Pranab reaches out to Ramdev as Anna rallies activists for a fight

A worried Manmohan Singh government on Monday swung into action to meet the twin challenges of Baba Ramdev and Anna Hazare on the black-money issue and Lok Pal bill battle. The Cabinet Committee on Political Affairs, which met here this evening at the 7 Race Course residence of the PM, discussed a series of steps to be taken by the government to reach out to the civil society activist and the yoga guru.

Highly placed sources told DNA that Union finance minister Pranab Mukherjee has written to Baba Ramdev listing steps taken by the government to bring ill-gotten money stashed abroad. He also replied point-by-point to the yoga guru, assuring him that the government was working hard in this direction. With regard to the demonetization of high value currency notes, Mukherjee was non-committal.

In order to establish the sincerity of the government, Mukherjee informed him that the CCPA has cleared the setting up of a new “Directorate of Criminal Prosecution of Income-Tax violators”. So far, the law was only for imposing financial penalties on IT violators. Now, the Union Finance Minister has promised to treat IT violators as criminals.

The government was also worried about the threat issued by the civil social activists on the Lok Pal bill and the Dr Manmohan Singh made it clear that he would like the office of the PM to be brought under its purview. Law minister M Veerappa Moily will discuss the issue with other political parties too.

Meanwhile, the government also came down from its hardened stand of not disclosing the names of IT defaulters. As the amount of tax-arrears has run into over more than Rs one lakh crore, the Income Tax (I-T) department was working on plans to publish their names in newspapers.