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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 minister’s 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 leaders—one 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 government’s interference despite the Supreme Court’s 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. That’s not so much an indication of the CBI’s credibility as a sad reflection on its counterparts in the states. If the CBI gets away with its claim of being the country’s 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 government’s 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 Centre’s 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. It’s 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.