The
Judeo-Jogi test
By Manoj Mitta
The
Indian Express
12 Decmber, 2003
The sight of Judeo accepting a bribe.
The sound of Jogi offering a bribe. The Express exposed the Union ministers
shenanigans three weeks before Law Minister Arun Jaitley did the same
to the officiating chief minister of Chhattisgarh. Political retribution
followed swiftly against both the disgraced leadersone was sacked
from the Vajpayee government while the other was suspended from the
Congress party. But when it came to initiating legal action against
them, the CBI has proved to be far from even-handed. It promptly, and
rightly, registered an FIR against Jogi under the Prevention of Corruption
Act. It did not however react with similar alacrity to Judeo. On paper,
the CBI is still carrying out a preliminary enquiry to determine
whether the audio-visual evidence of the environment minister taking
money from somebody apparently seeking mining rights discloses any cognisable
offence at all.
The CBI, of course,
claims to be taking its time over the Judeo issue for purely legal reasons.
One of the excuses it trotted out is that nobody has so far owned up
to the sting operation. But this is just one more example of how the
CBI seems to be as vulnerable as before to the governments interference
despite the Supreme Courts attempt, through the Jain Hawala judgment,
to introduce a measure of autonomy in the agency. To be sure, the CBI
directors have since been selected by a committee headed by the CVC
and have also been provided security of tenure. Experience shows that
these reforms have failed to impart any greater independence to the
CBI.
One should not be
misled by the clamour that is raised for a CBI probe every time a politically
sensitive case surfaces. Thats not so much an indication of the
CBIs credibility as a sad reflection on its counterparts in the
states. If the CBI gets away with its claim of being the countrys
premier investigating agency, it is largely by default. Sometimes the
states themselves find it expedient to refer a case to the CBI. One
recent instance is the Bihar governments decision to transfer
the murder case of whistle-blower Satyendra Dubey. There are also times
when the Centre itself urges the states to do so. Look at the way the
Centre has been pressuring Congress-ruled Maharashtra and Karnataka
to hand over the fake stamp paper scam cases to the CBI. The Centres
insinuation is that the local police investigation was likely to be
compromised because of the alleged complicity of state ministers. And
even after the Bombay high court rejected the proposal of referring
the stamp scam cases to the CBI, the Centre has announced its intention
to move the Supreme Court.
But, regrettably,
when it comes to dealing with political corruption, the record of the
Supreme Court is not all that much better than that of the CBI. Indeed,
in the interval between the Judeo and Jogi episodes, the apex court
landed in a controversy because of the position it took on corruption
in the Jayalalithaa case. Despite recording a series of extremely damaging
findings against her, the court found a way of acquitting Jayalalithaa
with a straight face. For instance, it pulled her up for disowning her
own signatures in her anxiety to save her skin. But since
it held that the land transaction of her firm did not anyway violate
the law, the court said she was being unduly cautious in
taking the trouble of lying. Similarly, though the court said that the
code of conduct cannot be treated as an ornamental relic in a
museum, it let off Jayalalithaa despite its own finding that she
violated the code forbidding a minister to buy any public property.
Further, the court admitted that the purchase of the public land by
Jayalalithaa involves a conflict of interests but then went on to make
contradictory observations on whether the law prohibits such transactions.
The issue is not
just the quality of the reasoning that was applied to exonerate Jayalalithaa.
Its also about the rather regressive message the highest court
of the land has been giving to rulers in such cases. The court may deliver
homilies and rant about how some aspects of their conduct worry
our conscience. But all that is just hot air. The corrupt rulers
can with greater impunity than ever abuse their power for self-aggrandisement.
They are more equal than others.
The CBI seems to
have already imbibed this message as is evident from the report the
agency gave about a month ago in the Delhi high court against another
woman politician, Maneka Gandhi. The probe was on a complaint that when
she was Union minister for social justice, she was instrumental in releasing
massive funds to fake or ineligible NGOs from her constituency, including
one run by her own sister, Ambika Shukla. The CBI confirmed the allegations
against Maneka and yet, defying logic in the way the apex court did
in the Jayalalithaa case, recommended action only against her underlings.