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The Congress must have realised by
now that it gave too much leeway to Andimuthu Raja, the former
telecom minister, who has been christened "spectrum" Raja by the
media because of his suspected involvement in a gargantuan Rs.1.7
lakh crore (nearly $40 billion) corruption scandal relating to
second-generation (2G) spectrum allocations by his department.
Even a day before he resigned,
Congress spokesperson Jayanthi Natarajan was repeating the tired
lines about the imperatives of "coalition dharma", the convenient
explanation for turning a blind eye to the misdemeanours of an
ally so that it would not pull down the government.
In trotting out this cynical excuse for inaction, the Congress
seemingly forgot that being sensitive to a partner's concerns
should be inversely proportional to the size of its alleged
malfeasance. If the quantum of the scandal exceeded a certain
limit, succumbing to its self-serving demands could hurt the
government - and even the prime minister.
This is exactly what has happened. Failing to convince Raja's
party, the DMK, that he was becoming a grave liability because of
the mounting allegations about his unprofessional conduct as a
minister, the government tried to take cover behind the fact that
the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) was probing the matter.
Besides, the issue was before the Supreme Court, the Public
Accounts Committee of parliament and the Comptroller and Auditor
General's (CAG) office. But such patent tricks to avoid taking the
obvious step of asking the minister to go were less than
persuasive.
As a result, Raja has achieved what the opposition Left and the
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) could not during Manmohan Singh's six
years as prime minister - hurt his reputation. Given Manmohan
Singh's high reputation for integrity, the dragging in of his name
in the swindle is the saddest blow of all. Perhaps it is the fate
of every decent individual since he cannot always match his
gentlemanly instincts to the devious ways of his political
colleagues.
It is no secret that neither the DMK, nor its octogenarian
patriarch, M.K. Karunanidhi, who is the chief minister of Tamil
Nadu, is regarded as a model of rectitude in public life. It
should have been obvious to Manmohan Singh, and to Congress
president Sonia Gandhi, that expecting them to respond with
outrage to the allegations against Raja was unrealistic.
Karunanidhi and his sons, M.K. Stalin, who is deputy chief
minister, and M.K. Alagiri, who is an MP, are supporting Raja even
now along with Kanimozhi, the patriarch's daughter, who is also an
MP. Considering that they do not have much of a reputation to lose
where probity is concerned, their ostrich-like behaviour about
Raja's alleged misdeeds is not surprising.
But it would not be easy for the prime minister to erase the stain
that he was initially helpless before the DMK's threat of
withdrawing support if Raja was touched. The belief that passing
the buck to the CBI would deflect criticism was curious, to say
the least, because the agency has long been seen as being under
the government's thumb and, therefore, incapable of acting
professionally.
The prime minister's advice to the CAG that it must distinguish
between "wrong-doing and genuine errors" was also ill-timed since
it coincided with the organisation's stinging indictment of Raja.
But what has inflicted perhaps the maximum damage to Manmohan
Singh's reputation is the Supreme Court's criticism of the
inordinate delay by the Prime Minister's Office (PMO) to respond
to the petition by Janata Party president Subramaniam Swamy for
prosecuting Raja. If the PMO had rejected the application, it
might have been a face-saver for Manmohan Singh. But sitting on
the file for nearly a year suggests a deplorable failure to make
up one's mind - and an
indirect admission of Raja's guilt.
The DMK has been one of the Congress' most troublesome allies,
always ready to exploit the government's minority status to
feather its own nests. For instance, it had blocked the
government's move to disinvest the Neyvelli Lignite Corporation
and played hardball over the ministerial assignments of Raja and
T.R. Baalu.
The latter's controversial tenure as the road transport and
highways minister in Manmohan Singh's first government from 2004
to 2009 cost him his ministerial position when the new government
took office. But the shadow over his name pointed to the kind of
people the DMK was nominating under the coalition arrangement
where the prerogative to select ministers from parties other than
the Congress was not the prime minister's, but the ally's.
Now that Raja has followed Baalu out of office, the DMK must have
realised that its scam-tainted followers are depriving it of the
capacity to browbeat the Congress. In normal circumstances, the
DMK would have raised a hue and cry over Raja's resignation. But
not only have the charges of venality silenced it, the party has
also been weakened by its internal problems caused by the feud
between the two brothers, Stalin and Azhagiri, over who will
succeed Karunanidhi.
Like the DMK, the BJP too is unable to train all its guns on the
Congress because it is trying to defuse yet another scandal in
B.S. Yeddyurappa's government in Karnataka about the allocation of
land to the latter's relatives. Among the other opposition
parties, the Communists are now very much a demoralised entity
after its setbacks in the last general election.
It is possible that the opposition's weakness made the government
treat the Raja episode somewhat casually. But it had forgotten how
issues of corruption had fatally wounded earlier governments,
notably Rajiv Gandhi's in 1989 because of the Bofors howitzer
purchase scandal.
(Amulya Ganguli
is a political analyst. He can be reached at aganguli@mail.com)
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