The Hindu : Petrol and patronage

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Aug 07, 2002

Opinion

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Petrol and patronage

CANCELLING A STRING of dubious allotments does not cancel out a scandal. And so, while the Prime Minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, may have tried to reverse the political damage by revoking over 3,000 allotments of petrol pumps, LPG dealerships and kerosene oil outlets made since January 2000, the scandal is not going to disappear in a hurry. The Vajpayee Government still has a lot of explaining to do as it goes about attempting to defend the indefensible. The principal question thrown up by the petrol pumps scam brought to light by the Indian Express is how so many agencies found their way into the hands of close relatives of the ruling BJP leaders. Clearly, the so-called `objective' procedure employed by the Ministry of Petroleum — which ironically was instituted to prevent exactly the kind of crony corruption which seems to have taken place — was flawed in the implementation. Under this method, allotments of pumps and LPG dealerships were made by Dealer Selection Boards (DSBs), the members of which were selected by the Union Ministry of Petroleum headed by Ram Naik. The Boards were supposed to lend the process of making allotments an independent and ipso facto straightforward character. The fact that many of the Boards were chaired by retired judges was supposed to lend impartiality or objectivity in the selection process.

Mr. Naik was fond of contrasting the new allotment procedure with the earlier one in which the Minister of Petroleum enjoyed discretionary powers and which had eventually resulted in a scam during Satish Sharma's reign. But the new method has turned up shocking results and the roster of allottees in some places reads like a Sangh Parivar laundry list. The son of an RSS spokesman here, the wife of a BJP MLA there and scores of others — fathers, sons, husbands, nephews — linked in a familial way to someone influential in the ruling party. In these circumstances, cancelling the allotments may seem like an oblique admission of guilt. But the cancellation order, which is likely to be challenged in court anyway, is not enough. A judicial probe is the very least that must be instituted to get to the bottom of how the allotments became skewed in favour of those close to power. Among the many questions that need to be investigated is why some of the DSBs were suddenly reconstituted sometime ago by the removal of a number of retired judges as chairmen of the bodies. Mr. Naik has failed to satisfactorily explain why this happened.

In fact, Mr. Naik's overall reaction to the scandal has been far from adequate. He has tried to wash his hands of the whole allotment process by claiming that the Petroleum Ministry had nothing to do with it. This, not to mince any words, is a ridiculous position to adopt. A Minister who attempted to take credit for the introduction of an `objective' allotment procedure cannot suddenly dissociate himself from it when it becomes public that the method has yielded anything but impartial results. Mr. Naik has also failed to realise that the fact that a small number of Congress and Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) partymen secured allotments does not balance or even things out — if anything, it only reinforces the feeling that the selection process was influenced by political considerations. Rather than assume moral responsibility for what happened and step down, Mr. Naik has unfortunately chosen to deny any wrongdoing and declared his intent to continue in office. The ball is now in the Prime Minister's court. If Mr. Vajpayee is serious about dealing firmly and credibly with the scandal, then two things must follow: he must initiate the setting up of a judicial probe and he must secure the resignation of Mr. Naik.

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