Coalgate: ASG Harin Raval resigns after public spat with Attorney General

NEW DELHI: Additional Solicitor General Harin Raval has resigned, compounding the headaches for the government’s law department that has been marked by dissension, high profile exits and finds itself in an awkward position before the Supreme Court.

Raval, who had been locked in an ugly spat with the government’s top law officer, the Attorney General, and had accused his boss of making a scapegoat of him in the controversial coal blocks allocation case, put in his papers on Tuesday, hours after the government and investigating agency CBI were subjected to uncomfortable observations by the Supreme Court.

Raval, who had come under fire for misleading the Supreme Court into thinking that the CBI status report into coal block allocations had not been shared with the political executive, claimed in a letter on Monday that he had to back his senior colleague who claimed in court that he had never seen it, a claim Vahanvati denies. The entire fiasco came to light in the wake of revelations that Law Minister Ashwani Kumar had called for a meeting that had vetted the CBI’s draft status report.

CBI removed Raval as its counsel handling the case and appointed senior counsel Uday Lalit, a private lawyer, to represent it. Raval was nowhere to be seen in court, though the AG appeared and defended the Coal Ministry. Law Ministry officials decline to confirm whether Raval’s resignation has been accepted.

His resignation is the third exit by a senior law officer during the term of UPA-II, which has been reeling under a series of reverses in the court starting with the 2G case. For a government crammed with lawyers, UPA-II is racked by the worst troubles on the legal front ever to bedevil any administration in recent years. The law minister has been battling opposition calls for his ouster, the attorney general has been under a cloud and he and his deputy, the additional solicitor general, at war. “Never before has there been such a spectacle. This has never happened.

This is unusual,” said one senior Supreme Court lawyer The government has at least 17 law officers, at least 11 of them in the Supreme Court alone to handle its cases, but the government’s legal troubles have only gotten worse.

Senior lawyer Dushyant Dave said this was because of the government’s refusal to be straightforward with the court and cited the example of the coal block allocation case wherein the Supreme Court sought to know why CBI had not disclosed that the probe report was vetted by the political executive when it had actually so.

“If the government had stated that the coal blocks were given for increasing production to deserving people, and if we find anybody undeserving, we will cancel it, perhaps all this would not have happened,” Dave said. “What is happening is very surprising.” Dave blamed this on the government appointing persons to these posts on extraneous political considerations. “Merit has taken a backseat and their independence and objectivity compromised. It is a vicious cycle. Since you have not selected the right people you will not get the right advice. As a result government suffers."