What’s That C-Word Now?

UPA’s Scam Raj

• 2-G spectrum Rs 1,70,000 crore notional loss after Raja's telecom ministry undersells spectrum to shell companies. Then telecom secretary P.J. Thomas now appointed as Chief Vigilance Commissioner.
• Adarsh society Flats meant for defence personnel and Kargil war widows expanded to include politicians' kin, bureaucrats and defence top brass by Ashok Chavan
• CWG Rs 8,000 crore rip-off in allocation of rights, procurement of materials by Suresh Kalmadi-led panel
• IPL Ministers Shashi Tharoor, Sharad Pawar, Praful Patel shown to have dubious links with IPL teams
• Scorpene Middlemen make hay in the Rs 18,000-crore submarine deal
• Rice export Private middlemen subvert ban under Kamal Nath's watch to export Rs 2,500 crore of grain
• Cash-for-votes MPs allegedly offered cash to vote for the government in the trust vote over nuclear deal
• Prasar Bharati B.S. Lalli stays in office despite Rs 68-crore loss suffered by national broadcaster in a subcontracting deal

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Was this therefore a clean-up or a cover-up? After all, no action has been taken against Sushilkumar Shinde and Vilasrao Deshmukh, who are also believed to be embroiled in the Adarsh Society scam. Moreover, the mother of all scams, the allocation of 2-G spectrum, continues to hover over the Manmohan Singh government. If figures in the CAG report are to be believed, Union telecom minister A. Raja has caused the exchequer losses of a staggering Rs 1,70,000 crore. No prime minister can hope to be remembered as Mr Clean if a minister in his cabinet has looted the nation on that scale. The losses on 2-G spectrum can actually run the budgets of several moderate-sized economies and fund NREGA three times over. At the time of writing, the telecom ministry had filed an affidavit in the Supreme Court, saying the minister had done no wrong. Meanwhile, the PM was expected to take a decision on the issue that has stalled the just-begun winter session of Parliament after his return from the G-20 meeting in Seoul on Friday, November 12.

Since Raja is a nominee of the DMK, the Congress has been citing “coalition dharma” to explain his continuation in the government. But now that the CAG report is about to be tabled and, based on a pil, the Supreme Court too has questioned the manner in which Raja allocated spectrum to telecom operators, should the DMK insist on his continuation and should the Congress succumb, it will be a huge blot on UPA-II.

However, what is also self-evident is that the first family of the Congress becomes distinctly uncomfortable when their image gets sullied by scams, big or small. Occupying the rarefied space reserved for the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, they would never dream of brazening it out like a caste/state leader such as Mayawati or A. Raja. The party is now seen to be preparing for the takeover by Rahul Gandhi, and he cannot be seen to be presiding over a scam-ridden outfit. And Sonia’s style of functioning is such that she will listen to everyone and take her time mulling over a decision, but once it is taken, the party acts with surgical precision. The impetus to act now was certainly the winter session of Parliament. Besides, the media had been hammering away at the scams. Something had to be done.

And with the Congress completely steeped in the culture of prostrating before the leader, decisions are taken only when the lady in 10, Janpath decides. The key inputs in this instance came from defence minister A.K. Antony, the great coalition manager, finance minister Pranab Mukherjee and, of course, Sonia’s political secretary, Ahmed Patel. The day Ashok Chavan put in his papers, Rahul Gandhi told journalists that it is “obvious” that the next CM should have a clean image. As it turned out, the man with the cleanest image got the job.

That is why individuals are sacrificed to set an example. This year alone, Shashi Tharoor lost his job as minister of state in the external affairs ministry following a scandal involving his then friend and now wife Sunanda Pushkar’s stake in the Kochi IPLl franchise. In 2005, K. Natwar Singh had to quit as external affairs minister once his name was mentioned in the Volcker report examining the Oil for Food scandal. And now Ashok Chavan has gone and Kalmadi has lost one of his posts. The mistake all these individuals made is getting caught and mired in a scandal. For it is not as if the Congress occupies a high moral ground. It just tries to do a better job of keeping up appearances. Indeed, the manner in which the Congress allots parliamentary committees without a care for conflict-of-interest issues is indicative of its highly ambiguous attitude towards corruption. Having been in power far longer than any other formation, the Congress has also acquired a high level of sophistry in many such matters.

In all fairness to the party, the corruption disease now rampages through most political parties with the possible exception of the Left, which is in decline anyway. Leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha Arun Jaitley believes “more money means more corruption”. The more prosperous the state, the greater the potential for robber barons to take over in the guise of politicians—as in Karnataka with the Reddy brothers—or for politicians to often act like highway robbers, as with the DMK regime in Tamil Nadu that blatantly extracts from the Centre in order to perpetuate its rule in the state.

With the opening up of the economy and the end of the licence-permit raj, the patterns of corruption are most blatantly linked to land use and new technologies. With India having one of the highest population densities in the world, land and its acquisition through a bending of the rules and/or modifying the floor space index when it comes to urban building projects is now the easiest way for a politician to make a quick buck or do a big favour. In Mumbai alone, there are a number of Adarsh-type housing societies where environmental and land rules were violated by serving bureaucrats, judges, police officers and relatives of politicians. Following the ruckus over Adarsh, the spotlight is back on at least a few buildings that were constructed in violation of the law. The navy, for instance, has moved against a high-rise called Har-Siddhi Apartments in Worli, because it overlooks naval installations in the area, including ins Trata.

As for new technologies, they represent an unmapped world where anything goes. The current telecom minister is not the first to be engulfed in a scandal. His predecessor in the NDA regime, the late Pramod Mahajan, was also involved in a scandal in 2002-03 that involved favouring one company over others in setting up mobile connectivity in rural India. It was a huge scandal of its times involving Mahajan, the Ambani brothers, other furious telecom companies and Sudhanshu Mittal, a one-time Mahajan hanger-on and BJP-RSS operative who has since been named in other scams, including that involving the CWG. Raja has, of course, surpassed Mahajan in the scale of the operation, but the trend and the tendency is the same.

To a large extent, politics is no longer engaged with or oriented towards social change as witnessed during the era of Mandal and mandir. As wealth pours into some regions, politics has become a vehicle to snatch and grab it. The richer the state, the greater the loot. Yet, at the end of the day, a clean image still pays dividends of another kind. Increasingly, state leaders who get elected, from the likes of Narendra Modi to Nitish Kumar and Naveen Patnaik, all have clean images financially. When leaders cock a snook at media coverage of scandals, like Mayawati does, they tend to have a great caste base that emboldens them. The Congress is a very different kind of party. It claims to be an all-India party that appeals to all sections of society. It must worry about image. It obviously does to some extent.

By Saba Naqvi with Smruti Koppikar