A ghost that refuses to go away

BRP Bhaskae
Gulf Todayhttp://gulftoday.ae/portal/838cf8e2-ab6a-40f0-bfbd-42b9fd087e6c.aspx

The Supreme Court last week rebuffed a belated attempt by the Central Bureau of Investigation to breathe new life into the three-decade-old Bofors scandal.

The scandal broke in 1987 when a Swedish radio reported that arms maker AB Bofors had bribed Indian politicians and officials to get the Rs 14.37 billion contract for the supply of 35 mm field guns the previous year. It had cast a shadow over Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s Mr Clean image.

The government conceded the Opposition’s demand for a parliamentary probe. The joint parliamentary committee in which the ruling Congress had a majority cleared the Prime Minister’s name but an Opposition member appended a strong dissenting report.

A sustained Opposition campaign built around the scandal did immense damage to Rajiv Gandhi and to his party. When a little boy, participating in a children’s programme broadcast live from an All India Radio station, was asked to sing a song he broke into a ditty in Hindi which ran like this: “In every lane, they are screaming Rajiv Gandhi is a thief!” 

The names of some friends of Rajiv Gandhi cropped up in media speculation on the middlemen who got the kickback but there was no material with which to pin anything on them.   

Later Indian mediapersons, following up the Swedish radio report, obtained documents which helped track the flow of funds from Bofors to suspected beneficiaries.  They won laurels for their labours but the material they unearthed was not sufficient to drag anyone to court.

The government had claimed that no Indian or foreign middlemen were involved in the deal. This turned out to be untrue.

Win Chadda, who had worked earlier for Bofors and some other arms manufacturers, was apparently involved in this deal too.

Bofors documents showed that in the closing stages of the negotiations, a London-based company AE Services Ltd suddenly entered the picture. It was not clear what role it played but Bofors rewarded it handsomely.

The money paid to AE Services travelled swiftly through several bank accounts before disappearing without leaving a trace.

The identities of those behind AE Services were never established but media reports linked it to Ottavio Quattrocchi, an Italian who came to India as a representative of Snam Pragotti, a fertiliser firm, and became a family friend of Rajiv Gandhi and his Italian-born wife Sonia.

Presuming that the kickback may have gone to Sonia Gandhi’s parents, a Delhi newspaper sent a reporter to Italy. Its hopes of finding signs of her parents living in opulence did not materialise. It found them living middle class lives.

The Bofors scandal played a part in the Congress party’s defeat in the Lok Sabha elections of 1989. A coalition government headed by VP Singh and supported from outside by the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Communist Party of India (Marxist) took office.

Singh, who was Defence Minister in Rajiv Gandhi’s government, had fallen out with him over a probe into kickbacks in the purchase of submarines from Germany. In his time, the CBI registered a complaint on the Bofors payoffs but the agency could make little headway in the investigation.

On a plea by one of the persons named in the complaint the Delhi High Court quashed it. However, the Supreme Court overruled the decision and restored the complaint.  

In 1997 after Swiss authorities furnished some secret documents relating to bank accounts of suspected Bofors payoff beneficiaries the CBI constituted a special investigative term for the probe.

While the investigations were on, Rajiv Gandhi was killed by a suicide bomber sent by the Sri Lankan outfit, Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, and a few other accused died of natural causes.

The CBI’s sporadic efforts collapsed when the Delhi High Court quashed the charges against Rajiv Gandhi in 2004 and acquitted all the other accused the following year.

The agency’s readiness to act in the interests of the government of the day in politically sensitive matters is well-known. But, then, even during the six years under BJP Prime Minister AB Vajpayee it could not conduct a successful prosecution.

The High Court verdict came early in the first term of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. However, the CBI appealed to the Supreme Court only this year at the instance of the Modi government, against the advice of Attorney General KK Venugopal.

The Supreme Court’s rejection of the appeal does not mean the ghost of Bofors has been finally laid to rest. The apex court still has before it a partly-heard appeal filed by Anil Agarwal, a BJP leader. --Gulf Today, Sharjah, November 6, 2016.

A scam vanishes into thin air

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today

It can only be likened to the fabled Indian rope trick. As the nation stood transfixed by the 2G scam, billed as the biggest of its kind, it vanished into thin air. 

The scam broke seven years ago even as the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government headed by Manmohan Singh began its second five-year term. The Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG), Vinod Rai, in a report placed before Parliament, estimated that the allocation of 2G telecom spectrum by the first UPA government had resulted in a presumptive loss of Rs1.76 trillion to the exchequer. 

The supposedly irregular allocations were made by A. Raja, of the Dravida Munetra Kazhagam, who was Minister of Communication and Information Technology in UPA 1. He had announced that the government had decided to allocate spectrum on a ‘first-come first-served’ basis, instead of auctioning. By the stipulated date the Department of Telecommunications received 575 applications from 46 firms. 

When the CAG report came Raja was minister in UPA 2. The opposition, led by the Bharatiya Janata Party, disrupted the proceedings of Parliament day after day demanding his resignation. After consultations with DMK chief M Karunanidhi in Chennai, he announced his resignation “to avoid embarrassment to the government” and to facilitate smooth functioning of Parliament. “I will prove that I did everything according to the norms,” he added. 

Criminal investigation of the 2G allocations had begun a year before the CAG report with the Central Vigilance Commissioner, acting on a complaint by a non-government organisation alleging irregularities, ordering a probe by the Central Bureau of Investigation. 

Soon the courts entered the scene. The Delhi High Court ruled that the setting of cut-off date for spectrum applications was illegal. In March 2011, the Centre, on the orders of the Supreme Court, set up a special court to try the accused in the spectrum cases.  

The special court heard three cases, two filed by the CBI and one by the Enforcement Directorate, against Raja, Kanimozhi, Karunanidhi’s daughter and DMK MP, and top officials of the government and of telecom companies.

Even as the special court was hearing the cases, the Supreme Court, in separate legal proceedings, cancelled all the 122 spectrum licences issued by Raja and ordered that fresh allocations be made through auctions. 

The widely publicised spectrum cases and the anti-corruption movement led by Anna Hazare badly tarnished the image of the Manmohan Singh government and paved the way for the BJP’s spectacular success in 2014 under Narendra Modi’s leadership.  

Last week Special Judge OP Saini, in a 1,552-page judgment, took the prosecution cases to pieces and threw them out lock, stock and barrel. He said the CBI’s “well-choreographed chargesheet” was based “mainly on misreading, selective reading, non-reading and out-of-context reading” of the official record. There was no evidence to indicate criminality in the acts of the accused. 

The CBI and the ED had cited a loan of Rs2 billion provided to a Tamil television channel controlled by Karunanidhi’s family by a beneficiary of 2G allocation as evidence of corruption and money laundering. However, the judge said, the prosecution put no question to any witness to establish that the loan was illegal gratification. 

The judge added that he had sat in the courtroom for seven years but not a soul turned up to provide evidence to establish corruption. 

In the circumstances he concluded that some people had created a scam where there was none by “artfully arranging a few selected facts and exaggerating things beyond recognition to astronomical levels”. 

Judge Saini’s is not the last word on the subject. The CBI and the ED have said they would appeal to the High Court against his judgment. Above the High Court, there is the Supreme Court.  

The CBI had once enjoyed a high reputation as an investigating agency but it is now generally seen as a tool in the hands of its political masters. Some time ago the Supreme Court dubbed it as a caged parrot. 

There have been insinuations that the Modi government may have allowed the 2G cases to collapse to prepare the ground for an alliance between the BJP and the DMK in Tamil Nadu for the 2019 Lok Sabha elections.   

The CBI has failed miserably in several high-profile cases in the recent past. Maybe, in the light of experience, there is a need to redefine ‘scam’ in the Indian context as a political scandal, real or imaginary, which offers immense scope for partisan warfare, helps bureaucrats attain celebrity status, enables investigative journalists to earn reporting laurels before subliming into history. 

The saddest part of the story of the scams is the erosion of people’s faith in the institutions to which they look up to sustain the democratic system. --Gulf Today, Sharjah, December 27, 2017.

A chilling message to media

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today

On May 3, World Press Freedom Day, Prime Minister Narendra Modi tweeted: “a day to reiterate our unwavering support towards a free and vibrant press.” The weeks that followed revealed the wide gulf between this pious wish and his administration’s practice.

A few days before that tweet, the Central Bureau of Investigation had received a complaint alleging fraud in a transaction between NDTV, a leading media organisation, and the ICICI Bank, both private companies. The complainant, Sanjay Dutt, was a shareholder of both the companies and had been pursuing allegations against the media company and its promoters, Prannoy Roy and his wife, Radhika, in various forums for four years with little success.

On June 2 the CBI registered an 88-page first information report on the basis of Dutt’s complaint and two days later it conducted searches at four places belonging to the Roys. It was not the first time that an investigating agency had acted against media owners but the attendant circumstances suggested that this one was intended to send a chilling message to the entire media.

NDTV is one of the earliest private news television companies and played a major role in bringing to national attention the enormity of the anti-Muslim riots that swept Gujarat in 2002 soon after Modi became the state chief minister. Just a few days ago, one of its anchors, Nidhi Razdan, had asked Bharatiya Janata Party spokesman Sambit Patra to apologise or leave her show as he alleged the channel had an agenda.

Two central government agencies, the Enforcement Directorate and the Income Tax department, had started looking into NDTV’s finances soon after Modi became the Prime Minister. They served notices on the Roys in connection with certain transactions, and they moved the courts with regard to some of them.

Last November the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting ordered the group’s Hindi channel, NDTV India, to go off the air for a day for revealing sensitive information in its coverage of the attack on the Pathankot airbase in violation of the rules regarding reporting of terror incidents. Media organisations had protested against singling out the channel for action sparing others who, too, had shown similar visuals.

Last week, at a largely attended meeting of journalists in New Delhi to demonstrate solidarity with the Roys, eminent jurist Fali S Nariman pointed to infirmities in the CBI conduct. It had acted not on the basis of any crime-related discovery but on a lone private complaint. The criminal conspiracy and cheating alleged in the complaint had taken place during 2008-09 and it did not say why the matter was not brought to the agency’s attention earlier.

Instead of instituting a criminal inquiry and conducting raids, the CBI should have asked Dutt to file a complaint in a criminal court, Nariman said.

Veteran journalists who spoke at the meeting likened the current situation to what prevailed during Indira Gandhi’s Emergency regime and called upon the media fraternity to stand together to safeguard press freedom. Prannoy Roy asserted he and his wife had done no wrong, and the action against them was a signal to the media that the government could get them even if they had done nothing.

A majority of the media has been uncritical of the government and there is in the electronic media a group of fawning fans ready to fight Modi’s and his party’s battles as if they were their own. But Modi remains distrustful of the media and avoids press conferences.

The CBI’s uncalled-for action on a private complaint with regard to transactions involving private companies has once again turned the focus on the functioning of that agency.

Set up by Jawaharlal Nehru’s government in 1963, the CBI established an early reputation as a competent investigative agency. That reputation now lies in ruins. After reviewing the way it handled a scandal of the United Progressive Alliance government, a Supreme Court judge had dubbed it a caged parrot repeating its master’s voice.

Ranjit Sinha who headed the CBI at that time said the court’s assessment was correct. The agency later appealed to the court to free it from governmental interference but nothing came of it.

The BJP, then in the opposition, had lambasted the UPA government using the judge’s remarks about the CBI. Last month leading lawyer and former Congress minister, Kapil Sibal said the CBI was now the long arm of the Modi government and it was holding out threats to people to secure favourable statements. -- Gulf Today, Sharjah, June 13, 2017. 

Another scandal playing out

BRP Bhaskar

Gulf Today

 

The raging controversy over the Agusta Westland bribery brings to mind the Bofors scandal which reverberated in India’s political space for a quarter century before petering out with the bribe-takers getting away unpunished.

The Bofors case related to a 1986 contract for the purchase of 410 field guns for the army from Sweden for $825 million. The Swedish radio reported that the company had bribed Indian politicians to get the contract.

The Agusta Westland case relates to a 2010 contract under which the British subsidiary of the Italy’s Finmeccanica was to supply 12 helicopters for the air force’s VVIP squadron for Rs35.46 billion. Italian investigators said the company had paid commissions to three middlemen and bribed the then Indian Air Force chief SK Tyagi through his cousins to clinch the deal.

The Bofors scandal brought down Rajiv Gandhi’s government. The Central Bureau of Investigation which probed the matter registered a case in which Rajiv Gandhi, Bofors chief executive Martin Ardbo and Ottavio Quattrochhi, an Italian businessman and friend of the Gandhi family, figured among the accused. Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated and the others died of natural causes without facing trial.

In the Agusta Westland corruption case, Italian prosecutors cited Air Chief Marshal Tyagi as an accused in a Milan court along with Finmeccanica chief executive Giuseppe Orsi, former AW head Bruno Spagnolini and three middlemen.

The trial court acquitted Tyagi, who was tried in absentia, of all charges. Orsi and Spagnolini were acquitted of charges of “international corruption” but were given two years in jail for “false invoicing”.

Last month the appeals court overturned that judgment. It held Orsi and Spagnolini guilty of bribery and indicted Tyagi as a beneficiary of corruption.

When word of the Italian prosecution came AK Antony, Defence Minister in the United Progressive Alliance government, ordered an Indian investigation. By then India had received three helicopters and paid Rs16.20 billion. Further payments were frozen and the money already paid was recovered by encashing the bank guarantees the company had provided.

In March 2013 the CBI filed a first information report and began investigation. The FIR named the Italian company, its UK subsidiary, two Indian companies which were believed to have been used as conduits for payment, Tyagi, who had retired by then, and three cousins of his, among others. Simultaneously the Enforcement Directorate started a probe under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act.

In May 2014 the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government under Narendra Modi took office. The two investigations made little progress even after the change of government.

Following the Milan appeal court verdict, the investigations have come to life again.

Seventeen cops headed the CBI while it probed the Bofors scandal. One of them claimed in his autobiography that Rajiv Gandhi had told him he wanted defence deal commissions to be used to meet the Congress party’s expenses.

Like the Bofors case, the Agusta Westland deal too has an Italian angle, and that comes in handy for political rivals to embarrass the Congress, which has an Italian-born president in Sonia Gandhi. Bits of information embarrassing to the Modi government and the Indian media have also come to light.

In a letter to an international tribunal James Christian Michel, one of the middlemen, alleged that Modi, in a meeting with Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi during the last UN General Assembly session, offered to free the two Italian marines facing murder charges in India in exchange for evidence against Sonia Gandhi in the helicopter deal.

The External Affairs Ministry and the Information and Broadcasting Ministry rebutted the allegations in statements which are studies in prevarication. The former said there was no Modi-Renzi meeting “as part of bilateral meetings” during the UN session and the latter said Modi did not “cut any deal” with Renzi.

Michel had said the Prime Ministers had a “brush-by meeting”, not a scheduled bilateral meeting. He had said Modi had offered a deal, not that he had cut a deal.

According to a Milan court document, Agusta Westland had paid Euro 6 million to Michel to manage the Indian media. The beneficiaries of the pay-out remain unnamed.

The Congress party has alleged that Tyagi was associated with Modi’s Principal Secretary Nripendra Mishra and National Security Adviser Ajit Doval in the Vivekananda International Foundation, a pro-Hindutva think tank.

Recalling the Bofors experience 25 years later, Chitra Subramaniam, a journalist who investigated clandestine payments in that case, said, “It showed us how every political party sought to protect its space without thinking of us as a nation.” That story is being played out again. -- Gulf Today, Sharjah, May 3, 2016.

Coal block corruption

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today

A Delhi special court last week asked former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to appear before it next month, along with industrialist Kumar Mangalam Birla, to answer charges of conspiracy and impropriety in coal block allocations. Is this a case of upholding the majesty of law? Or is it one of judicial activism? Time alone can tell.

The coal scam came to light three years ago when the Comptroller and Auditor General reported that during 2004-09 the government had allocated coal blocks to various companies without competitive bidding. He estimated that the government’s inept handling gave the companies an estimated windfall gain of Rs10,673 billion. He later scaled down the figure to Rs1,856 billion.

The first Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government was in power at the time and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh himself was in charge of the Coal ministry for a while. Acting on a complaint filed by the Bharatiya Janata Party, then in the opposition, the Central Vigilance Commission directed the Central Bureau of Investigation to probe the matter. The CBI registered first information reports against a dozen companies and, apart from company officials, some officers, including Coal Secretary PC Parakh, were cited as accused.

Last year the Supreme Court ordered the setting up of a special CBI court to hear the coal scam cases and appointed a special prosecutor to conduct them. It also cancelled all but four of the 218 coal blocks allotted since 1993, covering the periods of Prime Ministers PV Narasimha Rao (Congress), AB Vajpayee (BJP), and HD Deva Gowda and IK Gujral (both Janata Dal).

The CBI was on the point of closing the case relating to Hindalco Industries Limited and its chairman Kumar Mangalam Birla when special court judge Bharat Parashar asked it to record the statement of Manmohan Singh, who was holding charge of the ministry when the company was allotted coal block. Accordingly, CBI officials interrogated him at his residence and filed a status report.

Former CBI director RK Raghavan said the judge’s order reaffirmed the position that a Prime Minister – in office or outside – had no immunity from criminal prosecution. That a Prime Minister is not above the law was established years ago when Narasimha Rao faced three criminal cases, all of which were conducted by the CBI. Trial courts acquitted him in two cases for want of evidence. In the third, relating to bribing of MPs to buy support for his minority government during the voting on a no-confidence motion, the trial court found him guilty and sentenced him to three years’ rigorous imprisonment and a fine of Rs100,000. On appeal the high court set aside the conviction.

While the principle of supremacy of law has thus been asserted, there is room to doubt the reliability of the legal processes.

Created in 1963, the CBI traces its origin to the Special Police Establishment which India inherited from the British regime. It established an early reputation with its success in some sensational cases in which the role of the state police was suspect. However, in sensitive cases, like the Bofors scandal of Rajiv Gandhi’s time, it too failed miserably.

In 2013, on finding that the CBI had amended a coal block case affidavit at the instance of the Law Minister, Justice RM Lodha of the Supreme Court dubbed it “a caged parrot”. The court thereafter took certain steps to help it to function without political interference. However, few believe it is now a free bird.

There is something curious about the coal block cases. The CAG only accused the government of inefficiency. He did not allege corruption.

The conspiracy charge levelled against Manmohan Singh rests on the CBI report about a meeting between him and Birla before his firm was allotted the coal block. Neither the CAG nor the CBI has suggested that Manmohan Singh derived financial benefit from the allocation or that there was any quid pro quo.

Former Confederation of Indian Industry president Adi Godrej expressed surprise at the citing of Manmohan Singh and Birla as accused on the basis of their meeting. “It is not uncommon for senior industrialists to meet a minister or even the Prime Minister when an important matter needs to be discussed,” he said in a television interview. “If you keep summoning everybody as an accused, businesses will get disheartened and wouldn’t want to invest in the country.” --Gulf Today, March 17, 2015.

Probes that get nowhere

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today

Just as the Congress party, which heads the ruling United Progressive Alliance, thought the Bofors scandal, which brought down the Rajiv Gandhi government more than two decades ago, had been finally laid to rest, it has come back to haunt it and its head.

The scandal relates to kickbacks paid by the Swedish arms maker Bofors to secure its biggest ever deal of $1.3 billion for the supply of 410 howitzers to India and a supply contract for almost twice that amount.

Led by the Bharatiya Janata Party, the opposition rushed in to make the most out of the Congress party’s discomfiture. But a worse embarrassment was in store for the BJP. A court slapped a four-year jail term on its former president, Bangaru Laxman, in another corruption case.

The Bofors scandal was broken by the Swedish radio which said the company had bribed Indian politicians. The names of Rajiv Gandhi and Italian businessman Ottavio Quattrocchi, a friend of the Gandhi family, came up in later media reports. VP Singh, who became prime minister following the Congress party’s defeat, referred the matter to the Central Bureau of Investigation, which registered a corruption case.

In 2004, long after Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination, the courts exonerated him but the continuing proceedings against Quattrocchi remained a source of worry for the party, now headed by his Italian-born wife, Sonia Gandhi. Last year the courts granted the CBI’s request to drop the proceedings against Quattrocchi as he could not be brought to India.

Former Swedish police chief Sten Lindstrom, who had leaked a large number of documents relating to the kickback payments to Geneva-based Indian journalist Chitra Subramaniam-Duella, leading to a series of investigative stories in The Hindu, rekindled memories of the scandal last week with an interview to her to mark its silver jubilee. 

Lindstrom said he had turned whistleblower as he could not count on Bofors or the Swedish and Indian governments to get to the bottom of the deal in which rules were flouted, institutions bypassed and honest Swedish officials and politicians kept in the dark.

Lindstrom’s leaks did not yield expected results as there was no one in the Indian government or investigating team who shared his passionate desire to get to the bottom of the matter.

The CBI, which is directly under the Prime Minister, has a fair record of successful prosecution of offenders in ordinary crimes. However, its performance in cases involving top politicians, senior bureaucrats and high police officials is generally poor.

Recognising that the agency is susceptible to political influence, the higher courts have taken upon themselves the task of overseeing investigation of some sensational cases and asked it to report directly to them. The 2G spectrum cases in which two former ministers, a member of parliament and several high officials figure among the accused are among them.

The CBI’s failure to pursue the Bofors investigation vigorously even under non-Congress governments shows the issue of political control is not a simple one. The BJP-led National Democratic Alliance government, which served a full five-year term, too could not get to the bottom of the matter.

Lindstrom, in his interview, made two significant revelations. Fearing the media campaign might force India to cancel the contract, Bofors had sent its top executives to disclose the names of beneficiaries of kickbacks but no one of consequence received them. Politicians who met him and vowed to unravel the truth if they came to power did nothing when they had the opportunity.

Lindstrom has raised the Bofors issue again without high expectation. “Maybe we will get nowhere,” he said, “but silence cannot be the answer.”

The moral of the Bofors story is that politicians tend to view cases of corruption as grist to the mill of election propaganda rather than as acts of misdemeanour that call for punishment.

Ironically, while those involved in the Bofors affair, a real scandal, have got away, Bangaru Laxman has been convicted in a spurious arms deal. He took bribe not from an arms dealer but from a journalist posing as one in a sting operation conducted while the NDA was in power. Since there are two higher courts to which he can appeal, the present verdict cannot be taken as the last word. Eleven other cases filed on the basis of the same sting operation are still before the trial court. --Gulf Today, Sharjah, April 30, 2012.

Adivasi activist under CBI scanner writes to Home Minister

To
The Hon’ble Union Minister,
Ministry of Home Affairs,
North Block, Central Secretariat,
New Delhi – 110001.


Re: inquiry against me by the Ministry of Home Affairs through the CBI.

Dear Sir,

Greetings!

With due respect, I would like to bring your attention in a case of inquiry against me, which has been carried out by the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA), New Delhi through the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI). The Ministry had done the similar inquiry last year and I had given them all the required information despite that the same inquiry has been repeated to know whether I’m involved in any kind of anti-national activity and my association with the anti-national elements.

The Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) has initiated second round inquiry against me. An officer of the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), Mr. Nirmal Kumar Birua visited my resident in the afternoon at 3:15 PM on June 23, 2011 and asked me about the activities I’m involved with, the source of my income, my association with the organizations and

He also recorded about my family background including the background of my parents, brother and sisters, the present status of my family members and about my present residence and present status.

He told me that the Jharkhand Unit of the MHA has to send a bulletin in every evening and the Delhi office has been consistently asking to submit a report regarding my involvement in anti-National activities and association with anti-National elements. However, when I checked it I was shocked to know that there is no such unite of the MHA exists in Ranchi but the MHA does all kinds of inquiry in the state either through the Intelligence Bureau (IB) or the CBI. In fact, I have put everything in the public domain and I’m always available in Ranchi the capital city of Jharkhand and also appear in the media (print and electronic) very often. I have been raising the issues of human rights and social justice and the allegations of my involvement in anti-national activities and my association with the anti-national elements are baseless.

The most surprising thing is, the MHA is not even aware about my association with the Planning Commission of India. Last month, I was nominated as a member of an autonomous body “Assessment and Monitoring Authority” (AMA) under the Planning Commission (Govt of India).

Hence, I feel that the MHA has been taking actions against me with the clear intention to coerce, humiliate and suppress my voice as I’m one of the outspoken persons from the Adivasi community.

Therefore, I request you; kindly stop all kinds of inquiry against me and also to take action against those officers who are trying to defame my credibility. I hope to hear you soon.

Thanking you.
Yours Sincerely,

Gladson Dungdung
Member,
Assessment and Monitoring Authority,
Planning Commission (Govt. of India),
C/o – Mr. Suleman Oreya,
Near Don Bosco, I.T.C. Gate,
Lane – 2, Khorha Toli, Kokar, Ranchi-834001
Ph. No. 0651-3242752 Cell: 09334449335

See also May 2010 article by Gladson Dungdung “Am I a Maoist”

Tracking corruption at top

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today

There are hopeful developments on the anti-corruption front. Prodded by the Supreme Court, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) is pursuing cases against political leaders with some vigour. For the time, a former state minister faces the possibility of having to spend a year in jail.

Corruption of different kinds afflicts traditional and modern societies. In India, where the old and the new coexist, both kinds of corruption exist.

The corruption stories making big headlines in the media these days reveal graft of the kind that is familiar in the modern societies. They involve siphoning off of resources to corporate entities.

Corruption of this kind has grown alarmingly since India, under prime minister PV Narasimha Rao, took to the path of economic liberalisation in 1991. Some captains of Indian industry who figure in the Forbes list of the rich are beneficiaries of this trend.

The Comptroller and Auditor General, the constitutional authority mandated to look into government spending, reported last year that the manner in which the government allocated 2G spectrum to mobile companies had resulted in a loss of Rs1,760 billion. He is now examining a deal between the Indian Space Research Organisation’s commercial subsidiary and a private company floated by a former ISRO official, which, according to media reports, has inflicted an even greater loss. The deal gives the private operator free access to costly S-band spectrum.

At government establishments, including hospitals and police stations, citizens often encounter corruption of another kind. This involves having to pay bribes to get services which they are entitled to get free of cost. This kind of corruption hurts the poor directly and immediately. Transparency International’s India chapter, which studied the working of 11 government services, including the police, three years ago, estimated that people living below the poverty line paid over Rs9 billion annually as bribes to get basic need-based services.

Throughout the country the police was thought to be the most corrupt department and primary school education the least corrupt, it said.

The burden of corruption at higher levels also falls mainly on ordinary folks since manufacturers and distributors routinely transfer their costs to the consumers. However, people do not realise that the bribe component is also worked into the prices they pay. When the government bestows concessions on companies, normally they do not pass the benefit on to the consumer.

Unlike the other major countries of Asia like China, Japan and South Korea, India has a poor record in tracking down corruption at the top. Narasimha Rao, who was tried after he laid down office, was found not guilty. A Supreme Court judge who was impeached got away as members of parliament, voting according to party dictates, gave a majority verdict in his favour.

Against this background, the ongoing CBI investigations hold out some hope of action. Former Central minister A Raja and senior officials who worked with him were arrested recently in connection with the 2G scam. The net is closing in on Suresh Kalmadi, who was chief organiser of the Commonwealth Games held in New Delhi, and his close associates.

Raja is a leader of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, which is Tamil Nadu’s ruling party and a constituent of the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance which wields power at the Centre. Kalmadi is a leader of the Congress party.

The CBI, the premier investigative agency of the country, is directly under the prime minister. Opposition parties have alleged that it is often guided by political considerations. The Supreme Court’s monitoring of highly sensitive cases has limited the scope for political interference in the investigation.

Last week, the apex court awarded a year’s rigorous imprisonment to Kerala Congress (B) leader R Balakrishna Pillai in a case relating to the period when he was the state’s power minister. He is the first minister in the country to be given a jail term by the highest court of the land. His party is a constituent of the Congress-led United Democratic Front, which is now in the opposition.

Sukh Ram, a former Union Communication Minister, was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment on corruption charges by the trial court two years ago. The last word in that case is still a long way off. His appeal is now before the high court. If he loses there, he can go to the Supreme Court. -- Gulf Today, Sharjah, February 14, 2011,