Success at any cost

They hogged the attention, dominated headlines, and indulged in rhetoric to sound as if they are the voice of the people. What they are, in fact, is the disease which is corroding the nation. The disease is lack of integrity in public life. Values, they believe, are what they uphold or mould. For them, the success justifies the means.

The point that at least three of them underline is not just corruption which, in their case, is under scrutiny before the law court or the commission of inquiry. They want to establish that those in power have the right to lay the law of the land without being questioned. One case here or another inquiry there does not stop them. They want to make the prevalent porous, parochial system still more promiscuous and the bureaucracy still more obedient so that they can exploit any situation for their own purpose or the party to which they belong.

This was visible even in the days of Jawaharlal Nehru and Lal Bahadur Shastri. But they took the corrective steps and punished top ministers for even misdemeanours. The first made Petroleum Minister K.D. Malaviya quit the cabinet for not rendering account of funds collected from an individual for the party.

Shastri forced Finance Minister T.T. Krishnamachari to resign on a matter of impropriety.

The gravity of charges has increased since and so has their frequency. But ministers go scot-free. A coalition government is too dependent on the support of its constituents to dare take any action against the erring ministers. Manmohan Singh could not ask Lalu to resign even after the charges were framed against him because his Rashtriya Janata Dal, with 23 members in the Lok Sabha, threatened to withdraw support from the government.

Consequently, the effort in a coalition is to cover up things or rationalise them. It happened during the rule of the BJP-led NDA government, and it is happening when the Congress-led UPA is in power. There is no escape from such a scenario for many, many years to come because no political party is likely to win an absolute majority in the Lok Sabha on its own.

It does not mean that the party with a majority ceases to have skeletons in its cupboard. Rajiv Gandhi had a two-thirds majority in the Lok Sabha. Still the Bofors gun scandal chased him all his life. Now with the Congress in power, the case is as good as dead. There has been no information about Prime Minister Narasimha Rao's acceptance of a briefcase which someone had handed him over with lakhs of rupees in it. The best course would have been the appointment of Lokpal (ombudsman), a proposal that has been hanging fire for more than three decades. Such machinery with an independent apparatus may be able to fight against political corruption. But its independence is what the government fears and hence the delay in the appointment.

One thing common against Fernandes and Lalu Yadav is that they can get into any clothes. One has come to don the saffron. The other has raised the standard of caste. Yet, both were once socialists. Ram Manohar Lohia and Jayaprakash Narain were their gurus. They still mention their names, but they have torn their teachings into shreds. All that Fernandes and Lalu want to remember is which side of their bread is buttered. This has come to be their ideology.

If it is of any satisfaction to Lalu, Fernandes is the strategist on the NDA side. He is said to have initiated the boycott of parliament and the NDA's meeting with the President of India to ask for Lalu's resignation. Lalu too can take credit for crafting the policy of concentrating on Fernandes when he was the Defence Minister. The problem with people in the Left is that they have no sense of wrong when they move to the right. Their ideology is all about convenience.

Common friends of Fernandes and Lalu are unhappy that the two are not leading the socialist movement in the country. But what they do not see is the change in them. Power politics and money have done the trick. Modi's is a foregone case. No amount of disclosuresa police official has made his diary publiccan make the Centre go beyond dotting i's and crossing the t's.

It does not want to provoke the BJP after the latter's boycott of parliament. Former Gujarat governor Sunder Singh Bhandari's statement to find out why the system failed has gone awry. However, one would like to know why he did not speak out when "the system failed" during his governorship.

Arun Shourie's problem is his sense of self-righteousness and arrogance. But he should not get away with what is blatantly wrong. He may be right about rules and procedures, but there is something called propriety which he claims to wear on his sleeve. The Centaur Hotel that he sold as the Disinvestment Minister may seem all right to him but not to others. Many would like to own the hotel on the terms at which the purchaser got. He was the sole bidder and Shourie even arranged money through a government bank. The Comptroller and Auditor General has said all that. That the hotel owner fulfilled all the requirements which Shourie's ministry had laid down is not the point. What is at issue is that the government could have made much more money, but did not do so. I still can't comprehend the hurry with which the hotel was sold in the first instance.

In their own way, all the four have mutilated the system, some less and some more. Both political parties, the Congress and the BJP, have used the system for their convoluted purpose. The BJP is more to blame because it is desperate in the wilderness but the Congress is not giving it any space which the BJP characterises as "lack of self-respect."

The BJP should recall the period of its rule. It was the saffron crowd all the way. The Congress had picked up pseudo-progressives and those who have hovered around the dynasty to be a repeat. The nation has been left to grope its way through the lengthening shadows of opportunism, corruption, and communalism. It has survived so far. There is no reason why it will not in the future.

Kuldip Nayar is an eminent Indian columnist.