The editorial in the latest issue of Organiser, titled “Congress Bureau of Investigation,” says: “Congress has built institutions, used them to its advantage whenever it chose and destroyed them whenever it found them inconvenient. But for the interregnum of the Janata Party in 1977, V.P. Singh government in 1989 and the NDA in 1998, Indian democracy would have taken a different shape, had Congress been in power uninterrupted. Perhaps, we would have been a banana republic. Only that the focus now is on the CBI. In the last five years this has perhaps been one of the most useful and active institutions for the party and so it is always in news for the wrong reasons. Its utility is such and so overweening that a former Congress chief minister on a campaign trail in UP threatened the state chief minister by citing the power of CBI. It is natural that the agency has not been found wanting when it came to exonerating the darling of the establishment accused of the Bofors kickback. As a consequence the CBI’s image as an independent and autonomous investigative agency, which was impervious to external influences, has once again come under a cloud. In the latest instance it had sought the withdrawal of the Red Corner Notice against Ottavio Quattrocchi, the Italian middleman who is an accused in the Bofors bribery case. Even friendly parties of the ruling alliance are now finding it difficult to defend the Congress”.

It adds: “Accusing the Manmohan Singh government of undermining the autonomy of crucial institutions such as the Election Commission, Rashtrapati Bhawan and the CBI, BJP general secretary Arun Jaitley has promised that, if voted to power, his party would set up a commission of inquiry, to be headed by a Supreme Court judge, to investigate cases of collusion of the CBI with the accused in all sensitive cases and suggest steps to restore and re-establish the agency’s autonomy.”

... contd.