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New
Delhi, 15 August 2002
At
the recently concluded BJP National Council meeting in
New Delhi
, the BJP boss LK Advani
made his now usual and stirring call to arms. The BJP should not
only be a party with a difference he chortled, but also should
provide a government with a difference. He also announced the end of
the Vajpayee era, the subsequent feeble clarification being probably
even more fainter than Yudhishtra’s: “Aswathama, the
elephant!” The fable, history to some, tells us that Dronacharya
swooned and lost his head in quick succession. Vajpayee has been in
a stupor for many months now and it is a matter of time before he
too loses his head.
Mark
the use of the future tense by the Sardar. He wants a government
with a difference henceforth; very clearly suggesting it has not
been so, so far. Of course he will now deny that he did not mean
that this government is not a government with a difference. Of
course it is. It is worse than even the cash and carry government of
PV Narasimha Rao. But it looks like Pandit Vajpayee is not taking
the Sardar allusions lying down. He has struck back by canceling all
allotments made since January 2000, knowing very well that the
system of allocation using retired judges as fig leaves was
concocted at the behest of the Sardar and will leave a wide swathe
of litigation in its wake.
The
numbers involved are mind-boggling. In all 1134 petrol pumps and
1788 LPG dealerships were allocated, in addition to the 236 kerosene
dealerships. The going rate for each petrol pump was in the range of
Rs. 25 lakhs each and for each LPG and kerosene dealership anywhere
between Rs. 10-15 lakhs. Not less than Rs.500 crores went into the
pockets of the supply chain, mostly made up of top BJP
functionaries. The list of allottees is a veritable who’s who of
the shady BJP and shadowy RSS. Two Prime Ministerial nieces figure
prominently in it. One is clearly so unhappy about now being denied
by her uncle that she is threatening to go to court over the belated
cancellation. In each state the BJP hierarchy actively participated
in raking in the loot while distributing largesse.
A
leading national newspaper reports that in AP, a cabal of BJP
ministers such note worthies as Bangaru Laxman, Bandaru Dattatreya,
CH Vidyasagara Rao and UV Krishnam Raju together made more than 200
allocations. One senior BJP leader, very clearly unhappy, told me
that as a special case he managed to get a petrol pump sanctioned
for a reduced rate of Rs.10 lakhs! His complaint was that even party
colleagues were not spared in the collection drive supposedly for
the party fund. Party fund is a euphemism for personal fund, as the
gold-fingered Bangaru Laxman very clearly illustrated in the Tehelka
tapes. With the exception of Krishnam Raju, all of them are
self-made men and how well they have done for themselves is common
knowledge. It seems rather than Jai Shri Ram a more apt
slogan for the BJP should be Jai Shri Ram Naik!
Ram
Naik along with Arun Shourie is considered one of the more honest of
the BJP ministers. He is right when he says that he did not make a
single allocation. But he is being downright dishonest when he says
he was not aware of what was going on. For that matter neither was
Arun Shourie. The system, as Vajpayee’s men have now leaked out,
was installed at the behest of LK Advani, that paragon of probity
and votary of good governance, to benefit BJP and RSS supporters and
workers. But his party being what it is, a party of bania’s
literally went back to its roots to turn a profit for itself. Ram
Naik therefore sees no need to quit and is thereby very clearly
suggesting, in so many unsaid words that if anybody must go it must
be Advani. And this he must, owning up responsibility for creating
the corrupt patronage system that stands exposed, despite so many
willing judicial fig leaves.
But
what is shocking is how judges, even if they were retired, allowed
themselves to become a part of this scam. It speaks volumes about
the mores now prevalent in our judiciary. The doings of a lower
court judge in
Bombay
in cahoots with the
Dubai
and
Karachi
based mafia are well
known. Every state has its quota of crooked judges. For every one
discovered to be a crook many more go undetected. Even when they
are, little happens. A High Court chief justice gets huge sums
ostensibly from an unheard of overseas publisher for books few read
or even buy and gets away with it. A former judge of the Supreme
Court is accused of stealing furniture and a partisan parliamentary
majority exonerates him. Clearly the higher courts set the standards
for the judges of the Dealership Selection Boards? A former chief
justice of the Supreme Court hurriedly disposed off cases writing
patently biased judgments during his short tenure, while another who
shouldn’t have been a chief justice at all for favoring himself
when he was in the High Court gets away with it scot-free. The
courts have become increasingly politicized, in other words
criminalized, if corruption can be considered a crime anymore. Its
small wonder then we have judges who either write opinions for a
consideration or honestly believe that: “Proof beyond reasonable
doubt is a judicial guideline not a fetish!”
We
have never had a government so utterly without shame, so openly
venal, so untrue to its commitments and so vengeful towards its
critics. Even the Narasimha Rao government looks quite good by
comparison. If there was a petrol pump and gas agency scam in the
Narasimha Rao era it was entirely the doing of the minister. But
here despite a Supreme Court judgment and the meting out of
punishment to Capt. Satish Sharma, the BJP led government does just
the same thing, but only on a much larger scale. Then a relative of
a former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court benefited, but now two
relatives of the incumbent Prime Minister were undeserving
beneficiaries. The former Chief Justice’s relative met certain
norms, but the PM’s relatives did not have any. Then we had a
crook like Harshad Mehta claiming to have given the Prime Minister
One Crore rupees packed in a suitcase, with little evidence backing
his claim beyond a display by his lawyer, the theatrical Ram
Jethmalani, that One Crore rupees can indeed be packed into a
suitcase. Now we have a Prime Minister who inaugurates a venture
promoted by Century Cyberspace, a bogus software services company
with few assets beyond a wholehearted endorsement by The Business
Standard, and because of which and a few telephone calls tens of
crores were invested in it by the UTI. Of course the money went down
the drain. How is this qualitatively different than buying
non-existent urea over which Vajpayee went to town then?
If
Narasimha Rao was vengeful he at least picked people of his size. He
picked on LK Advani, Yashwant Sinha, Madanlal Khurana, VC Shukla,
Arif Mohammed Khan, Madhavrao Scindhia and some others – all men
of some stature and ability to fight back. The Vajpayee government
picks on someone like Tarun Tejpal, a mere journalist who had the
gumption to set up an effervescent news portal to do what media
should be doing – investigating and exposing wrongdoing also
rather than just retailing news handouts. Tehelka not only exposed
several Indian cricketers not quite playing cricket by playing for
the bookies, it also exposed the Indian defence ministry and the
military establishment as being steeped in corruption. Not only was
money was taken by the Defence Ministers lady friend and party
colleague in the minister’s official residence, but she did so in
the presence and apparent with the connivance of serving officers.
We know what is being done to Tejpal, Tehelka and its investors.
Politicians
will be politicians, which usually means thieving and scavenging
rascals. The BJP is after all a political party, no different from
any of the others. Its only defence against any charge by the
Congress is to say, “You did it too!” When the Ketan Parekh scam
surfaced, Yashwant Sinha’s only defence was to jeer at Manmohan
Singh and remind him of Harshad Mehta! Dr. Manmohan Singh is too
decent a man to jibe back that he did not have a
Mauritius
connection. When the
Tehelka scam surfaced, all George Fernandes could muster was to
remind the Congress of Bofors! When details of Ranjan
Bhattacharya’s telephone calls to PS Subramaniam of the UTI
surfaced, all Pramod Mahajan could say in defence of his master was
to remind us about PV Prabhakar Rao and the urea scam! And so it
goes. All the Congress can now say is that: “You steal more!”
And so it goes for Mulayam Singh, Jayalalithaa, Bal Thackeray, Laloo
Prasad Yadav, Prakash Singh Badal, M Karunanidhi, N Chandrababu
Naidu, Omprakash Chautala and Deve Gowda. Our political choices are
now reduced to just that: Who steals less?
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