Congress or a corruption-free India: The choice is ours !

It is hard to fight corruption, right? Then, why not put up with it and get on with the business of life? After all, the great unwashed masses of this ancient land blame it on their karma in their past lives for whatever is happening to them in their present avatar. Such fatalism has in fact been the greatest source of strength for our criminal and corrupt political class. The ruler-ruled (Raja-Praja) syndrome is so deeply etched in the collective psyche of Indians that despite incontrovertible evidence of wrongdoing the aam admi keeps on repeating the same set of thuggish netas to preside over his destiny election after election. It is a sham democracy, isn’t it?

That would explain the return of the Congress in Karnataka after a gap of more than a decade. As if their experience with successive governments in Bangalore was not dreadful, the voter with the proverbial short memory has brought back the same set of crooks whom he had cast aside with utter disdain only five years ago. Give him a couple of months, and he will begin to grumble that the new lot is worse than the one he had so comprehensively rejected in the recent poll. For, it is futile to expect the Congress DNA to change. It cannot.

However, this is not to suggest that the Karnataka outcome was not on expected lines. It was. The BJP did not leave the voter with any option. It did everything in its power to court unpopularity. Its drubbing was well-deserved. Early evidence of factionalism in the State unit was accentuated further by groupism at the central level. If Sushma Swaraj patronised the infamous Reddy brothers, LK Advani played godfather to his constant sidekick, Ananthkumar. The two together never allowed a moment of peace to BS Yeddyurappa. And now the Advani-Sushma duo is engaged in denying the BJP the only credible chance it has of dislodging the corrupt and non-performing UPA Government by blocking the graduation of Modi from Gandhinagar to Delhi.

The absence of a strong BJP leader in New Delhi gave a free rein to various factional players in Bangalore to pull one another down. All things considered, Yeddyurappa was more wronged against than wronging. By the prevailing standards of morality, his was a minor act of corruption – taking donations for a family-controlled education trust, as per a Lokayukta indictment, from a company which had bagged the mining rights from his government.

Come to think of it, if that yardstick were to be applied universally to eject people out of power, we have no hesitation in asserting that Manmohan Singh could be in great trouble. For, as his own Coal Minister for nearly three years, he allocated 140-odd coal mining leases without due diligence. He ignored the written advice of the Coal Secretary at the time that these coal blocks were being auctioned to the highest bidders. It does not in any way mitigate Singh’s misdeed, which cost the exchequer heavily, that he himself did not make a khota paisa from such allocations. He merely allocated those coal blocks on the basis of chits sent by the ruling party bosses, notably treasurer Motilal Vora and all-powerful Ahmed Patel. While coffers of the Congress and its netas swelled, the nation’s natural resources got depleted without any benefit flowing to the aam admi.

Now, in his anxiety to avoid any blemish on his character, Singh is desperate that to ensure that there is no adverse mention against him, even edgeways in the on-going CBI probe into the Coalgate. Facts already in the public domain establish that he cannot evade responsibility for having made wrongful allocations en bloc for the benefit of his masters in the Congress. The Prime Minister’s desperation to escape an adverse finding alone would put in perspective the intervention of a joint secretary each from the PMO and the Coal Ministry and the gross intercession of the Law Minister, since sacked, and the Attorney General in the investigative work of the CBI.

Not unlike the Harshad Mehta scam when he was the Finance Minister, Singh is loath to accept even his constructive responsibility for the wholesale trade in the grant of leasing rights for coal mining to all manner of people, some of them who had had nothing to do with the industry and were engaged in running regional rags or were out to make a quick buck using their proximity to the ruling party bosses. It was plunder as plunder can since no objective criterion was followed in handing out 140-odd leases to well-connected people. That painful truth should become stark clear if a very chastised CBI probes the scam sincerely and reports back to the apex court on July 10 when it reopens after the summer recess.

Frankly, even the outcome of the Karnataka poll should give the Congress Party a strong reason to worry about. For, if its analysis is correct that the Karnataka voter has punished the BJP Government for corruption and non-performance, it cannot be unmindful of its own champion status in that regard. The unending series of scams in the last four years is reason enough to throw it out at the first available opportunity, going by the Karnataka logic. Nor can the party be unaware of the policy-paralysis, the stalemate in Parliament, the rising crime graph in the national capital, the Ministerial malfeasance, the ever-rising consumer prices, et al. As compared to the failures of the BJP Government in Bangalore, the Congress-led Government in New Delhi has attained Himalayan highs in corruption, non-performance and abdication of national duty. Conversely, Karnataka has given the BJP-led NDA a new hope, and the Congress-led UPA a dire warning of the impending doom.

Source : Niti Central