Vigilance Bureau caught between Badal and Amarinder

CHANDIGARH: The Vigilance Bureau officials seemed to be caught between the devil and the deep sea. While former chief minister Parkash Singh Badal has meted out a covert threat to them to be prepared for facing reprisals for hounding SAD leaders, the brief from the Amarinder government is no less stringent.
In his effort to deflate pressure from the Vigilance Bureau, Badal on Monday named atleast four senior officers including chief director AP Pandey, who, he said, had joined hands with chief minister Amarinder Singh to "conspire against SAD leaders and unleash indiscriminate excesses on them".
"All these officers would be held accountable for playing second fiddle to their political bosses whenever the Akalis came back to power," said Badal.
He said the Vigilance Bureau had been completely politicised to serve the interest of the Congress government and to cover up failures of Amarinder as a chief minister.
Besides Pandey, Badal named DIG BK Uppal, who led the raids at his residence on Saturday, DIG KJS Pannu and SP Surinder Pal Singh, who later supervised the raid. Badal also identified DIG, Ludhiana range, S Chattopadhyaya, as another "puppet officer who was working overtime to please political masters".
While declining to join issue with the former chief minister, Pandey told Times News Network that such threats had no meaning since the officers were engaged in their "official duty" and there was no political motive attached to that.
While rebutting that the VB had cooked up charges against former SAD ministers to malign their image, Pandey said that it was for the courts to decide whether the corruption charges framed against SAD leaders were right or wrong. "The accused would always have the right to defend themselves in the court", he added while asserting that political threats would in no way make the VB relent in its campaign against corruption.
Another senior VB officer, who also figures in the list of Badal, however, sounded more firm when he said that Badal was subverting the legal process by threatening the investigating officers.
He said it was no less than "political criminalisation" when political leaders start intimidating officials investigating charges against them.
The officer denied that the fear of being hounded out after the Akalis come to power would in anyway make the VB officers go soft. "If any officer feels cowed down, he is free to opt out of the VB", he argued.