VIEWPOINT
AMITABH SHUKLA
As expected, Haryana government
has given a clean chit to Robert Vadra and his companies and absolved the
son-in-law of Congress President Sonia Gandhi of any wrongdoing in the land
deals in the NCR region of the state where real estate agents are making a
killing due to booming prices.
What else was the state Congress
government and its Deputy Commissioners in Haryana expected to do? Find Vadra
guilty of acts of omission and commission? No one would have expected the state
government and its officials to behave differently. DCs are relatively junior
officers in the hierarchy of IAS and those of the four districts of Gurgaon,
Faridabad, Mewat and Palwal, who gave a clean chit to Vadra, know this well.
The example of whistle-blower and their senior colleague in the IAS, Ashok
Khemka who was transferred the moment he ordered a probe into the deals of
Vadra, was too recent for any official to forget.
Common sense says that a state
Congress government can never go against the top boss of the party and her
family, come what may. This has never happened in the past. You do not find
faults with your benefactor or his immediate family unless you have gone astray
and want to commit a political suicide.
Bhupinder Singh Hooda was made
the chief minister of the state eight years ago overlooking the claims of
Bhajan Lal. He has been in the good books of the Gandhi family ever since and
despite a poor performance of the party in the 2009 assembly polls where the
Congress failed to get a simple majority, he was entrusted with the top job as
he was the only leader who could have won the independents and effected a split
in the Haryana Janhit Congress, the party of Bhajan Lal.
Being a smart business man, Vadra
simply bought land in the NCR region of Haryana at throwaway prices, sold them
and made a killing after 2005 when Hooda government was firmly in the saddle.
Any other businessman would have done the same if there is responsive and
helpful administration and a government which bends to become accommodative.
Obviously Vadra would not leave any trail of any wrongdoing as the land was
bought above the Collector or the Circle rate. Proving quid pro quo is next to
impossible as there would never be any paper or electronic trail for these. Remember,
those who want to evade the dragnet of Income tax or other punitive laws are
very meticulous in their paperwork and it requires a lot of investigation to
find fault in their papers. Vadra is no exception.
Public opinion may crucify Vadra
and the Congress leaders in the state and the Centre but in any case, no one is
bothered about the public opinion any longer. Political leaders, cutting across
party lines, have a simple theory – public memory is very short. Ask any person
on the street about the land deals of Vadra and they will tell you that it
reeks of corrupt practices. They will tell you that even if the land was bought
above the collector rate or the circle rate, the price on which it was bought
was extremely cheap and the price on which it was sold was extremely high. Any
person owning any property in the country knows that the circle rate is in some
cases only one tenth of the market price and in most cases, it is one fourth of
the rate it commands in the market.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh says
that money does not grow on trees. We agree. It grows on land instead. This perhaps
explains the astronomical difference between the purchase price and the selling
price of land in the case of Vadra.
After the end of the license permit and inspector raj, it is the natural
resources which have become the biggest money spinners for those in power.
Change in land use has become such an effective financial weapon in the hands
of the state governments that no longer do they require any other mechanism to
make gains or oblige someone with windfall gain.
BJP President Nitin Gadkari too
finds himself in the same league. He is facing charges of irregularities in his
companies and predictably the Congress is quick to attack him and defend Vadra
in the same vein. Ask the aam aadmi (common man) on the streets and they would
say that the defence of Gadkari is very weak. More so, when you stand on a high
moral pedestal and accuse others, there should not be even a semblance of doubt
on you. Caesar’s wife should be above suspicion. But this is obviously not
happening. Two wrongs cannot make a right. Investigate both thoroughly.
But here comes the relevant
question. Is there any impartial investigating agency in the country? Which agency in the country would be fair to
both Vadra and Gadkari at the same time without any bias if entrusted the task
of investigation? CBI may or may not be good in investigating criminal cases
but its record in dealing with the politicians has been abysmal and questioned
time and again. Has it ever been able to get a conviction for a politician in
numerous cases it has lodged against the likes of Mulayam Singh Yadav,
Mayawati, Lalu Prasad Yadav and several others? Aren’t those cases dead like a
dodo and revived only when politics necessitates it? Or has it ever lodged a
case against a politician of the ruling party in the Centre in recent years? Remember, it lodged a series of cases against
Jagan Mohan Reddy in Andhra Pradesh only when he left the party and posed a direct
threat and not when he was a Congress MP or his father YSR Reddy was the chief
minister of the state.
So at the end of the day, the
debate rests there. BJP will shout against the irregularities committed by
Vadra while the Congress will point out that those by Gadkari are much serious
in nature than that of Vadra. Public discourse will never move beyond that. At
best, agencies could investigate Gadkari and come out with selective leaks to
keep alive the issue politically. The entire political discourse has become too
predictable in the recent past.
At one end of the political
spectrum you have Vadra and Gadkari and the other end Virbhadra Singh who is
shouting at the top of his voice that he is not corrupt, innocent and has been
framed. Wasn’t it time that the Parliament passed the Lok Pal Bill so that this
cacophony came to an end. (October 29, 2012)
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