Former Telecom Minister’s explosive account of the 2G scam ‘The Book In My Defense’ reportedly has a date of release now – it will be on the shelves by November. “The book is under edit. Once the work is complete, we will share the date of publication,” a source from the publishing house said to Deccan Chronicle.
The date was earlier uncertain, and book was also said to have been shelved. The book was to be released by the end of the year, after final arguments in the 2G case were completed. After the Congress-DMK alliance for the Tamil Nadu Assembly polls was sealed earlier this year, Raja was reportedly summoned by the DMK leadership and told to give up any plans of releasing the book.
Sources close to the DMK leader said Raja is expected to shed light on how he kept the then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and his senior cabinet colleagues like the then finance minister P. Chidambaram and then external affairs minister Pranab Mukherjee in the loop on the 2G spectrum allocation and how he had consulted them at every stage.
The Pioneer had previously reported that former telecom minister A Raja’s tell-all book about the 2G scam has been shelved in the face of renewed relations between the Congress and the DMK. Raja met party leaders again in June to convince them to change their minds about the memoir, but the latter were not willing to risk embarrassment to their alliance partner, said The Pioneer.
The book has been eagerly anticipated ever since it was announced in the 2015 catalogue of Penguin India, where it was described as “honest, hard-hitting and with no holds barred, an important and utterly absorbing book”.
In interviews given after his 15-month stay in Tihar jail, Raja had promised that the book would contain explosive revelations.
“I am writing a book to be published by Penguin, but it is not just about my days in jail. It will talk about why I was put there and how I was charged with corruption as I had allegedly abused power. The truth is that I waged a war against monopoly, cartelisation and surreptitious exploitation of a natural source. I am not the only person who was charged for a crime I did not commit. I was charged because I stopped the telecom monopoly from committing fraud and crime. Truth will prevail. History will absolve me,” he said in an interview to India Legal, parts of which were published in DNA.
The Pioneer said that the book’s release had become common knowledge, and was even discussed in court arguments.