An Indian court has summoned former prime minister Manmohan Singh over allegations of corruption and wrongdoing in the allotment of coal mining licences during his government's decade-long tenure that ended last May.
Mr Singh was ordered, along with five others, to appear before the special Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) court in New Delhi on April 8th.
Legal experts said Mr Singh had not been charged with any crime but was being investigated for criminal breach of trust, criminal conspiracy, cheating and corruption. The maximum sentence for criminal breach of trust is life imprisonment.
“I am upset, but this is a part of life,” the 82-year-old Mr Singh told reporters at parliament, where he is an indirectly-elected member of the upper house.
“I will be able to establish my total innocence,” he later told the NDTV news channel, adding that he was open to scrutiny and confident that the truth would emerge.
Mr Singh's Congress Party spokesman dismissed the charges as baseless and said his former government had conducted itself "with utmost probity and transparency", and the legal process would vindicate them.
CBI investigation
Since 2012, the CBI has been investigating the allotment of 220 licences to industrial houses and businessmen to mine coal, following claims by federal auditors that India had lost €31 billion by selling off these rights cheaply.
In a report that severely damaged Mr Singh’s government, the comptroller and auditor general had claimed there was collusion between businessmen and officials in acquiring these licences, in what has come to be known as “Coalgate”.
Last September, India’s supreme court intervened and cancelled almost all of these coalmining licences dating from 1993, saying they were illegal.
Mr Singh’s Congress Party-led federal coalition was in office from 2004 onwards, when the majority of these licences were awarded. Mr Singh also doubled as coal minister for several years during this period.
Prime minister Narendra Modi's Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government, which ousted the Congress Party in a general election 10-months ago, is re-auctioning the coalfields in question in order to reduce India's dependence on imports.
Mr Singh's court summons relates to the awarding of the Talabira-II coalmining block in eastern Orissa state in 2005 to Hindalco, a private company owned by billionaire businessman Kumar Mangalam Birla. He too has been summoned to court next month.
The move to involve Mr Singh in Coalgate is not only a blow to the already discredited Congress Party, which is reeling under a raft of corruption scandals, but also to him personally.
The Oxbridge-educated economist, who wears a trademark light blue turban, was known as “Mr Clean”, and his name was a byword for honesty and rectitude.
As federal finance minister in 1991, he was responsible for ushering in market reforms to replace India’s command economy, which had been dominated by a corrupt and venal “licence Raj”. His reforms led to the emergence of an opulent middle class of more than 250 million.
Congress Party
The Congress Party itself is at its lowest ebb, having ruled India for more than 50-years since independence in 1947.
It was politically humiliated by the BJP in the general election last summer, following multiple corruption scams. More recently, it was wiped out in Delhi’s state assembly elections in February, failing to secure a single seat.
