Coalition owes explanation to House on corruption: PDP
Date: Feb 10, 2012
Kathua, February 10
As the countdown to the budget session of the Assembly has begun, the main opposition party, the PDP, has stepped up attack on the ruling National Conference for patronising corruption in the state and shielding corrupt elements.
The PDP has taken the anti-corruption campaign to the streets before the session begins on February 23, giving a clear hint that recent cases of corruption are likely to dominate the Assembly proceedings.
“We are not pinpointing corruption in the government. Leaders of the coalition partners are levelling serious allegations of corruption against their own ministers,” former Chief Minister and patron of the PDP Mufti Mohammad Sayeed said while recently addressing a public meeting at Kathua. In an obvious reference to the recent statements of senior Congress leader Abdul Gani Vakil, who accused his own party minister of indulging in corrupt practices, Mufti said the government owed an explanation.
He said during the last three years this regime had weakened all institutions and people too had lost faith in the government.
Although Mufti avoided a direct attack on Chief Minister Omar Abdullah or Congress leaders, his party colleague and former Deputy Chief Minister Muzaffar Hussain Beig made a frontal attack on National Conference leaders for patronising corruption.
Taking a dig at the statement of NC leader Mustafa Kamal, who has demanded the resignation of Congress Ministers, namely Taj Mohiuddin, Peerzada Sayeed and Sham Lal Sharma, for their involvement in corrupt practices, Beig said the NC leadership had no moral authority to talk about corruption because the Chief Minister and Union Minister Farooq Abdullah were also under the lens after the mysterious death of NC worker Yousuf Shah. “THe NC has lost the moral authority to say anything about corruption because the role of top leadership of this party is also under a cloud,” he said and asserted that the party would effectively take up the corruption issue in the coming session.
Besides corruption, Mufti also mentioned the trust deficit in the state and sought support of the people “to change the present inefficient and corrupt system to give justice to all sections of society”.
He said the people of the state were now fed up with “this non-serious regime, its misgovernance and the strikingly corrupt system”. “Corruption has crossed all limits during the last three years because there is no transparency and accountability in the governance”, he observed, adding that the present regime had been committing the same blunders which were committed by the earlier NC regime from 1996 to 2002.
