Arunachal Pradesh Chief Minister Pema Khandu has been ordered to resign by the Supreme Court, a month after it ordered a preliminary inquiry into corruption allegations against her. Veteran Congress leader Jairam Ramesh has slammed Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s silence on the failure to remove Chief Minister Khandu as “gross contempt for the Supreme Court verdict”.
“The order has come from the Supreme Court of the country, not a lower court or a high court,” Rajya Sabha MP and Congress general secretary of communications Ramesh told ‘X’, which is a matter of concern for the Chief Minister. He also said that Chief Minister Khandu is in charge of the state road department and has important files required by the CBI for investigation. Recalling Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ‘Na Khaunga Na Khan Dunga’ slogan when he came to power in 2014 on his anti-corruption stance, Ramesh asked why the Prime Minister was silent now and why the Arunachal Chief Minister was not asked to resign.
The petitioners alleged that the Arunachal Pradesh government had illegally and arbitrarily awarded major construction contracts to Chief Minister Khandu, his brother, grandmother and their close political associates. It is alleged that between 2015 and 2025, contracts worth around Rs 1,270 crore were allotted to four firms linked to Khandu and his relatives. Pema Khandu took over as the chief minister of the state
Justices Vikram Nath, Sandeep Mehta and N.K. V.S. A division bench of the Supreme Court comprising Anjaria ordered a preliminary CBI probe into the allegations. The bench directed the probe agency to conduct a special examination of the contracts awarded to companies linked to Khandu and his family members. During the judgment, the bench made an important oral observation that it was a strange coincidence that such a large number of contracts were awarded to family members in a state. Earlier in October, the central government had told the Supreme Court that it could not investigate the allegations against Khandu and that the matter was under the jurisdiction of the state government.
The CBI is currently moving towards initiating a preliminary inquiry as directed by the Supreme Court, but the political pressure created by the opposition demanding the resignation of Chief Minister Pema Khandu has drawn intense attention at the state as well as the national level.
