The Hindu : The mother of all scams

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

Opinion

Opinion - News Analysis

The mother of all scams

By Inder Malhotra

Even the most hardened cynics must have been shocked by the sheer enormity of the petrol pumps scam, the latest, lamentable landmark in the relentless march of venality and villainy in the world's largest democracy. Having been witness to, and chronicler of every major scandal in this country since Independence, I cannot think of anything comparable to what has gone on and has been exposed to the light of day only because of commendable journalistic enterprise.

Just look at a few facts. Bofors that contributed materially to Rajiv Gandhi's defeat in the 1989 general election involved bribes totalling Rs. 64 crores. To this day, despite all the CBI investigations and the filing of court cases, the beneficiaries of the Bofors bribes have not been nailed. But there is not dispute about the amount of the Swedish largesse. All the Bofors guns bought did at least arrive and, during the Kargil War, did the country proud. In sharp contrast to this, also during the Congress era in the nineties, was the urea scam. It involved the electronic remittance of Rs. 133 crores to some international crooks one dark night without either opening a line of credit or adopting any other legal safeguard. Not a single flake of urea ever reached the Indian shores. Nor is there a hope in hell of even a single paisa of the remitted amount being recovered. And, as always, the highly connected masterminds of the robbery remain unpunished.

All this is indeed horrendous and horrifying. But it pales, compared with the mother of all scams that the BJP has perpetrated in relation of the allotment of petrol pumps and equally lucrative agencies for the sale of cooking gas and kerosene. According to conservative estimates, the money that the ``party with a difference'' has thus put into the pockets of the faithful, especially the kith and kin of the powerful and the influential in the Hindutva camp could be anywhere between Rs. 2,500 crores and Rs. 3,000 crores. Surely, not something to sneeze at.

The only saving grace in this act of infamy has been the bold and prompt decision of the Prime Minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, to cancel all allotments made after January 2000, except those tot he relatives of the soldiers killed during the war on bleak Kargil heights. But here again there are two cruel twists to the tale.

First, the widows and dependents of many martyrs of Kargil have represented that they have been waiting in vain for the promised allotment of petrol pumps etc. while these gifts have been showered on the daughters, sons, nephews, nieces and other relatives of Governors, Chief Ministers, other BJP bigwigs and so on. A woman claiming to be a relative of Mr. Vajpayee and using his Lucknow address as her own is among the chosen beneficiaries. So are some Congressmen to whom a few crumbs have been thrown which only goes to show that the BJP can show greater generosity to its opponents than the Congress — with or without the appellation ``I'' in parenthesis — could or did during its long reign.

Secondly, authoritative accounts of the meeting at which Mr. Vajpayee put paid to the appalling allotments are rather depressing. It seems that even after he had clearly stated that all allotments had to be rescinded if the BJP wanted to retrieve its badly tarnished image, there was dissent. The dissenters argued blandly that the BJP must brazen it out just as the Congress had done over the years. One can only infer that in four years flat large sections of the saffron party have plumbed the depths of degeneration that the Congress had taken 25 years to reach.

It is also remarkable that the effrontery of the Petroleum Minister, Ram Naik, matches the enormity of his Ministry's misdeeds. His anxiety not to be evicted from his gilded ministerial chair may be understandable; few Ministers have quit voluntarily over the last 55 years. But his claim that there was nothing irregular about the allotments cancelled by the Prime Minister is nothing short of impertinence. Somebody ought to tell him that in the late fifties when LIC had made some investments in dubious firms owned by Industrialist Mundhra, the then Finance Minister, T.T. Krishnamachari, had to resign. This happened though there never was any allegation about either T.T.K. or anyone else having benefited personally from the transaction.

Justice Kuldip Singh, formerly of the Supreme Court and currently chairman of the Delimitation Commission, has taken the lid off the BJP's and Mr. Naik's Ministry's massive web of chicanery and deceit. It was Justice Singh's famous 1996 judgment that had ended the much-abused system of discretionary allotment of petrol pumps etc. He has now underscored that the 10 Dealership Selection Boards (DSBs), appointed by Mr. Naik, were so thoroughly manipulated and perverted that allotments made by them amounted to ``organised, institutionalised loot''.

To this, the eminent sociologist, Andre Beteille, has added that since ``there are norms of head-hunting and norms of cannibalism, the norms of institutionalised looting also had to appear one day''.

Printer friendly page
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Opinion

Stories in this Section

Petrol and patronage

Overhauling the cereal economy

India and oil exploration

The death of innocence

India and the next Gulf war

The mother of all scams

Monitoring investigation in Gujarat

Give us sworn affidavit