Five years after the CBI registered a case to probe a forged government letter questioning the disinvestment of Air India, the agency is still waiting for the Lok Sabha Speaker’s sanction to question Priya Ranjan Dasmunsi, now Minister for Parliamentary Affairs and Information and Broadcasting.

The sanction request now acquires urgency because the case is coming up on January 8 in the court of Delhi’s Chief Metropolitan Magistrate who in March this year not only rejected the CBI’s October 24, 2004 file closure report but also directed the agency to record Dasmunsi’s statement.

In September, the CBI made another request through the Department of Personnel and Training for Speaker Somnath Chatterjee’s sanction — the first request was made when Manohar Joshi was the Speaker — to question Dasmunsi. There has been no response till date, sources said.

In August 2001, Dasmunsi, who was then the Congress chief whip in Lok Sabha, had targeted the NDA government by reading extracts from a letter, purportedly written by the Cabinet Secretary to then Principal Secretary Brajesh Mishra on the subject of Air India’s disinvestment. The letter, which Dasmunsi quoted, alleged “it has been felt in certain sections of the government and Parliament that the government is engaged in an exercise to give away a valuable asset rather than extract value from it”.

Arun Shourie, the then Disinvestment Minister, told Parliament that the letter was a forgery. The CBI registered a case and questioned all persons concerned, including officials from the Cabinet Secretariat, but never managed to speak to Dasmunsi. Directed by the CMM to record Dasmunsi’s statement, the CBI now waits for the Speaker’s sanction.