In a bid to avert a political controversy in the run-up to polls, Union Law Minister Arun Jaitley is said to have advised CBI against seeking the arrest of BSP chief Mayawati in the Taj Corridor case. Given the fact that the nation is already in an election mode, Jaitley is said to have argued that any attempt at this stage to arrest Mayawati was bound to kick off a storm regardless of the merits of the case. It’s on this advice that the agency dropped the proposal earlier this month of removing a legal hurdle to Mayawati’s arrest. The CBI had time till January 19 to file an appeal before the Supreme Court against a controversial order of the Allahabad High Court passed in October staying the agency from arresting her till the completion of the investigation. The CBI’s legal department had even drafted a petition which is learnt to have pointed out, among other grounds, that the Taj case was booked on the direction of the Supreme Court and that it was more important to arrest the accused during the investigation rather than afterwards. The CBI had also claimed that Mayawati’s alleged complicity in the Taj case was not comparable to the 148 cases she booked earlier against her political rival, Mulayam Singh Yadav. It had argued that Mayawati could not cite the precedent of Yadav’s cases in which the High Court and subsequently the Supreme Court restrained the police from arresting him. But none of these legal arguments in favour of Mayawati’s arrest came to anything as the CBI top brass referred the proposed petition to Jaitley. Ironically, the CBI’s failure to file an appeal prompted a former standing counsel of Uttar Pradesh, Ajay K Agarwal, to file one instead. He pleaded that the High Court’s order staying Mayawati’s arrest be overruled as it set a ‘‘wrong precedent.’’ The Supreme Court is due to hear Agarwal’s petition on February 13.
