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Though his supporters will never admit it, urban development minister Ram Jethmalani appears to have not just over-stepped his limits by having an excessively public scrap with his department's top bureaucrat Kiran Aggarwal, he seems to have picked the weakest case to do so. Indeed, while Jethmalani was extremely upset with what he considered an attempt by his bureaucrats to prevent him from taking a re-look at the Delhi Metro project, his public outcry against Aggarwal was about something else.
Aggarwal, according to Jethmalani, is supposed to have stolen papers from the department, passed them on to Subramaniam Swamy, who then used them to discredit the minister in a press conference. Let's set aside the allegations of her having leaked the papers to Swamy, because there doesn't seem much concrete evidence of this. Besides, there are enough allegations that Jethmalani's friends leaked anti-Aggarwal papers as well. But what were these papers all about anyway? The papers pertained to Jethmalani orderingHUDCO to return the Rs 67 crore that it had confiscated from Pawan Sachdeva, or allot him the guest house complex that he had won in a bid in New Delhi's Andrews Ganj complex. To go back a few years, Sachdeva won a bid for a hotel-cum-guest house project in 1994. He paid the first instalment of Rs 67 crore in February 1995, but due to a severe cash flow problem, despite having borrowed over Rs 200 crore from banks and financial institutions, could not pay the second instalment of Rs 40 crore for the guest house complex due by April. By which time, he had also been arrested on charges of rigging his share prices, and colluding with officials in SEBI and SBI Caps to dupe the public into investing in his Rs 699 crore public-cum-rights issue -- the famous MS Shoes scam case.
Since the contract allowed for cancellation for non-payment, HUDCO issued a notice to Sachdeva. He appealed against this, won some time, lost the case, and filed some more. To cut a long story short, Sachdeva got extensions of over a yearfrom the courts, but failed to make the payment. Meanwhile, the hotel complex was retendered, and won by Leela Kempinski hotels.
Sachdeva, who still has cases pending in the court on the matter, now contends that HUDCO had delayed getting permissions for the guest house, and that's why he didn't make the payment. This is so much nonsense. Under the terms of the bid, he had to pay 40 percent of the amount within a month of allotment, 40 percent two months after this, and the balance on possession. But since he never made the second payment, the question of HUDCO's delays didn't apply this would apply only at the time of possession. Jethmalani's contention that HUDCO delayed matters and so Sachdeva should get justice, of course, is what Aggarwal was resisting. Her argument was that HUDCO had a very strong legal case, so a decision to force it to give him the guest house couldn't just be taken so easily. In any case, since the decision on refunding money despite a breach in contract by the party would havehuge implications for other cases as well, surely the matter should have been studied by the law ministry, and passed by Cabinet.
But, Jethmalani's well-wishers argue, this is precisely what ministerial prerogative is all about. After all, if a minister is just supposed to rubber-stamp whatever the officials give him, then why have a minister? That's a valid argument, but only up to a point. We do know that, with a few exceptions, bureaucrats do tend to hold back progressive proposals, and delay matters. But what happens if a minister is doing something which could be wrong what is then the court of higher appeal? This, of course, is where the Prime Minister comes in. Much as he may wish that the matter between Jethmalani and Aggarwal get sorted out on its own, he just has to take some action. Genuine action, that is, not some kind of inquiry that takes years to conclude. Either Jethmalani or Aggarwal is wrong. And merely shifting one out to another place isn't going to solve the problem either, for theair of wrong-doing will remain. What makes it even more important that the Prime Minister intervene in this matter, apart from the fact that the huge row between the two makes the public feel the government is totally out of control, is that this is not the only ministry where the minister and the bureaucrats are feuding.
The case that comes most immediately to mind is that of the Department of Company Affairs where the Secretary T.R. Krishnamurthy cleared 145 proposals for intercorporate investments of around Rs 1,000 crore, but the minister M. Thambidurai is sitting on most of them for over 4 months. The minister, like Jethmalani, also tried hard to get his secretary removed. Other cases of ministers taking matters into their hands, bypassing the secretaries, of course are those of the ministers of state for revenue, R.K. Kumar and later R. Janarthanam, ordering mass transfers of income tax officials and the ED counsel on their leader J. Jayalalitha's FERA cases in Chennai.
What we have on our hands isa fairly serious war of the ministers with the bureaucracy. And for every time the minister appears to be in the wrong, there are equally strong allegations of the bureaucracy trying to subvert the system -- the latest being the manner in which it is supposed to have tried to hide the Law Commission's draft on the appointment of the CVC, and was caught out by the same Jethmalani. Of course, one wrong does not right another. Presumably that's something the Prime Minister is aware of.
Copyright © 1998 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
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