1,76,000 crore. His entire tenure was marked by political maliciousness, and all those reports need to be revisited.

This would have definitely impacted the Gujarat elections, and all that Narendra Modi had said during the general elections. The bubble would have burst. Therefore, if the judgment had come out a week earlier, the Congress party would have definitely swept Gujarat. It punctures the entire architecture of calumny, which has been systematically built up by the BJP, aided and abetted very ably by ‘North Korean’ television channels, or ‘kept’ media and troll armies on social media.

Manish Tewari is the spokesperson of the Congress, and was a member of the Joint Parliamentary Committee on the 2G spectrum.