He made this prayer in the supreme court saying there is a shortage of law officers who can assist him in dealing with such money laundering cases.
However, the apex court bench, consisting justices Deepak Gupta and Surya Kant, refused to pass any order on Cheema's application and promised him of providing all necessary help.
The Supreme Court, in July 2014, had appointed Cheema as the Special Public Prosecutor in coal scam cases.
He has been making submissions on the behalf of CBI and ED in a court headed by Additional Sessions Judge Bharat Parashar.
Cheema's name was recommended by CBI special counsel Amarendra Saran to Supreme Court Bench monitoring the coal block investigation.
Now we shall come to the issue. This plea of Cheema has raised many questions on the intentions of Narendra Modi government to prosecute the accused, mainly former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and a couple of big industrialists.
The questions are - Why Cheema is seeking relief from the case? Is the Narendra Modi government delaying prosecution or weakening the case? Is it afraid of electoral reverses if former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is imprisoned in the case?
I believe, the Lutyens brigade might love these questions from my side ...
IS GOVT TRYING TO SABOTAGE THE CASE?
Answers could lie in some of the developments that have been reported in media.
Consider this: The CBI failed to prove their charges against former coal secretary Harish Chandra Gupta in a special CBI court and was, in August, acquitted in the case.
The CBI failed to prove charges against Gupta that he had misled PMO into approving coal allocation. The court, in fact, said there was no chance for the government to be misled because it knew the purpose of use of coal by Pushp Steels and Mining Private Limited, which was granted lease.
It also failed to prove that Gupta took a unilateral decision to grant coal block. The court instead found this allegation to be incorrect. It held that the decision was not just Gupta's.
Further, the CBI did not seek many documents, which led special CBI court judge Bharat Parashar to summon Singh as an accused in the case.
In a submission before a special court in September 2015, former Jharkhand Chief Minister Madhu Koda had accused Singh of consciously taking a decision to allot coal block to JSPL and GSIPL.
He had alleged that the allocation of Amarkonda Murgadangal coal block in Jharkhand to Jindal group was approved by Singh, who was also the then coal minister. Koda had argued that CBI's theory of conspiracy remains incomplete without Singh's involvement.
DELAYING TACTICS
Interestingly, the prosecution process has slowed down since March 2015 after AICC President Sonia Gandhi had led a solidarity march in Delhi in support of Singh, who was summoned as an accused by Justice Parashar.
The Congress leaders had attacked Modi government accusing it of maintaining a "studied silence" after CBI had told the court that there was no criminality involved in the allocation of Talabira coal blocks II to Hindalco company of Aditya Birla group in Odisha in 2005 when Singh also held the portfolio of coal.
Thereafter, Singh approached a supreme court bench and got stay over trial court's summons order.
Actually, Singh should have petitioned the coal scam monitoring bench, but petitioned a bench which did not have any direction.
Since, the CBI did not protest, a case with a no-direction-stay resulted in a permanent stay.
This is nothing but an alleged ploy to weaken the case against the former Prime Minister.
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