Vinod Rai is retiring tomorrow (May 22), and as of today there is no official announcement on his successor. Media reports quoting anonymous officials say defence secretary Shashi Kant Sharma’s appointment has been cleared by president Pranab Mukherjee.

There are a couple of questions that need to be raised – and you can bank on Prashant Bhushan to do so (watch this space for more from his press conference at 3 pm today). Before Bhushan, the lawyer and social activist, makes a detailed case, here are a couple of questions to begin with (and these have nothing to do with integrity or pliability of the candidate):

Transparency
CAG is a crucial office, comparable to the chief justice of India (CJI) and the chief election commissioner (CEC0. How would it sound if the name of the next CJI or CEC is a matter of speculative reports a day ahead of the incumbent’s retirement? However, that is the story with the CAG’s appointment. There is no collegium; no one knows who takes the call: the PM or FM or their party boss. The only thing known is that the president signs on the dotted lines.
And this is not a UPA innovation; it has been so for quite some time – as pointed out in great detail in our earlier Trithesh Nandan’s report ‘How not to select Vinod Rai’s successor’.

In fact, in 1996, VK Shunglu was appointed a full week after CG Somiah retired!

In the age of RTI, the appointment to a critically important office like CAG could be a bit more transparent.
 
Conflict of interest
If Sharma becomes CAG, then over the next year, among other tasks, he will be auditing the accounts of the defence ministry, of which he is today the top bureaucrat. As Kamal Kant Jaswal, president, Common Cause, and former secretary, government of India, told Governance Now: “If you appoint an officer who was a defence, petroleum or telecom secretary and make him CAG, he will have to review his own actions. How would you ensure objectivity when executive decisions taken during his own term are to be considered by him?”

Again, this is not a UPA innovation, and there is a precedent. Gian Prakash, the first IAS officer to hold the CAG office, was a defence secretary. “During his tenure, the defence audits were compromised up to certain extent. The defence audit officer of CAG office had a tough time dealing with Prakash. The paragraphs on defence audits kept reducing during his tenure,” a former deputy CAG has told Governance Now [see more in the detailed report in Trithesh’s story].