And the pot told the kettle

There has been a continuing slide into politics of inquiries, where governance is in the back-seat, political debate forgotten & acquisition of power reduced to trying to fix your rivals.

Some remarkable things have happened in our politics lately. One was Laloo Yadav wagging his finger at two great institutions that have caused him much trauma, the judiciary and the Election Commission. The second was Mayawati asking the Congress where was its part of the quid pro quo if the CBI was to keep on going after her with so much zeal, and asking that as directly as only she can, on the floor of Parliament – she actually introduced a new abbreviation to our vocabulary, DA, for “disproportionate assets”. Now, we have always known that that is how the game of politics was played. But when was the last time a senior politician asked for such a straight deal – withdraw the CBI or I withdraw support – in Parliament? What is even more worrying, MPs of Laloo’s RJD joined her, shouting slogans in support, and generally suggesting that the system and the institutions had their knives out for those from “lower” castes or backward classes.

Who knows, but for the fact that the Supreme Court is watching them so carefully, the UPA government may have even thought of finding a way of getting these allies out of trouble. It is, after all, moving quite brazenly to clear Satish Sharma of all old charges. In these cases, the Supreme Court is both a restraint and an alibi. The most bizarre turn, however, came on the very last day of this unfortunate Parliament session. In the morning, the government produced the Justice Phukan Commission report in the House and rejected it outright, preferring to wait for a new inquiry by the CBI instead. In the afternoon, it announced an inquiry into the sale of the two Centaur hotels in Mumbai.

This paper’s (The Indian Express) view on the unfortunate threat to look into the Centaur deal is stated in the editorial on this page. It is also quite unnecessary to hold forth in any detail on the irony of a government ordering an inquiry in an issue involving a former minister whose reputation for personal integrity is matched by very few in our political system. My concern is about our continuing slide into this politics of inquiries, where governance takes the back-seat, political debate and discourse are forgotten and where acquisition of power is reduced primarily to an opportunity to fix your rivals.

To be sure, this was not started by the Congress, but by V.P. Singh and his BJP backers in 1989 after Bofors. While Bofors was one issue and this newspaper (The Indian Express) was in the forefront of exposing it, this then created an open season for scandal-mongering. It created permanent bitterness, set off blood feuds, yielded nothing, and damaged national interest. German HDW submarines and the Indian Airlines Airbus-320 acquisitions are two examples. In the first case, there were only some unconfirmed allegations, in the other there was no more than an air crash in Bangalore. A mere crash led to rival business interests floating insinuations of wrongdoing, of the government having purchased a bad plane and resulted, first of all, in the grounding of the Airbus fleet. Nothing came of the inquiry, the case was closed 15 years later, but Indian Airlines has still not recovered from the losses it suffered from the grounding of its fleet. For those who may not remember, or were too young when this nonsense happened, the planes only got off the ground thanks to a calamity. Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait required the evacuation of lakhs of Indian expats and the government had no choice but to lift the ban on A-320s flying.

Similarly, the allegations and the inquiry (which yielded nothing) prevented the submarine project from growing into further purchases and co-production. And the Bofors story we well know by now. We bought the guns but black-balled the company, so did not buy the spares and ammunition, and when it worked so effectively in Kargil, had to run around buying them in the black market. Commissions apart, Bofors was one of the best things to have happened to our army in a long time.

There are many in the Congress now who want to pay the BJP and George Fernandes back not only for all these, but for also reviving the Bofors story in their own six-year reign which was silly to say the least and meant only to embarrass the Gandhi family a decade after Rajiv Gandhi’s death. Some day the leading lights of the NDA will reflect on their decision to include a dead Rajiv’s name in the Bofors FIR. The people of India have already sufficiently punished Rajiv Gandhi and his party for Bofors, most key Indian players or suspects in the deal are no more, and yet if the NDA government pulled out the Bofors chestnut every few months, the intention was not so much to catch the guilty, or recover any money, but to use a never-ending inquiry as a permanent political weapon.

If politics of two decades now has been overshadowed by scams and infructuous inquiries, it is primarily because this whole business has become so politicised as to lose all credibility. An “inquiry” is merely seen as political vendetta. You expect a new government to start a few against its predecessor and because we have such strong anti-incumbency now, counter-revenge follows inevitably. Wait and watch, for example, for what will happen in Punjab if the Akalis come to power again. So thoroughly has the image and credibility of the instruments and institutions of these inquiries been damaged, in the process, that nothing convinces the non-believer. So a Sena-BJP government can junk the Justice Srikrishna report report into the Mumbai riots as conveniently as the UPA now throws out Justice Phukan’s. We have seen JPC inquiries come and go. And as for the CBI, the less said the better. Its record with any high-profile cases, involving politicians or top bureaucrats, is worse than Sourav Ganguly’s scoreline this season. And you can’t even blame them for it. They have no freedom, not enough people, skills, authority or credibility. A year and a half ago, they showed such alacrity in burying the Dilip Singh Judeo case, and in nailing Ajit Jogi in a similar sting situation. Today? Ask them what happened?

This politics of inquiries has only left muck, injustice and harassment in its wake. One of the most stunning examples of such victimisation is now in the UPA’s own establishment, the National Manufacturing Competitiveness Council chairman and a 10 Janpath loyalist, V. Krishnamurthy. His life, reputation and career were nearly destroyed by a vindictive and Stalinist CBI that tortured him, his family, planted a hundred stories against him in the media and found not a shred of evidence to nail him on anything.

There will be scams in politics and scams must be investigated, the guilty nailed and punished. But this politics of inquiries has now created a sorry situation where such probes have lost all credibility. These are ordered by one set of politicians, and their findings rejected by another. Senior leaders in the two coalitions have a duty now to break this vicious cycle in this era of anti-incumbency. If this carries on, for example, what is to stop somebody in the NDA from threatening that if they come to power they will investigate the Boeing deal, particularly when MPs from the ruling coalition have put their signatures to letters raising questions on it? What will the political class do then, send each deal to the CAG and CVC for pre-clearance? Anticipatory bail-seeking of this kind can’t become an instrument of governance. In any case, why would the next government bother about any such pre-clearance?

This has to stop. The prime minister has provided an opening on Friday by expressing regret over this confrontation with the NDA. Someone like Advani should respond suitably. A softening on the part of the BJP states on the implementation of VAT, for example, could be a good beginning. Only after the two sets of politicians return to the barracks, to play their respective roles in governance and the opposition at the Centre and in the states, could we expect a return to normal politics. Otherwise, there is nothing to stop a slide into nationwide confrontation, and a continuing vicious cycle of politically motivated “inquiries”.