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The CIAA has filed a corruption case against 175 persons in the Lalita Niwas scandal, but has given political protection to a few 

A constitutional body like the Commission for the Investigation of Abuse of Authority (CIAA) is supposed to conduct its investigation on corruption impartially.

Its probe should be widely acceptable to the public. The anti-graft body should not be seen as acting as a tool of the ruling party or the people in power, out to take political revenge on rival political parties by dragging them into corruption cases to ruin their political and social career once and for all.

The manner in which the CIAA filed a corruption caseagainst 175 individuals, including former deputy prime minister and vice president of the Nepali Congress Bijaya Kumar Gachhadar, on Wednesday, for their roles in the Lalita Niwas land grab case shows the charge-sheet was motivated by political vendetta.

Gachhadar was minister for Physical Planning and Construction nine years ago in Madhav Kumar Nepal’s cabinet, which decided to expand the PM’s residence and build a road inside Lalita Niwas by providing compensation to the landowners who had captured the land illegally on the basis of the government decisions taken on May 28 and May 31 and on July 23, 1990.

In fact, the then cabinet in 1990 had decided to return the land – only 14 ropanis – confiscated during the Panchayat regime on political grounds. Following this decision, the politicians, bureaucrats and land mafia, however, forged a nexus among them and misinterpreted the then cabinet decisions and managed to register 112 ropanis of land in their names, out of the total 299 ropanis land of Lalita Niwas duly obtained by the government through the Land Acquisition Act, 1961. However, the Sarada Prasad Trital-led probe panel found that the land was illegally grabbed by those people levelled in the CIAA chargesheet at the Special Court.

Undoubtedly corruption is rife in the country. This is not possible without the nexus of politicians, bureaucrats and land sharks, all of whom have become millionaires without known sources of income. The action taken by the CIAA is welcome. But the question here is: Why did the CIAA act so selectively? Why did it not file a charge-sheet against Navin Poudel, the son of Bishnu Poudel, general-secretary of the ruling NCP, and Supreme Court Justice Kumar Regmi, both of whom had also bought plots of land there? The CIAA’s claim that it did not deem necessary to file a case against t

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