Unfair to point finger at PM for file handled by babus: Tewari

Tewari said while ministers dealt with substantive issues of policy, administrative matters were handled by the secretaries

Rejecting Opposition's demand for the booking of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in the coal scam following filing of charges against former coal secretary PC Parakh, Union Minister Manish Tewari said "there is a difference between an administrative head and the political head of the ministry".

Maintaining that it was unfair to hold the Prime Minister responsible for the administrative decisions taken by the government at the bureaucratic level, Tewari pointed out that Singh had been holding the coal portfolio only in the interim after Shibu Soren's resignation as the then Coal Minister.

"By the time a file comes to the PM it has been processed by the coal bureaucracy and the bureaucracy within PMO. To expect the PM to scrutinise every file and then sign on it and then that being used by (Parakh) to say the PM is equally complicit, I think it's a bit of a stretch," Tewari, the Minister for Information and Broadcasting, told Karan Thapar on CNN-IBN programme 'Devil's Advocate'.

Tewari was responding to a question related to remarks by Parakh that if industrialist Kumar Mangalam Birla and himself were guilty of conspiracy, then surely former Minister of State for Coal Dasari Narayan Rao and the PM must be part of that conspiracy since the allocation could not have happened without the signatures of the two ministers.

Defending the Prime Minister, Tewari said that while ministers dealt with the substantive issues of policy, administrative matters were handled by the secretaries, who were the administrative heads of the ministry.

"There is nobody trying to escape responsibility... I am trying to make the distinction that by the time a file comes to the PM, who is the interim head of a particular ministry, it's gone through the entire coal bureaucracy," he said.

The Union Minister at the same time made it clear that merely naming somebody in an FIR and even charge-sheeting one did not make a person guilty.

"Neither an FIR or charge sheet is conclusive proof of guilt," he said.