The Ministry has even asked the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) to examine the accounts of the organisation, which was set up as an autonomous institution by the late Rajiv Gandhi in 1987. Since its inception, the IGNCA has had its accounts audited by a private chartered accountant, though organisation officials maintain the CAG has conducted an audit upto March 1997.

More importantly, the HRD Ministry has sought and got legal opinion from the Attorney-General which says it can go ahead and ask the IGNCA to revoke the life-trustee status given to six members of the executive committee. ``When we gave IGNCA a corpus of Rs 100 crore, we never intendedthat it would be given to an oligarchy,'' says an angry official.

To which an equally irate IGNCA official replies: ``Why is the Government so perturbed? None of these trustees can live forever, can they? Anyway there is a public interest litigation pending on this matter.'' The six trustees who were accorded life membership by the 22-member Executive Committee are former president R Venkataraman, former prime minister P. V. Narasimha Rao, former media adviser to the prime minister H. Y. Sharada Prasad, former finance minister Manmohan Singh, trust president Sonia Gandhi, and Academic Director Kapila Vatsyayan.

But ministry officials are not amused at this ``perpetuation of an oligarchy.'' They are insisting on the CAG report, which will be ready in ``two or three months,'' and they want a proper explanation for the Rs 38 crore of the building fund which is yet to be spent.

IGNCA officials bristle at the idea of financial irregularities. ``We may be guilty of over-staffing, but we are not guilty ofdefalcation. Sure, we have a lot of typists who can't even type, but that is not corruption. And the building is coming up, what do they want an explanation for?'' they ask. As for the constitution of the IGNCA, which they amended in 1996 to accommodate the lifetime trustees, the officials say they did it only to ensure continuity. The late Pupul Jayakar's resignation had nothing to do with the amendment, they insist.

As the IGNCA officials maintain: ``It is political. The BJP wants to control what it sees as a Congress fiefdom and the bureaucrats will aid it because they want Vatsyayan's job.''