NEW DELHI: Sustaining pressure on the Centre over the issue of corruption, Anna Hazare wrote a letter to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Wednesday asking him to implement the UN Convention against corruption and the recommendations of A N Vohra Committee to counter graft.
“I request your good self and your Cabinet to read the UN Convention document, which was signed by our government, and also the Vohra report again. It is possible that due to your busy schedule you may have forgotten the details of the convention and the findings of the report. I request you to implement the recommendation of the Vohra report,” the octogenarian activist said in the letter. He said that it was a matter of ‘grave concern’ that despite being a signatory to the UN Convention and fears raised by the Vohra Committee, no action has been taken in the direction of countering corruption. Hazare said: “Corruption is much like the plague as the then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan had noted, which infects democracy, judiciary and day-to-day functioning of the government.”
The anti-graft crusader noted that in 1993, Vohra Committee studied about the nexus among criminals, politicians and bureaucrats, and discussed about criminal gangs enjoying ‘political patronage’. “Corruption has reached enormous scale and all the mechanisms established to fight the menace have proved futile,” he said.