A P Singh: quit UPSC, bungalow

Now that the cat is out of the bag in the Moin Qureishi-AP Singh linkup case, it is high time for the former CBI director to step down from the plum post he holds at present. With the Department of Income Tax sending a legal notice to Singh and his family members, the warts that Millennium Post first dared expose in its 21 February 2014 edition and rigorously and dedicatedly followed up, are for everyone to see. At a time when no other paper touched A P Singh’s role in facilitating cushy deals for meat mogul Moin Qureishi, we broke the story and wrote about how the owner of AMQ Agro India held disproportionate assets worth hundreds of crores apart from his known and declared income. We also reported on the I-T raids at Qureishi’s office premises, one of which was in the basement of A P Singh’s house, that yielded Rs 6 crore worth of cash and documents in sealed lockers that were examined later to reveal the meat exporter’s connections with powerful political secretaries, top bureaucrats and chiefs of intelligence agencies themselves! Moin Qureshi is suspected to have played the role of a middleman in a number of sensitive CBI cases in settling and transferring hundreds of crores from Dubai accounts to London.Not only AP Singh, in fact links with current CBI head Ranjit Sinha and Sonia Gandhi’s political secretary Ahmad Patel have alos been hinted at by officials in the I-T department, laying bare the nefarious entente between the Lutyens’ elite and the colourful businessmen with stakes in shady operations.

    Naturally, sycophantic tongues wag only when the winds are favourable. With A P Singh’s credibility in shreds, the question that needs to asked at this hour is on what basis is he still carrying on as a member on the board of the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC), which is the body overseeing the nationwide examination to select future bureaucrats. Singh must be compelled to give up not just the post but also the sprawling Lutyens’ bungalow that he currently occupies. These are state assets that should be granted only to persons with impeccable characters and flawless records. With the BBM messages exchanged between Singh and Qureishi pulling the lid off the ‘transactions’ between the two, possibly involving the respective family members as well, Singh does not retain any moral ground to hold on to the government post, until at least the investigations are completed. Given that the former UPA regime, a dispensation neck-deep in corruption scandals of gigantic scales, had appointed Singh as member of UPSC and had allotted him the bungalow, his involvement with Querishi comes as no surprise.