A Raja's 2G Scam Tell-All Book shelved for Now

Former telecom minister A Raja's much-hyped book on the '2G scam' in which he was to expose Congress leaders, including former prime minister Manmohan Singh, and former finance ministers P. Chidambaram and Pranab Mukherjee, is unlikely to be published anytime soon, and perhaps never.

Penguin India was scheduled to launch Raja's In My Defence, a 288-page book billed as a tell-all expose, by the end of the year, to coincide with the closing of arguments in the court in the 2G scam case.

In the book, which Raja wrote originally in Tamil and was translated into English by journalist Paran Balakrishnan, the former minister is said to have even charged some CBI officials with having put the onus for the scam on him to save senior Congress leaders.

Penguin's marketing blurb for the book reads, "Now for the first time, Raja tells his side of the story - defending his decision regarding 2G allotments, drawing a revelatory picture of the corridors of power and the pressure he faced from big business, Government and the bureaucracy and of his time in jail. Honest, hard-hitting and with no holds barred, this is an important and utterly absorbing book".

A report in Pioneer said the book may have been shelved due to an understanding between the Congress and Raja's party, DMK. The two parties, which were part of the Congress-led UPA government, had fallen out following the 2G scam but stitched up an alliance in Tamil Nadu during the recent Assembly elections there. Part of the political understanding, it is alleged, was that Raja's book would not be published.

Raja is reported to have met top DMK leaders recently to ask them to lift the 'ban', but the party bosses have told him not to go ahead to avoid embarrassment to the Congress.

Raja had earlier threatened to expose former prime minister Manmohan Singh and former finance minister P. Chidambaram as far back as 2011, when he was still part of the UPA ministry, but has never carried out the threat so far.