Upset by the “unnecessary accusations” thrown at him by the media in the 2G spectrum and coal-block allocation scandals, former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh felt like quitting office, outgoing Solicitor-General Mohan Parasaran said here on Monday. Dr. Singh, in his last press conference as Prime Minister in January, however, said he had never wanted to quit.

“The Prime Minister on many occasions did actually feel upset that he was unnecessarily being accused. And he had said that the way things are going on, with the media aggressively accusing him, he felt so suffocated. And he even felt like quitting office,” said Mr. Parasaran, who had handled many sensitive cases in the Supreme Court, including one on the coal-blocks allocation, during the second term of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA). Mr. Parasaran told The Hindu that on such occasions, senior bureaucrats and law officers, including the Attorney- General and himself, used to ask Dr. Singh not to become “too emotional” and reassure him that he “had done nothing wrong.”

On why Dr. Singh did not assert himself to put an end to corruption, he said the former Prime Minister could have wanted to be “safer,” considering his past experience. “Particularly, Dr. Singh could have been troubled by the way his mentor, P.V. Narasimha Rao, was prosecuted [in the cash-for-vote scam],” he said.

Hitting out at the UPA allies for the scams that riddled the government, Mr. Parasaran said the resultant policy paralysis led to courts stepping into the jurisdiction normally reserved for the executive.

“This was because the executive was unable to fill up the aspirations of the people. It was taking arbitrary decisions in accordance with the compulsions of coalition politics,” he said. Judicial activism had been a phenomenon ever since 1989, when coalition governments became the norm at the Centre.

Asked if the 2G case accentuated judicial activism, the senior lawyer said what happened outside the courts, including the reaction of some government functionaries that no wrong had been done and that it was only a “notional loss,” aggravated the issue.

“It has resulted in the courts taking a very aggressive posture. This has continued since then,” he said. Mr. Parasaran said such scams could have been avoided had law officers guided the government properly. “What I felt was there were some matters where the law officers could have made corrections to their opinion. This could have avoided great disasters,” he said.

Asked if this was in reference to the allegations levelled against Attorney-General G.E Vahanvati, he said in the 2G case, Mr. Vahanvati had to deal with the then Telecom Minister, A. Raja, now an accused in the case. But the clean image of the Prime Minister helped. “If it had been any other person other than Dr. Singh, he would have been packed off long ago by the courts,” Mr. Parasaran said.