The Hindu : A gift that never was

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Apr 22, 2002

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A gift that never was

BY DIRECTING THE Bharat Yatra Kendra Trust to return the 51 acres of land now in its possession to whom it belonged — the Bhondsi gram panchayat — the Supreme Court has only intervened in one of those instances where a member of the political class was found to have abused his position. The Trust, in this instance, was not one more of the kind. And the property that came in its possession in Bhondsi, a sleepy Haryana village, was a lot more than a stretch on the roadside where migrants had pitched tents. The Bhondsi Ashram could manage the large tracts of cultivable land as a "gift'' from the village panchayat only because the promoter of the project — the Bharat Yatra Kendra Trust — was founded and presided over by someone whom the apex court described as having a "giant stature''. The long and short of the apex court's judgment is that the ashram managed to get as a "gift'' all that land from the Bhondsi village panchayat and ensure that the gift was regularised by the State Government only because it was headed by the former Prime Minister, Chandra Shekhar.

The observation, in this regard, by the Bench that "Mr. Chandra Shekhar's giant stature, hovering over the office-bearers of the Bhondsi gram panchayat and officials of the State Government, appears to have factually immobilised them in discharge of their duties,'' is indeed a commentary on the extent to which influential members of the political class could distort the "due process of law'' to serve their own interests. What would have been another instance of land grabbing by the mighty and the powerful was managed in a manner that everything looked so perfectly legitimate. The Trust had committed to put the land (it obtained as a gift) to use for the welfare of oppressed sections in society. A college and a polytechnic institute were assured within the ashram. But all these were only on the trust deed. Mr. Chandra Shekhar and the trustees converted the large tracts of agricultural land thus obtained into a campus where he would visit (along with his close associates) to escape from the hustle and bustle of life in the Capital. The issue here is not just one about how a vast extent of land — 600 acres in all — was taken away by a Trust with lofty objectives and all those objectives being ignored. It is a case involving someone who also became the Prime Minister for a short while. The apex court's intervention should be a ray of hope for this very reason.

Be that as it may, the Bhondsi affair is only one of the several instances of such abuse by the powerful among the political class. The past couple of decades have witnessed a number of such instances. The shameful revelations when investigating agencies stumbled upon entries of payments by industrialists to political leaders (the Jain hawala transactions) or the criminal-politician nexus about which a committee set up by the Union Home Ministry (the Vohra Committee report) spoke in detail did contribute in a big way to the building of a popular perception about the political class as a whole being corrupt. Such a perception was only strengthened further when it emerged that the investigating agencies could not establish the charges of corruption and malfeasance in most such cases. This came out so strikingly in the Jain hawala case when the accused were discharged, one after the other, for want of evidence. The Supreme Court's order in the Bhondsi Ashram case, despite the fact that there are no charges of corruption and malfeasance of public funds against Mr. Chandra Shekhar, should rein in the taking instincts of the political class. That the mighty and the powerful will not be allowed, at least for long, to trample upon the norms has become clear. And as for Mr. Chandra Shekhar, it is not merely his image — the courage he displayed as a young turk in the 1970s to take on the establishment in the Congress Party then — that has taken a beating but also the values he claimed to inculcate during his padayatra (the Trust was formed around the time when the nationwide march culminated) that have taken a beating. His loss is nevertheless a gain for good governance and the norms of proper conduct by public men.

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