Why is the BJP shying away from filing an FIR on Goa’s ‘watergate’ scam?

While the focus is on the former PWD minister in the Congress government, the controversy king, Churchill Alemao and his Chief Minister Digambar Kamat, who Alemao passes the buck to whenever he faces a corruption charge, the BJP too needs to answer more than a few questions on the Louis Berger bribery scandal which has hit Goa.

There is no way that the BJP can go out smelling completely clean since more than 8 packets or projects funded by the Japanese International Cooperation Agency (JICA) actually took off during the BJP rule. From 2012 onwards when the JICA project moved into top gear, the ruling BJP at no point of time made public its knowledge or its serious intent in doing  check back on such a water supply and sewerage project with huge funding and confirm that there have been no cost overruns. If the Congress can be accused of taking bribes to clear the consultancy of the JICA project, given to the Louis Berger headed consortium, it is the BJP which retained  Mr A M Wachasundar as the project Director of JICA well after his retirement. Mr Wachasundar is the officer who has been with the project since inception and closely involved in the selection of the Louis Berger Consortium (though he maintains that the government had no direct role and all  decisions had to be JICA approved) and the award of all work orders. Ultimately, the augmentation of sewerage and water supply in Goa is a government of Goa project, so the signoffs were done by Mr Wachasundar. If the actions of this officer are under a cloud because of the revelations of Louis Berger  to the Department of Justice in New Jersey, then the BJP government's decision to retain him as Project Director by giving him financial authority, also needs to be probed.

Let's look at how the BJP lead by Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar, who was the Chief Minister of Goa during the period when the maximum number of JICA works were sanctioned, reacted when news of the Louis Berger bribery admissions broke. He was in Goa and while addressing a public meeting he mocked "Has the money gone for football"?, an obvious reference to Churchill Alemao's football club, Churchill Brothers. He significantly didn't make a direct charge at Digambar Kamat. Those who are aware of the power play in the corridors of the government know that Mr Wachasundar was a trusted officer of both Mr Kamat and Mr Parrikar. While asserting that Churchill Alemao's role as PWD minister has to come in for sharp scrutiny, it has to be taken into account that Alemao did make to remove Wachasundar as Project Director but was over ruled by his Chief Minister.

The big question is why is the Parsekar government not registering an FIR and starting a police investigation. Nothing stops them from doing so since a prima facie crime has been committed under the Prevention of Corruption Act. The giver of the bribe has confessed it to the Department of Justice in the USA. If the money was handed over in India, the place of occurrence  of the crime is India or Goa. The bribe surely did not come by wire transfer into the smart account of the two ministers.

The honest transparent approach should be that an FIR should be registered at a police station and the crime branch or the Anti-Corruption Bureau should commence a preliminary inquiry. It can then ask the Department of Justice, through national diplomatic channels, to ask Louis Berger to reveal the names of the ministers in confidence and once the names are revealed, the investigation can be escalated by formally naming them as the accused.

It is amusing to hear the Chief Minister say that he would go to Delhi and seek the advice of the centre in what the state should do. The constitution and the criminal laws of this country guide investigating officers who are trained to do this. Chief Minsters only rush to get advice of this sort when the decision has to be purely political and not administrative.

Thus, Mr Parsekar should act and behave like a Chief Minister and not a school boy who needs his chemistry teacher's nod before embarking on a lab experiment. Let the system takeover and probe everything and everyone. Who knows some of the worms that come out of the opened can may carry lotuses as their symbols, even as the other Congress worms in the can get exposed.