Congress: CVC acted as collaborator in violating Constitution

Verma was sent on forced leave in October last year on the recommendation of the CVC. He was removed from the CBI on Thursday.

Congress spokesperson Abhishek Singhvi said the CVC has not acted in the Rafale case but has taken action in the Verma case.

The Commission also did not act against CBI’s special director Rakesh Asthana, against whom evidence has been provided, Singhvi pointed out.

The Congress leader accused the CVC of acting as “Collaborator in Violating the Constitution” in collaboration with the government, forgetting its status as an independent authority. “It is unfortunate that the Modi government is using the shoulder of such institutions to fire political bullets, and even more unfortunate that such institutions are lending their shoulders for such abuse.”

The Modi government, he said, “cannot hide behind fig leafs of such institutions, and cannot act in this alarming, shocking and deplorable fashion to destabilise the CBI”. He said the CVC is neither the appointing authority nor the removing authority for the CBI director. Given that, the CVC report cannot be treated as gospel truth to “form the entire and sole basis” for the Prime Minister-led committee to remove Verma, he said.

Arguing that the entire CVC report is based on conjectures, premises, speculations and unsubstantiated inferences, he said the CVC should not have allowed “such non-conclusions and non-findings to be misused as if they are conclusive, definitive views of some quasi-judicial authority”. “We are stunned that the CVC is practising willful and Nelsonian blindness to such obvious facts,” he said.