The CBI raids being conducted in the offices of the Punjab government and at the residences of close aides of Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann, while on the one hand seem to have sullied the Kattar Imandar (honest image) of AAP leaders, have raised a question on the other: are the raids a genuine crackdown on graft, or a calculated political strike by the Centre?
The court did not merely comment; it ordered the probe. That judicial backing blunts the charge of a purely arbitrary executive vendetta. The stakes are legal as well as political, and AAP cannot wave the file away as a random hit from Delhi. The action rests on Enforcement Directorate inputs about alleged corruption, cash-for-postings, and irregularities in administrative transfers. The allegations, such as leaks of confidential files and providing Arms licences, have left the agencies shocked. AAP’s clean image took a hit after a series of CBI and ED raids. After the legal trouble for the top leadership in the Delhi excise case, the CBI raids and corruption allegations in Punjab have come as a double whammy for the party that is hoping to win a second term in Punjab. The network is also accused of opening a back door. The FIR does not stop at Ghuman and names close associates and childhood friends, among them Dr Romi Raja Mahajan and R.S. Nagra, who allegedly managed appointments and pushed administrative interventions outside formal channels. The court faulted state authorities for failing to act on the ED’s initial disclosures of corruption in the CMO. Opposition leaders tore into the AAP government after the CBI raids on Punjab Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann’s camp office and on his OSD. Congress leader and Leader of Opposition Partap Singh Bajwa went after the government’s record.
Because the state sat on the Enforcement Directorate’s early inputs on cash-for-transfers, the High Court ordered a CBI probe, he said,.
Unauthorised people, the probe says, were given access to the chief minister’s camp office and to confidential government documents, and were helped with matters such as arms licences. The target was the party’s “Kattar Imandar” line – the claim that it is strictly honest.
From a legal point of view, the fresh raids appear genuine as the CBI probe followed sharp observations from the Punjab and Haryana High Court, which pulled up the state police for sitting on earlier ED inputs about graft in the Chief Minister’s Office.
