Babus & politicos unite in corruption

A few years ago, an upright CBI officer, who was closely following the disproportionate assets case against Rashtriya Janata Dal president Lalu Prasad and his wife Rabri Devi, got the shock of his life.

A special CBI court in Patna had acquitted the couple for want of evidence but the agency’s state office was said to have strongly recommended for filing an appeal before the high court.

It was convinced that it had enough evidence to bring them to the book.

But to the utter shock of the IPS officer, the CBI headquarters saw no logic in going into an appeal. At that time, Lalu was railway minister and his party’s support was crucial for the survival of the UPA government.

The RJD chief’s journeys to jail in connection with the multi- crore fodder swindle, too, have come to a halt.

It is rarely that the quintessential Indian politician is held guilty of corruption and howsoever grave the charges, the case slowly fades out of public memory.

Sukh Ram, who was convicted in an earlier telecom scam after the CBI recovered Rs.2.45 crore cash from his premises, was convicted a good 13 years after the scandal surfaced. Perhaps the only other prominent politician to be jailed in a corruption case was Congress veteran Kalpnath Rai, who was involved in the infamous sugar scam. Rai, who walked out of the prison sooner than expected, was later convicted in a TADA case, but he died before he could serve the sentence.

The politician-bureaucrat nexus, which has emerged as the fount of corruption in India, has become too well oiled to be busted by the best of investigators, who, in turn, function under tremendous political pressure in high-profile cases.

A former CBI officer recently admitted in public that while probing the infamous hawala case, he was asked by the agency’s director to go slow in the matter. “ The pressure had come from the office of the then Prime Minister and all my protests went unheard,” the former official revealed.

The growing corruption of the political class is a bane of the Indian version of parliamentary democracy. It vests immense financial power in the executive, headed by a minister, who quite often finds a procedural cushion in the fact that civil servants are accountable for key decisions.

The system has the potential to wreak havoc if the politician and the bureaucrat join hands.

The end result is no different even in the case of corrupt bureaucrats because for every Neera Yadav convicted, many more get away scot- free.

The mandatory filing of affidavits by all candidates during elections has also not served the purpose for many reasons — there is no provision for the politician to disclose the exact source of his assets; an understated affidavit is rarely taken into account by the authorities and the courts to penalise the candidate; and nothing in the provision stops the politician from hiding black money and ill- gotten immovable assets.

Exemplary action against the guilty is necessary because the electorate has often rewarded corrupt politicians by electing them to Parliament or the state assembly. And this washes off all the taint gathered earlier.