Monsoon Mudsling

• In 1947, when he was a policeman in the Sikar Estate Police, he was suspended for accepting a bribe/misconduct"
  
  
• Shalini Sharma, close to Shekhawat when he was Rajasthan CM, was accused of supplying women to powerful BJP ministers. Shalini was made VP of the state social welfare board by the Shekhawat regime.
  
  
• In 1994-95, while Shekhawat was CM, his son-in-law Narpat Singh Rajvi was accused of fudging land records, claiming compensation for 750 bighas (about 560 acres) of "his" land that he said had been taken for the Indira Gandhi Canal in Bikaner
  
  
• In October 1992, Rajasthan MLA Surendra Vyas wrote to then home minister S.B. Chavan levelling charges against Shekhawat's nephew for tampering with land records
  
  
• As VP in 2002-2003, Shekhawat invited criticism for his frequent pre-assembly election flights "on state aircraft" to Jodhpur, Kota, Jaipur, Udaipur, Dungarpur-he made a total of 16 trips
  
  
• Shekhawat's tenure as Rajasthan CM (1993-1998) saw an eight-fold increase in the number of rapes
  
  
• Despite claims of being secular, in 2002, he publicly said that Rajasthan would become Gujarat if the Congress government did not stop "appeasing Muslims"

• In 2003, RBI cancelled the licence of the Pratibha Mahila Sahakari Bank Ltd, Jalgaon, for "erosion" of funds. Rs 2.24 crore of the bank's unrecovered loans were given to relatives of Pratibha Patil. She was the founder-chairperson of the bank.
  
  
• The Sant Muktabai Cooperative Sugar Factory, set up by her, was closed down after running a loan default of Rs 20 crore
  
  
• Pratibha Patil has been accused of shielding her brother G.N. Patil in a murder case in 2005
  
  
• There is a case of abetment of suicide of a school teacher against her husband Devisingh Shekhawat
  
  
• Pratibha's public gaffe--Mughal invaders being the reason for Rajput women taking to the veil-has shown her as being unfit to be the President

The campaigns that precede the election of the American president have been notoriously dirty, with participants on both sides looking for instances of financial and sexual misconduct or misuse of political power by the rival candidate. But, then, that's a battle for arguably the world's most powerful job. In India, by sharp contrast, the president plays a largely ceremonial role, and barring the V.V. Giri-Sanjeeva Reddy face-off in 1969, the contest for Rashtrapati Bhavan has generally been a staid affair.

But this time, with the ruling UPA-Left combine announcing former Rajasthan governor Pratibha Patil for the top job, and the BJP-led NDA, in turn, fielding Vice-President Bhairon Singh Shekhawat, the campaign has taken an ugly, unsportsmanlike turn. The BJP—always quicker off the mark in such matters—has fired the first salvos against Patil; the Congress, complacent about its candidate's winning margin, initially adopted a lofty tone. But with the accusations against Patil coming thick and fast, it too has begun to dig into Shekhawat's colourful past inRajasthan.

At the time of writing, the party was divided on whether to use the material against Shekhawat. While one general secretary told Outlook, "This is a political battle—our candidate is winning by a long shot. Why should we stoop to the level of the BJP?", another took a different line. He said, "Let's wait till after June 30, after the last date for withdrawal of nominations, when Patil will begin to travel around the country—then, watch out, we will also be armed."

In the Congress rank and file, there is a sense that Patil has been thrown to the wolves, that nothing is being done to either defend her or to put the BJP on the defensive. The numbers may be with the UPA, but it is the NDA which currently has the edge in the spin war. Indeed, belatedly, on June 27, party sources said Sonia decided the accusations against Patil had to be countered. She has now asked Union ministers Suresh Pachauri and Prithviraj Chauhan to prepare a dossier to answer the BJP's charges, and deputed her political secretary, Ahmed Patel, to explain the situation to the allies.

The Congress, simultaneously, fielded Union parliamentary affairs minister Priyaranjan Das Munshi at its daily press briefing. Referring to the accusations levelled against Patil, he tore into the BJP, and described its leader L.K. Advani as "fascist", "irresponsible" and "desperate" for addressing Patil as a "tainted candidate" without "any substantiated document or citing any specific stricture or instance of any inquiry in a court of law". He also criticised the party's "fortnight awareness campaign to mount public pressure" on the UPA's MPs and MLAs to take recourse to a conscience vote in favour of Shekhawat. Das Munshi added that this sort of intimidation by the BJP "should invite the Election Commission's attention to the safety and security" of the presidential electoral college's members.

But this is as far as the Congress has gone publicly till date. But now, behind the scenes, there are efforts to collate instances of misconduct and misuse of power by Shekhawat. Here is what the Congress has come up with:

• As a policeman in the Sikar Police (earlier known as the Sikar Estate Police), Shekhawat was suspended on August 21, 1947. The reason for the suspension is shrouded in secrecy—some claim it was for taking a bribe, others say misconduct, but the matter has been reported in the Rajasthani press. He was later reinstated. However, on October 20, 1948, just 25, Shekhawat sought premature retirement—he was relieved within three days on October 23, 1948.
  
  
• In the early 1990s, as Rajasthan CM, Shekhawat was accused of "shielding" son-in-law (Shekhawat has only one child, a daughter) Narpat Singh Rajvi—currently industries minister in the Vasundhararaje government. Rajvi had claimed compensation in lieu of land, acquired for the Indira Gandhi Canal in Bikaner district, which actually did not belong to him. The matter figured for several days in the state assembly, when Congress MLA Surendra Vyas raised the matter. A revenue inquiry established that Rajvi's father, who had been a tehsildar in his time, had manipulated land records to show Rajvi as owner of a substantial chunk of agricultural land in Bikaner's Momewala village. The controversy centred around the fact that the land records predated Rajvi's birth.

• In the same period, Shalini Sharma, a minor BJP leader from Alwar, who was appointed state social welfare board vice president by the Shekhawat government, was convicted and jailed, along with her husband, for allowing a young lady teacher who worked in a school run by her to be sexually exploited. Only the Sharmas were convicted, but media reports at the time suggested that the young woman had been "supplied" to a range of powerful BJP ministers and MLAs. Shekhawat and Rajvi were both accused in the media of having promoted Shalini.
  
  
• Several cases involving one of Shekhawat's nephews of "tampering with village land records" were cited by Surendra Vyas in a letter he wrote in October 1992 to then Union home minister SB Chavan, requesting the government to withhold assent to the Rajasthan Tenancy (Second Amendment) Bill 1992, which had been passed by the Rajasthan assembly. (Vyas's letter is cited in Chapter 4 of Rob Jenkins book, Political Incentives: Elite Perceptions and the Calculus of Survival)
  . . . . .

• As vice-president, Shekhawat came under fire for ignoring his constitutional office's constraints of neutrality and helping the BJP in Rajasthan. In 2002-03, in the run-up to the state elections, his frequent visits to the state, at least 16 in one year to Jodhpur, Kota, Udaipur, Jaipur and Dungarpur districts, raised eyebrows. Jaipur-based newspapers Rashtradoot, Dainik Bhaskar, Dainik Navjyoti and Rajasthan Patrika reported in 2003 that many aspirants for a BJP ticket had met Shekhawat, and sought his intervention on their behalf.
  
  
• Rajasthan under Shekhawat as CM between 1991 and 1998 had one of the worst records of atrocities against women, with cases of rape multiplying eight times. When women's groups took repeated protests to him, he told them, "Why this unnecessary hue and cry over one or two rape cases?"
  
  
• He used his stints as CM (June '77-February '80, March '90-December '92 and December '93-November '98) to make Rajasthan a Hindutva bastion, where the minorities—even Christians —continue to be under attack. In 2002, he warned the Congress state government not to "appease Muslims" to avoid creating a "Gujarat-type situation"
  

Of course, currently, Shekhawat is playing cool. While he warded off a query on the suspension issue, when Outlook posed a question on the land scam involving Rajvi, he said, "Ask my son-in-law". And on the campaign against Patil, he said he did not wish to comment.

Clearly, Shekhawat would like to distance himself from the barrage of accusations being hurled against Patil—orchestrated by a crack NDA team, reportedly consisting of the BJP's Rajiv Pratap Rudy, Sudheendra Kulkarni, Sudhanshu Mittal, theJD(U)'s Digvijay Singh and a Mumbai-based businessman, Ashok Khemka. Interestingly, many of the reports appearing in the press against Patil were apparently "lifted" from former Union minister Arun Shourie's blog, the contents of which have been in circulation. The BJP also released it as a booklet entitled Two insightful articles by Arun Shourie on Pratibha Patil, Sonia Gandhi's hand-picked candidate for the Presidentialelection. It exhorts recipients to "Please read and circulate widely."

The first article, headlined Here is how to empower women, deals with the accusations relating to theRBI cancelling in 2003 the license of the Pratibha Mahila Sahakari Bank in Jalgaon, a bank of which Patil is the founder-chairperson, for "heavy erosion in its assets as observed in the inspection in March 1994". There are allegations that Rs 2.24 crore were given as loans to Patil's relatives, and though the bank was on the verge of bankruptcy, she got huge amounts of interest waived on the loans given to her relatives. After that, the accounts were apparently closed. (On June 28, Das Munshi denied these allegations, saying she had been chairperson for precisely one month and eight days, that she had not disbursed any loans, and loans given to relatives had been returned with 13 per cent interest.) The article also says that the Sant Muktabai Cooperative Sugar factory, started by Patil, was closed down after running up a loan default of nearly Rs 20crore.

The second article, It is all a BJP-conspiracy? A murder they don't care about, accuses Patil of shielding her brother G.N. Patil in a murder case. It is alleged that she used her influence to keep his name out of the fir and chargesheet relating to the murder of a political rival, Vishram G. Patil, a college lecturer in Jalgaon, and president of the district Congress committee, on September 21, 2005.

Clearly, the ugly war of accusations has sullied the election campaign, eroded Congress president Sonia Gandhi's moral authority and diminished vice-president Shekhawat's stature. Asked how he planned to cover the over one lakh deficit in committed votes in the presidential election without "horse-trading", Shekhawat told Outlook: "I am sure many of our legislators will listen to their inner voice and vote for me. " Does the Congress have an answer to that?