“Indian investigators are morons.” That one comment in a conversation between Christian Michel and Guido Haschke, prime conduits for the bribery by Italian helicopter manufacturing company AugustaWestland to Indian bureaucrats/politicians, could turn out to be the clincher in the multi-million euro scandal that has shaken the political establishment in this country.
The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) is India’s premier agency that is entrusted with the task of investigating all manner of serious and high-profile crimes, including economic ones. The CBI is supposed to be staffed by the cream of police force from all over India. But this is what Avirook Sen, journalist-turned-author, says about the CBI in his book Aarushi which deals with the sensational murder of teenaged girl Aarushi Talwar in a Delhi suburb in 2008:
“The CBI’s image is built upon the notion that it is more competent and more neutral than the police…That the CBI’s recruits are largely from the same pool as the police is somehow forgotten.
“The announcement that the CBI has taken over an investigation is routinely treated as good news. It comes with the suggestion that there is intent to get to the bottom of whatever the matter is. With this comes expectation. In the Aarushi case, for instance, the magistrate who sent the case for trial reflected the general belief that the CBI had disappointed not just her, but the country, by saying that it didn’t have enough evidence to convict anyone when it submitted its closure report.”
Of course there is no chance that Haschke or Michel had heard about Avirook Sen or his book, but they sure shared the same sentiment as the author when it came to the CBI although Sen stopped short of making such a blatantly disparaging comment. In fact, if Sen was only concerned with the CBI, the American-Swiss Heschke and Briton Michel painted the entire Indian investigating agencies by the same broad brush.
If the middlemen in the helicopter deal had challenged the CBI, the Enforcement Directorate (ED) and the rest with that caustic remark, Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, never one to miss an opportunity to hit out at Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has his own way of taunting the agencies, though his ultimate target is to tarnish Modi. Kejriwal wants Congress president Sonia Gandhi, Ahmed Patel and others, who are alleged to have been beneficiaries of the graft, arrested within one week. If not, he will ask his party to protest. The proposed protest will not be against the CBI but against Modi because the agency is directly under the prime minister.
Kejriwal knows that arresting anyone, leave alone the head of the country’s main opposition party, on charges of corruption requires elaborate investigation and corroborative proof. But the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) supremo, who is eyeing next year’s Punjab state assembly elections with eager expectations, cannot be inconvenienced by such formalities.
The CBI, for its part, is not totally blameless either. The agency made a high-profile raid on Kejriwal’s secretariat last December ostensibly to recover documents related to illegal award of government contracts from senior bureaucrat Rajendra Kumar. It has been close to five months now but the top sleuths of the agency have not been able to convince anyone, least of all the courts, that they had found anything incriminating. It was the first such raid on a chief minister’s office in the country and there was widespread belief that the CBI was on to something very important to nail Kejriwal and his secretary. In the event it turned out to be a damp squib. Perhaps India’s premier crime-fighters were striving to live up to the “morons” tag!
And then there is the dark shadow of corruption within CBI itself. The Indian Express reported earlier this week that an investigating officer of the agency had written to the CBI director that he knew of at least 24 major cases where his senior colleagues had accepted bribes to favour the accused. So, if they are not morons they are corrupt. Either way the goose is cooked.
While the gumshoes have their work cut out to get to the bottom of the chopper scam, the more open battle between the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Congress is grabbing all the media space. As far as culpability is concerned, it is an open and shut case. The Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government was in charge throughout the entire episode and, therefore, has a lot to answer. Congress Party spokespersons are doing their best to control the damage by sidestepping some crucial questions even as they highlight some of the actions taken by the then defence ministry headed by A K Antony, including scrapping the entire chopper deal and getting refunds plus interest.
Top leaders of the BJP, including party chief Amit Shah and Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, have been categorical that now that the Milan High Court has jailed the bribe-givers, stringent action would be taken against the bribe-takers in India. Problem is, the government and the ruling party have been holding out such threats for the last two years without anything to show for it. Robert Vadra’s alleged omissions and commissions in land deals in Haryana are cases in point. Modi’s famous declaration that he would bring back all the illegal wealth that the rich had stashed away in foreign tax havens remains a promise unfulfilled till date and does not hold out much hope for the foreseeable future.
So where is all this heading? Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar is getting ready to tell parliament all that the government knows about the chopper deal. It remains to be seen how far he will go in accusing the previous Manmohan Singh government for the scam. One really lost count of the number of scams and swindles that happened under the ten-year Congress-led rule. Many are in various stages of trials in court but the general feeling among Indians is that nothing tangible will happen and that the real big fish will get away once again because, after all, politicians know exactly how to scratch each other’s back.
(As recently as this past Monday, Petroleum Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, while speaking in the Lok Sabha about Reliance Industries and how it is influencing the Modi government, warned leader of the Congress Party Mallikarjun Kharge that it was better not to go do down that road for too long as otherwise he will have to say things that will be “uncomfortable” to the Congress).
Jaitley had been quoted as saying that the crucial bills concerning Goods and Services Tax (GST) and bankruptcy will be passed during the ongoing session of parliament. He had claimed he could do this even if the Congress Party opposes the bills. That was under the assumption that the rest of the opposition, especially the ones like the All India Anna Dravida Kazhagam of Tamil Nadu and the Trinamool Congress of West Bengal would vote with the government. But there is no guessing what the two lady leaders, Jayalalithaa and Mamata Banerjee respectively, of these two parties would do till the last moment. Observers here feel that with the latest charges against the Congress leadership in the chopper scam the fate of these two bills are sealed.
Jaitley has set much store on these bills for the economic agenda that Modi had been parlaying for long. He had blamed “legacy issues” for the sluggish performance of the economy, although at 7.5% GDP growth it’s still one of the world’s best.
Such excuses are fine in the first two years of a new government. But if Jaitley is unable to break such shackles in the third year so that results would be visible in the fourth and fifth years, a return to power for the BJP in 2019 would be a tough call. Hence the GST and other bills are crucial. Will the government use the inquiries into the various scams against the Congress as a bargaining chip for passage of these bills? That will then be a betrayal of the mandate Modi got in 2014 because Indians were fed up with the corruption stories that emerged in the last two years of Congress rule and that is why they voted the party out.
But the investigating agencies, especially if they are monitored by the Supreme Court, could end all such speculation. If the CBI can get to the bottom of the chopper scam and expose the real culprits, not only will it be doing the country the greatest of services but it will also show that “morons” and “corrupt” they may be but they can still come up trumps when it matters. Messrs Michel and Haschke would then have to eat their words!
