Leftist parties unanimously demand sacking of “tainted” ministers

New Delhi: A grouping of six Left parties on Sunday demanded the removal of all tainted ministers in the central government and states and a CBI probe into their alleged misconduct.

"The Left parties demand that a thorough CBI investigation under the supervision of the judiciary must be conducted in these cases and the guilty should be booked and punished," a joint Left statement said.

"All tainted ministers in the Centre and the states must be removed from office until the investigations are completed and action taken," it added.

The statement was issued by the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M), Communist Party of India (CPI), Forward Bloc, Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP), Communist Party of India-Marxist Leninist-Liberation and Socialist Unity Centre of India-Communist.

The statement said that "all the claims made by the BJP central government and the prime minister, that during the course of this one year the NDA government has offered a corruption free administration, are being thoroughly exposed by the day."

"In the Lalit Modi-IPL scam, the external affairs minister and the Rajasthan chief minister have figured as persons grossly misusing their office to help a fugitive from Indian law, Lalit Modi," it said, referring to Sushma Swaraj and Vasundhara Raje.

"The minister for human resource development (Smriti Irani) has given a false statement regarding her educational qualifications."

"Cases of misuse of office for pecuniary gains have come up in the BJP ruled states of Maharashtra, involving two BJP state ministers."

"In other BJP-ruled states like Chhattisgarh, such instances of high-level corruption are being reported."

The Left statement said the admission and recruitment scam in Madhya Pradesh – called Vyapam scam — "has exposed the BJP state government as having perpetrated one of the worst corruption cases in the state ever."

"Officially 27 people associated with this case, including nine important witnesses, have died under mysterious circumstances.

"Important journalists, reporting on the scam, have also been victims of such mysterious deaths. Nearly 47 inexplicable deaths of people connected with this scam in one way or the other have been reported."

The statement followed a meeting attended by CPI-M leaders Sitaram Yechury and Prakash Karat, Sudhakar Reddy and D. Raja from CPI, Dipankar Bhattacharya and Swapan Mukherjee from the CPI-ML-Liberation, G. Devarajan from Forward Block, Satyawan and Pran Sharma from SUCI-Communist and Abani Roy from RSP. (IANS)