Corruption Watch

[Guest]

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>Condoning bribery</b>
The Pioneer Edit Desk
Cash for votes; sham for justice
<b>The Parliamentary Committee set up to investigate the ‘cash-for-support’ defection scandal that besmirched the vote of confidence won by the Manmohan Singh Government in September 2008 has made one laudable suggestion.</b> It has asked the Union Government to begin the process of regulating sting operations. Unfortunately, that is about where the Committee’s good work ends. In its primary purpose — to uncover an attempt by the UPA coalition to bribe members of the Opposition and instead save a Government that had, for better or worse, been reduced to a minority — the committee has failed and in fact been grossly negligent. It has refused to implicate the senior functionaries of the Congress and the Samajwadi Party against whom there was considerable circumstantial and audiovisual evidence. Instead it has recommended investigations against political colleagues of the whistleblower MPs! Ironically, if the MPs who were offered the money had quietly pocketed it and voted for the Government — in violation of the party whip — they would have got away. There would have been no suggestions of a larger probe or of the investigative might of the Indian state being unleashed on them and their associates.

While the political nature of the committee’s report is apparent — and has been anticipated since the day it was set up — the fact is the panel has fallen short of the standards of rigorous investigation. For instance, telephone records, which are clinching evidence in this case, have been rejected and not even referred to. How fair can a judgement be when it decides to selectively appraise the evidence, and cherry-pick from what the plaintiff places before the court? The committee’s report as well as the dissenting notes of the CPI(M) member and the BJP representative — in this case, Mr VK Malhotra, whose conscientious objection was the last act of his long and distinguished parliamentary career, now that he has decided to devote his remaining days to civic politics — were, in a sense, pre-ordained. They conformed to party positions. The entire episode has done little to advance the cause of parliamentary practice and integrity.

In a larger context, the legislature must pause to ask itself if it is doing enough to prevent bribery of members. At some point or the other this afflicts all parties. Earlier it was felt that only small and regional parties were vulnerable. As the September incident made clear, even big national parties like the BJP or the Congress are not immune to this disease. As far back as 1993, when Jharkhand Mukti Morcha MPs took money to vote in favour of PV Narasimha Rao’s Congress Government, the issue had begun to loom. Yet, even then, the courts had said they could punish the bribe-giver but not the bribe-taker. The logic was that it could not be conclusively established that the receipt of money had caused the individual MP to vote in the manner he did. This is a crucial technicality that has also resulted in — in another field — corrupt cricketers escaping unpunished for match-fixing. It can be proved that a cricketer took money but not that the money induced him to play the shot that ended a particular inning. Cricket has found a way round this labyrinth and expelled the wrongdoers. Can’t Parliament do likewise?
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