The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has sought permission from Maharashtra governor C Vidyasagar Rao to initiate criminal proceedings against former chief minister of Maharashtra, Ashok Chavan in the Adarsh Housing Society scam.
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The earlier Governor, K Sankaranarayanan, had denied permission to prosecute Chavan, triggering a controversy.
The CBI had alleged that Chavan suggested inclusion of civilian members in Adarsh Housing Society meant for war veterans and widows of defence personnel, to secure flats for his relatives in the plush complex, situated at Colaba in south Mumbai.
“The CBI is being misused against the Congress”, Chavan, the Lok Sabha member from Nanded, said. “We want to expose the Congress for its sham”, said a senior minister. He had decided against seeking the Cabinet’s opinion because he felt that it was unlikely that the ministers, who once worked under Chavan, would give him unbiased advice.
He demanded to know that when the then governor had declined sanction after consulting the state solicitor general, on what grounds the state was now going ahead with the prosecution.
It was on the basis of Sankaranarayanan’s order that the Congress-NCP Cabinet had made a decision to reject the Adarsh judicial commission’s report in December 2013. “The Congress government had neither rejected nor accepted the findings”, Fadnavis said. Mr Chavan, who had to resign as chief minister after the scam surfaced in 2010, was among the 12 persons chargesheeted by the agency in connection with the case.
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The CBI chargesheet listed Chavan as an accused, while the two-member Commission of Inquiry comprising Justice (Rtd) J A Patil, a former judge of the Bombay High Court and P Subramanian, a former Chief Secretary, had accused him of “quid pro quo” and “political patronage”.
