Till the quicksand of
indiscretions enveloped Sushma Swaraj and Vasundhara Raje, the Bharatiya
Janata Party (BJP) had the advantage over its principal rival, the
Congress, of not being the victim of any major scandal.
Hence,
Prime Minister Narendra Modi had the chutzpah of telling an audience
abroad that while he was associating India with "skill", the previous
government had shamed the country with the appellation of "scam India".
Only a few months after this display of effrontery which ignored the
tradition of not raising domestic issues on foreign soil, the Modi
government has had its comeuppance.
Instead of focussing on ways
to emerge from the "prudent gradualism", in economist Jagdish Bhagwati's
words, of the reforms, which the government's critics interpret as a
dragging of the feet, the prime minister and his government are immersed
in an episode which, according to the Congress, is marked by "nepotism,
abuse of authority and violation of procedure".
Notwithstanding
the attempts to emphasize the Good Samaritan aspect of the external
affairs minister's intervention on behalf of the former Indian Premium
League (IPL) administrator, Lalit Modi's ailing wife, the fact that
Lalit Modi is a fugitive from Indian justice has undermined Sushma
Swaraj's acts of "good intentions", as finance minister Arun Jaitley has
said.
To make matters worse for the BJP, Rajasthan Chief
Minister Vasundhara Raje has joined Sushma Swaraj in demonstrating her
proximity to Lalit Modi. Their explanation for their camaraderie is that
Modi is a family friend. But the acts of hobnobbing recall the adage
that a person is known by the company he or she keeps.
Interestingly,
the BJP is seemingly keener on standing by the external affairs
minister than the chief minister, who has apparently been left to fend
for herself over an allegation that she endorsed Lalit Modi's
application for immigration to Britain on the condition that the Indian
authorities should not know about it.
Although the document bears
no signature, the chief minister and her party will have considerable
difficulty in wriggling out of this instance of playing hide and seek.
Further complications have been caused by the charge of dubious business
links between Lalit Modi and Raje's son, Dushyant, which has made the
BJP's critics dub Dushayant as its Robert Vadra, the controversial
son-in-law of Congress president Sonia Gandhi.
Scams are not only
about thieving as the scandals involving the 2G telecom spectrum, the
allocation of mining blocks for coal and others during Manmohan Singh's
tenure suggest. They can also damage a party by showcasing the
subterranean links between powerful ministers and sleaze operators.
Considering
that Narendra Modi had once taunted Congress leader Shashi Tharoor for
having a Rs.50 crore girl friend because of Sunanda Pushkar's IPL deals,
the reports about how prominent BJP leaders have gone out of their way
to help the tainted former IPL czar cannot but be an embarrassment for
the prime minister.
The BJP rode to power not only on the basis
of promising economic growth but also by stressing its commitment to a
clean public life.
Now, both the pledges have failed to
materialize. Unless Narendra Modi demonstrates his fabled capacity to
act decisively, the daily unfolding of the bonhomie between ministers
and a person under the scanner of the Enforcement Directorate will only
provide more juicy grist to the Congress's mill.
Taken together
with the disquiet among farmers about the proposed amendments of the
land acquisition law, and among ex-servicemen over the delay in
implementing the one-rank, one-pension rule, the Sushma
Swaraj-Vasundhara Raje-Lalit Modi saga can have damaging consequences
for the BJP on two fronts.
First, the inevitable stalling of
parliament on the issue will be a further setback to the prime
minister's reforms agenda. Secondly, the BJP will not find it easy to
launch an effective election campaign in Bihar when its hands are not
clean and when it faces various disaffected groups.
Moreover, in
view of the attacks from multiple fronts, the BJP seems to have lost
some of its fighting instincts. Otherwise, it is not clear why it backed
off from attacking the Congress on the affairs of Ottavio Quattrocchi
and Warren Anderson after a few initial forays.
Though several
years old, these issues still have the potential to embarrass the
Congress, and particularly the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty. If the BJP has
erred by befriending a virtual absconder, the Congress had committed a
worse sin by allowing Quattrocchi, an Italian friend of the dynasty, and
Anderson, the Union Carbide chief, escape from the country without
facing the consequences of their offences in the Bofors howitzer deal
and the world's worst industrial disaster in Bhopal.
Instead of
raising these issues, the BJP has chosen to opt for a Central Bureau of
Investigation (CBI) probe into a disproportionate assets case against
the Congress's chief minister in Himachal Pradesh, Virbhadra Singh,
presumably to show that its rival is also not squeaky-clean.
The
move will appear all the more to be a tit-for-tat exercise considering
that the government has stopped the CBI for pursuing the inquiries into
the Ishrat Jehan fake encounter case apparently in view of the
likelihood that an investigation can turn the needle of suspicion
towards senior BJP leaders.
For the BJP, the euphoria of May last year must now seem far away.
(Amulya Ganguli is a political analyst. The views expressed are personal. He can be reached at [email protected])
