A distilled diary

 A few months ago, the income tax department had raided the offices of Uttar Pradesh Distillery Association (UPDA) and recovered a diary in which the details of the pay-offs made to UP politicians and bureaucrats were scrupulously maintained.  Media reports had suggested pay-offs to top UP politicians to the tune of Rs 250 crore for looking the other way when it came to evading excise duties. Later, it was reported that not one but two diaries were seized: one by the income tax and the other by the state excise department. In both the diaries, the names of the recipients were in abbreviations, which were later deciphered by the officials. Now it is alleged that while the first one by the income tax department was genuine, the other one was deliberately planted by the accused on the excise department to take the attention away from the original. What has deepened the mystery is the manner in which five officers of the Directorate General of Investigation (DI) who were handling this case have been transferred out. If that was not enough there is a denial from the law ministry that they did not give any opinion to the income tax department on the seizure of the diary listing pay-offs. Newspapers had reported that the law ministry had cited the hawala scandal to suggest that a diary was not a book of account till the agencies got corroborative evidence against those who figured in it. The mystery of the distillery diary gets murkier.