Hearing the Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar assure the nation that those who received bribes in the Agusta deal would be punished is something to be taken with a pinch of salt. Normally in most corruption cases it is usually hearsay and rhetoric that is audible no hard proof. So the “I am innocent, if proved I will resign works well”, in this case half the issue is sorted out. Thanks to the Italian court who in three years decided that Agusta paid bribes and accordingly passed judgment. To whom, remains to be answered.
This judgment has released the cat among the proverbial pigeons, pigeons being our political class. No political party worth its salt wants to get involved in convicting another of their ilk even if it is from a rival political party. The fear is such a conviction will haunt them too. So they usually leave it to the law to find its own course. This generally means meandering to nowhere with investigative agencies working with hands tied behind their backs.
The proof of this is in the fact that the Agusta case is being investigated by the Indian government (read ruling BJP) for the last two years and they are nowhere closer to establishing if bribes were paid in the first instance, to whom: is that part of their mandate?. The Italians have gone ahead and done that part of the job in three years forcing the Government to try and show it is working on the case. The same thing happened in the Louis Berger case, it forced the ruling government’s hand to act and after a little noise all is quiet.
There is another angle, it is believed that the choppers failed the payload test, that is technically they are not of acceptable quality, quotation and performance are not matching. So we have paid much more that we got, I guess the difference would be skimmed off to the beneficiaries.
The corrupt have to be tried in court and not in Parliament. So making brave statements while the issue is hot is part of the usual drama. The DM was candid in saying his Government will MAYBE do what could not be done in the Bofors case. So his alibi is already made, and unfortunately nothing is going to happen. Maybe a bureaucrat or two maybe sacrificed to appease the public but surely no political big fish will see jail. Even the initials which on TV are being attributed to persons freely, will not stand the test in court. Earlier the BJP themselves have argued and won, that the initials LKA found in the diary of another scamster does not necessarily relate to someone who has the same initials in their party. But till then the Congress spin doctors made hay.
Of course the DM is a master at playing to the gallery and delivering nothing. Who can forget that he led the BJP to victory four years ago on an anti-corruption plank. People fed up with the obvious corrupt methods of the then congress government swept the BJP to power. Four years later there is nothing to show officially that the then Congress government was corrupt. The mining scam was supposed to be, by his own admission on the floor of the House, Rs 35000 crores. Till date there is not a single case filed against anyone, on the contrary every miner has had his leases renewed in haste. The PWD was supposedly riddled with corrupt practices. What we saw was, a minister, two engineers and a son in jail for a few days and that news too has moved off the radar. They did try or showed they were trying to put the ex-CM behind bars , obviously unsuccessfully. The GIDC was supposedly a hotbed of scams and corruption, till today apart from one measly case against unknown persons there is nothing else to show that the previous regime was corrupt.
There are two reasons for this attitude by a political party. One, it is better to hold a sword over the neck than to strike. Take the case of Babu Kavlekar, not filing the cases against him surely helped at the time of the defence expo. Babu who was vocal initially quickly withdrew once the Defexpo moved into higher gear. The other reason is that the ruling dispensation takes over from when the previous regime left off. If in the Agusta case change in specs would point to corruption, in Goa when a steel unit’s proposal is rejected by the all-powerful IPB chaired by the Chief Minister himself. Would it not point to a “setting” when subsequently the cabinet approves the same project chaired by the CM, himself. That too, after a previous cabinet decision banned further investments from power guzzling steel units. By the way, the proposal is approved on land that the GIDC has already passed an order to repossess under the Chairmanship of Manohar Parrikar.
So it is apparent if politicians would not like to convict anyone especially another politician for corruption because such decisions can come back to bite. They would rather discuss, thrash it out in the any other fora so as to get political mileage and one-upmanship. Using it to keep the other politician or other political party on a tight leash. So do not expect too much from the Agusta case, there is surely a U-turn ahead.
(The author prefers to write rather than chat in a balcao.)
