Commentary/Dilip D'Souza
What hold has Narasimha rao over these men? What's in their pasts?
What hold does Narasimha
Rao have on his fellow Congressmen? How is it that
they are simply unable to stand up to this man? Men
like Rajesh Pilot, Sharad Pawar, K Karunakaran and Balram Jakhar are
constantly telling the press and circulating rumours about how they have
had enough of Rao and he has got to go. But as soon as the time comes to turn
such talk into action, they turn silent.
Congress Working Committee meeting
follows Congress Parliamentary Party meeting with nothing more transacted
in them than the usual banalities and platitudes. Rao remains firmly
in charge of his party.
The other day a Bombay rag carried this
screaming headline: Narasimha Rao Cheater.
The very mention of the word 'cheater'
beside the name of a man
who used to be prime minister produces a certain
squeamishness inside (can you imagine Jawaharlal Nehru Cheater?
or Lal Bahadur Shastri Crook headlines?).
The headline was to celebrate the latest
shameful episode involving our ex-prime minister: He has been named
as an accused in a cheating case involving a non resident Indian called Lakhubhai Pathak
and the jailed fraudman, Chandra Swami.
Rao's so-called detractors within his party
whispered loudly they were planning to use this newest scandal to get rid of
the man. The press did not remind them that they had said the same thing
several times earlier.
Most recently, they said it after the May elections,
in which the Congress got the electoral thrashing it fully deserved. Then,
we heard from them that Rao would be made to answer for the disaster
by resigning as president of the party. There were even rumours of a split
in the Congress party.
As of now, those were all no more than whispers.
Nobody has spoken out against Narasimha Rao in any party forum.
He is still president of the party.
It's clear Rao doesn't have either the statesmanship
or the simple decency
to quit on his own while the scandals are being investigated.
The question is: Why don't any of his colleagues have the strength
to toss him out? And as they don't, I can't help wondering: What is the
hold he has on them?
It is not for nothing that I ask this. Narasimha
Rao seems to be nursing hopes to be our prime minister again. Failing that,
or in addition -- who knows? -- he wants to be our President when the current
one leaves office.
I suppose it is possible that Rao is actually innocent
of all the charges against him. But I am not looking forward to having
as head of my country, all over again, a man whose son and nephew are implicated
in a huge urea scam; who, even worse, is himself being openly
called a cheater.
Actually Narasimha Rao's murky past goes
back a long way into ... well, the past. In 1984, he was India's
home minister when
Indira Gandhi was assassinated, and so directly responsible for the
country's law and order.
Well, law and order went flying out of the window
after the lady died.
Congress politicians and activists went on a rampage
over the next few days, killing every Sikh male they could lay their
grimy hands on. As later inquiries clearly showed, powerful Congress figures
like Lalit Maken, H K L Bhagat and Sajjan Kumar had led the massacre. When
it was done, 3,000 Sikhs lay dead.
Home Minister P V Narasimha Rao had shown
no inclination to take steps to halt the rioting. Over the 12 years since
then, he has not lifted a finger to see that Bhagat and Kumar, or even some
of the lesser known killers, get the punishment they should get. Of course,
Maken got what he deserved when he was shot dead in 1985.
In 1989, there was the shabby St Kitt's
affair. With Finance Minister V P Singh uncovering all kinds of shady dealings involving
Rajiv Gandhi, including Bofors, he was expelled from the party.
Foreign Minister Narasimha Rao was put on the job of undermining Singh.
Documents were faked, a desk somewhere in the Caribbean masqueraded
as a bank and produced 'evidence' that Singh's son had
a foreign account and was violating the Foreign Exchange Regulation Act.
Three years later, the man had graduated
to prime minister. The BJP's unscrupulous leaders
had succeeded in convincing
their supporters that the
most crucial issue in the country was not drinking
water, or corruption, or education, but -- you will hardly believe this --
a dusty old mosque in Ayodhya, the Babri Masjid.
Rao kept pleading for
time to solve the tangle, but sat around doing nothing in that time.
In December, the BJP's Chalo Ayodhya! (On
To Ayodhya!) call had gathered 200,00 louts in that town.
Armed as they were with sticks
and crowbars and ropes and other implements, there was little doubt what
they planned to do they were going to destroy that mosque. Prime Minister
Rao did precisely nothing to stop them.
After it was torn down, Rao promised Muslims
that the mosque would be rebuilt. He promised that the men who instigated
the demolition would be
punished. He lied.
Both those promises are buried
somewhere in the rubble.
The destruction of the Babri Masjid set
off the worst rioting since 1984.
Through the end of 1992 and early 1993, Bombay burned.
While Bal Thackeray of the Shiv Sena goaded his rioting thugs on,
Maharashtra's then Congress chief minister Sudhakar Naik sat around -- he learned
that particular skill
from Narasimha Rao, obviously -- claiming impotence.
Defence Minister Sharad Pawar rode into town to save it, but occupied
himself with one pursuit -- pushing Naik off his
chair.
Rao himself stayed in Delhi through much of the rioting. Like in 1984,
he was unwilling to take steps to stop it. When he did come to Bombay
on January 15, 1993, he sped through the city in an air-conditioned car,
enroute to a meeting with Madhukar Sarpotdar, the man the army had arrested
four days earlier for rioting. Such was his concern for a flaming Bombay.
Again like in 1984, Rao has done nothing
to ensure punishment for the
killers of over one thousand citizens of Bombay during
the riots.
This dismal litany could go on and on. I've
not even mentioned Harshad
Mehta and the suitcase with ten million rupees that
he says he gave Rao.
Nor the notorious stock scam in which Mehta was a
major figure, in which
the guilty remain, as usual, unpunished. Nor the
blatant buying up of MPs
to help Rao win a no-confidence vote in Parliament.
And now there's the urea scam in which Rao's
relatives are prominent stars.
There's the Chandra Swami cheating case in which Rao
has been named.
Yes, I suppose it is possible that Rao is
really innocent of all that he stands accused of.
It is possible to argue that stopping
rioting, while
beyond his inclination, was beyond his capacity as
well. It is possible that punishing the guilty, whether for riots or demolitions
or for various scams, is also beyond his inclination and capacity.
But what is undeniable is that all these
disgraceful events have happened while P V Narasimha Rao
has been in one position of
considerable authority or another in our country.
In a less corrupted political
atmosphere, Rao would have either accepted
responsibility for them
on his own or been forced to accept responsibility for them. Just as
Lal Bahadur Shastri resigned as railway minister after a single train
accident; or like Richard Nixon was forced out of office by the Watergate scandal.
But today, among us, Rao clings to power in his party like a crusty
barnacle.
What's worse, he aspires to the highest post in the land!
And perhaps the most shameful aspect of
all this is that Rao has surrounded himself in the Congress
with half-men who will not
stand up to him and make him answer for his misdeeds.
Which raises the question:
if Rao's copybook is blotted with so many disgraces, what must their
copybooks look like?
That's why I want to know: What hold does
Narasimha Rao have over these people?
Dilip D'Souza, who lives in Bombay, contributes
a fortnightly column to these pages.
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