The life and times of the Congress Legislature Party Leader in Goa, Babu Kavlekar is indeed getting even more interesting, with the Crime Branch, on information from the ACB finding thousands of matka slips and books, in an office room inside Kavlekar’s property.
The Crime Branch in a raid at Kavlekar’s house found prima facie evidence of a full-fledged matka racket being run from the premises of the Quepem MLA and Congress Legislature Party leader. Some of the pictures of the raid made available to Herald, need no words of explanation. An office full of matka slips, books with codes and numbers, calculators and other such paraphernalia, will make it quite a task for Kavlekar to defend charges of “running a full-fledged matka business”. According to an officer
Kavlekar, will, as he has the right to, claim innocence till there is more evidence generated and he is implicated in court. But can he, as the Leader of the Congress in the Assembly, have the moral right to continue, when the images emanating from his residence, which appear tell-tale, reek of a seedy illegal matka racket?
Can Babu Kavlekar continue to shamelessly parade his falsehood around, that he is a victim of the upper caste establishment which is jealous of a backward caste leader who has acquired a bungalow.
The onus is also upto the Congress to introspect and immediately seek a change in the CLP leadership, but this is something it will not do, even as the trail of disproportionate assets appears to wind its way through a labyrinth of property purchases. However if the prima facie finding of he being involved in a matka racket is confirmed, then this amounts to a blatant criminal act.
One should also be wary that any conviction leading to imprisonment of more than two years leads to the immediate disqualification of an elected representative.
Practically though this will take a very long time to play out. But the Leader of the Opposition, who holds the rank of minister, should step back and let another party colleague take the position of CLP leader, in Goa. If he does not do so, the party should immediately call for a meeting of all its MLAs and take a principled stand to change the CLP leader.
If the Congress fails to do so, it will lose its authority to take on the government on any major issue of corruption.
At the same time, it cannot respond to the clarion call of replacing its CLP leader to serve as an example of political righteousness, by saying that the BJP did not take the same call when its Tourism minister Dilip Parulekar was indicted in the Serula land grab scam. There is no righteousness or moral high ground when the inaction on an issue such as this by your political opponent, becomes the reason not to do right yourself.
The Congress may to an extent play the victimisation card and claim that political opponents of the BJP are being targeted. However, this will hold only when there is a strong response that the charges against Kavlekar hold no ground. On the contrary, with raids throwing up shocking surprises like evidence of him running a matka racket, the victimisation argument is sinking more and more into a quagmire.
Meanwhile the Crime Branch should pursue this case, do a thorough investigation and bust more links of politicians to the matka business, where they seem to have graduated from being mere participants to controllers of the trade.
It is an irony that this raid happened a day after Herald ran a report on how the matka trail runs through the country and beyond, to its headquarters in the Gulf, where the underworld controls it with its vice like grip. It’s time to also unearth which matka Godfather in the gulf has “sons” in Goa.
