Stop ‘smear campaign’, Anna tells Sonia – ToI – 19.4.11

TIMES NEWS NETWORK

New Delhi: Anna Hazare and Congress were locked in a fresh confrontation on Monday after the antigraft campaigner accused Congress leaders of seeking to derail the process of drafting the Lokpal Bill by a smear campaign, and asked party chief Sonia Gandhi to restrain her colleagues.
    Hazare told Sonia that the government nominees on the drafting committee were more vulnerable to a counter-attack from civil society, although he insisted that his colleagues did not want to turn their attention away from the prime task of the Lokpal Bill. The veteran Gandhian also warned, pointing to the anti-corruption mood sweeping the country, of consequences of the efforts to derail the Lokpal campaign.
    In a separate statement, he made it clear that he would not relax his August 15 deadline for passage of the Lokpal Bill.
    Congress rejected Hazare’s demand that it rein in party leaders speaking against him and his colleagues, with party spokesperson Manish Tewari saying that dialogue in a “democracy could not be onesided” and termed it the essence of democracy.
    Although Tewari said he was not reacting to Hazare’s letter, party sources said the tough riposte reflected the party’s stand not to cede ground to civil society activists just because they had grabbed support of articulate sections at the moment.
    In a letter to Sonia, Hazare referred to the Shanti Bhushan CD, Congress general secretary Digvijay Singh’s charge that the lawyer had engaged in stamp duty evasion and HRD minister Kapil Sibal’s alleged statement about dilution of civil society’s stand on the Lokpal Bill, as he urged the Congress chief to intervene.
    The anti-corruption campaigner, who took no names, referred right at the start to the letter Sonia had written him a day before he ended his fast, underlining her own concern about corruption and also stressing the urgent necessity to combat it in public life. He termed Sonia’s letter as “reassuring”.
    “Together we have to defeat their designs,” Hazare told the Congress chief.
    But it was his grouse against Congress, not the appeal for partnership, that defined the tone of the letter.
Bhushan moves SC against Amar
    Former law minister Shanti Bhushan on Monday requested the Supreme Court to launch contempt proceedings against MP Amar Singh for allegedly fabricating and circulating a CD to derail court monitoring of 2G scam probe and influencing the decision on his lawyer-son Prashant Bhushan’s plea to make public the politicians phone intercepts. Bhushan, who is cochairman of the joint committee to draft the Lokpal Bill, also said the CD was engineered to defame and discredit him because of his involvement in Anna Hazare’s crusade against corruption.