Former Union Minister P. Chidambaram said on Friday that institutions like the CBI were being destroyed to such an extent that these would have to be reinvented and rebuilt, as it would not be possible to put them together again.
He was speaking at the launch of fellow Congress leader Shashi Tharoor’s book The Paradoxical Prime Minister , a critical work on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government formally released by Mr. Modi’s predecessor Manmohan Singh here.
“This is again an example of how institutions are being destroyed. It always had weaknesses: I am not denying that...,” Mr. Chidambaram said when asked about the turn of events within the CBI.
‘Damage is done’
“A new government has to reinvent a Federal Bureau of Investigation or a Central Bureau of Investigation. This cannot be repaired. This cannot be put together again. You can say the same thing about the Central Information Commission. You can say the same thing about the Central Election Commission.”
Earlier, releasing the book, Dr. Singh also made a reference to the CBI being “vitiated” under the term of Mr. Modi.
“In 2014, Narendra Modi was elected the 14th Prime Minister of India on the back of lofty promises... In the past four years, they have failed the electorate and eroded the voters’ faith,” Dr. Singh said.
He said Mr. Modi had failed to speak as Prime Minister for all Indians and that his government had been largely silent on widespread communal violence, mob lynching and cow vigilantism. He added that academic freedom had been sought to be curbed.
Dr. Singh charged that nothing had been done to bring black money back, that “hastily implemented” demonetisation and GST had been disastrous, and that petrol and diesel prices were high despite low international crude prices, as the government levied excessive excise duty instead of passing benefits to consumers.
Accusing the Modi government of punishing the people, he pointed to joblessness, farmers’ suicides, “insecure borders” and instability in Kashmir.
Dr. Singh said that “Mr. Modi’s rule has not been good for India” and it was not the secular, plural, free society that the founding fathers of the Republic desired.
Labelling Mr. Modi as being all about “marketing”, Dr. Tharoor said: “You may be an extraordinary salesperson but if people find that your package is always empty, how long will people buy the package?”
Pawan Verma of the Janata Dal (United) said Dr. Tharoor had ended up creating a binary where nothing after 2014 seemed to be good, while former Union minister Arun Shourie attacked Mr. Modi’s government, saying the present “nullity” of the Cabinet, the Parliament and bureaucracy was precisely what his “Gujarat model” was.
