Congress may sack Ashwani Kumar, Pawan Kumar Bansal to protect its tainted image

NEW DELHI: Law Minister Ashwani Kumar and Railway Minister Pawan Kumar Bansal are skating on thin ice, with the Congress leadership, which had been resisting calls for their ouster, veering to the view that their continuance will blight the afterglow of the party’s election victory in Karnataka.

The removal of the two ministers is imminent, a senior minister told ET, explaining that the positions of Kumar and Bansal have been rendered untenable after the Supreme Court’s damning observations on the conduct of the scandal-scarred government in the coalfield allocation probe and the reports on the alleged influence-peddling in the railway ministry.

“A final decision will be taken in the next few days,” said the minister, who did not wish to be named, adding that the leadership was yet to take a call on whether the two departments would be handed over to the existing members of the council of ministers or new faces would be brought in.

The Congress brass is furious with Kumar for maintaining, until the Supreme Court pointed to his brazen interventions, that no major change was made at his behest in the probe report, a senior leader said. The law minister had toed the same line of defence in his interactions with senior BJP leaders Sushma Swaraj and Arun Jaitley.

However, there is an acceptance in the party that Kumar was involved in an exercise that involved the PMO and the coal ministry as well while Bansal is embroiled in charges of financial impropriety. Bansal did not attend the Cabinet meet on Thursday. The party is also assessing reports on Bansal’s kin multiplying their personal fortune many times over by trading off their connections with the minister. “The party leadership may not wait for the probe to be completed,” the minister quoted earlier said.

Tangible Measures Needed

The minister added that the party had already kicked off discussions on the nature and scope of the correctives required for digging the government out of the deepening hole. The government realises that some tangible measures on "liberating the CBI" would be required after the court lashed out at the investigative agency's seeming inability to ward off the influence of the executive, the minister said.

Kumar's ouster alone may not be enough to insulate the prime minister, though, from the Opposition's attack that high-level interventions were made to calibrate the probe into coal block allocations. The Supreme Court had observed that officials in the PMO and the coal ministry "changed the heart" of the report.

"Everyone seems to be very keen on perusing PE2 (preliminary investigations 2) which deals with allocations made between 2006 and 2009," the court had said, pointing to the period when the coal ministry was under the prime minister's direct charge.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh met Attorney General GE Vahanvati to discuss the import of the apex court's observations and the way forward.

Kumar may still be able to bank on the prime minister to bail him out after he allocated to him the high-profile law ministry in the first place, a senior Congress minister observed.