A necessary standard

IT WAS JUST as well that Mr. Harin Pathak, Union Minister of State for Defence and Mr. Ashok Bhatt, Gujarat Minister for Health, were made to quit office following their being chargesheeted in an Ahmedabad court for murder and rioting. There is no way that they, particularly Mr. Pathak, could have continued without becoming an embarrassment to the BJP leadership - more specifically to the Prime Minister, Mr. Atal Behari Vajpayee - given the compulsions of coalitional politics. The legal investigation process has caught up with the two Gujarat leaders who are among the 12 facing criminal charges related to the murder of a police head constable during the anti-reservation riots in Ahmedabad in 1985. That the case is 15 years old cannot by itself absolve them of their culpability; it only underscores the need to expedite reforms in the justice delivery system. To say, as the Defence Minister, Mr. George Fernandes, did, that the events of 1985 did ``not make any sense'' after a lapse of 15 years is to be flippant about an issue that has a vital bearing on the national imperative of decriminalising politics and also of upholding the rule of law.

During his previous tenure as Prime Minister, when confronted with such situations of ministerial incumbents being hauled up in court for criminal offences - Mr. Sedapatti Muthiah (of the AIADMK) and Mr. Buta Singh, for instance - Mr. Vajpayee had set down a normative standard for application in such cases; it required that those against whom charges of corruption have been framed by a court of law will necessarily have to step down from public office until they are exonerated. The charges against Mr. Pathak and Mr. Bhatt may not involve `moral turpitude', but that cannot in any away detract from the gravity of the criminal offences brought up before court. Nothing could be more specious, or outrageous, than the argument that such charges as `murder', `attempt to murder' and `criminal conspiracy' are slapped against political opponents by the powers that be as a matter of course or in a `routine fashion'. If the much-too-common `vendetta' and `conspiracy' theories put out by political leaders at the receiving end lacked credibility, the pervasive tendency on the part of their friends and patrons in Government to give them a ``clean chit'', arrogating to themselves the powers of the judiciary, is highly deplorable and liable to the charge of contempt of court. Remember the manner in which clean chits were given, even without a semblance of an enquiry, to Sangh Parivar elements in the Graham Staines murder case as also in the various other cases of attacks on the Christian community reported in the recent past?

By getting Mr. Pathak to quit, the Vajpayee regime may have deprived the Opposition of a ground for attack. With persons such as Mr. L.K. Advani, Mr. Murli Manohar Joshi and Ms. Uma Bharati (reinducted into the Cabinet last week) keeping their ministerial berths undisturbed, despite their facing criminal charges in the Babri Masjid demolition case, its vulnerability to the charge of double standards remains as high as ever. In fact, the Pathak- Bhatt case only serves to bring the `double standards' into a sharper focus. The Government has persistently sought to explain away their continued presence by claiming that the prosecution against them is ``political'' in nature. The distinction is patently invidious and the explanation is too facile to carry conviction. The general norm that chargesheeted persons should not remain in public office cannot be restricted to charges of corruption but must apply with equal force to all serious criminal offences. This is to say that the Vajpayee Government cannot continue the farce of taking the moral high ground of clean governance, even while allowing the Ministers tainted by criminal charges in the `Ayodhya case' to stay on.

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Section  : Opinion
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