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T. V. R. Shenoy
I ended my last column by saying that the investigation of the hawala scam was a dropped catch, and praying that the Romesh Sharma case wouldn't be similarly flubbed. However, the chaos of the past fortnight is less than reassuring. Dropped catches seem to be the order of the day; but are they the result of so many butter-fingers or are they deliberately contrived?Given the current state of affairs, I propose we hand over investigations to the Pakistani cricket board, an organisation that seems to take charges of match-fixing quite seriously. In any case, qualified for the task or not, they can't do a more error-prone job than the Delhi Police.
The Union Home Minister has already taken the task of investigations away from the Delhi Police and given it to the Central Bureau of Investigation. But, given the involvement of so many high-profile politicians, bureaucrats, and even policemen, it is anybody's guess how much the CBI can do. At the moment, the CBI men seem to be concentrating on nailing Sharma andhis associates under the Official Secrets Act. This may prove to be harder than the sleuths suspect, but that is another story.
The point to be noted is that Romesh Sharma's influence did not suddenly come to an end with his arrest. Let me cite one instance: the strange case of Amina Bi Kaskar, Dawood Ibrahim's mother. By now, it has been widely reported how Romesh Sharma pulled strings to get her a new passport so that she could leave the country in a hurry. However, nailing precisely which officer (or officers) was responsible for this idiocy is proving to be an unusually tough job.
How come? Surely, the Indian bureaucracy excels in putting things down in one file after the other. So checking the paper trail should be simple, right? Wrong.
For starters, the External Affairs Ministry is calmly insisting that the relevant file has simply disappeared. True or not, that is the mandarins' story as related to the CBI, and they are sticking to it.
But it gets weirder still. It turns out that Romesh Sharmawas wasting his time when he got the lady a fresh passport. Neither the Bombay Police nor the Union Home Ministry authorities of the day had issued an LOC a `Look Out Circular' for her. Essentially, what that means is that nobody would have stopped her at the airport even if she had gone with her old passport.Why wasn't this elementary precaution taken? The answer lies with the then Prime Minister, Narasimha Rao, and his home minister, S. B. Chavan. But I am yet to hear that either of those two is being called to task.
Let us get back to the External Affairs Minis-try. It now turns out that the IFS officer who was with the Minister of State at the time is currently representing India in a sensitive place Dubai. If it just coincidence that it happens to be one of Dawood Ibrahim's reputed hideouts or were strings pulled to obtain a plum posting for a favoured officer?
If Dawood Ibrahim is ever to be brought to answer for his crimes against India, a close liaison with the authorities in the United ArabEmirates is absolutely essential. How seriously will they take India's arguments if there is even the slightest doubt about the man who is representing India? Surely we can use the concerned gentleman's diplomatic talents in another sphere.
As noted above, this officer was close to the then Minister of State. And since the subject of junior ministers has come up, it should be noted that at least two former ministers of state in the Union Home Ministry have been linked to Romesh Sharma. One of them may have used that acquaintance to obtain a farm-house at a cut-throat (the perfect adjective) price. The other gentleman, it has been alleged, went so far as to allow Romesh Sharma to escort him to a meeting with Dawood Ibrahim's brother.
It is also recognised today that the Don's wings spread farther than just Delhi and Mumbai. The courts have specifically asked the CBI to look into Romesh Sharma's alleged links with Laloo Prasad Yadav. (How long will it be before interested parties denounce this as a BJP plotagainst one of the bulwarks of secularism?)
Of course, it wasn't just the politician-bureaucrat nexus that used Romesh Sharma as a means of contacting Dawood Ibrahim. The investigators have turned up a hilarious story about a prominent businessman. He had no qualms about paying the tribute demanded by the man in Dubai, he just wanted Sharma to arrange a slight discount. And this was just one of the instances where the same man found Sharma a useful man to know. When it came to getting payment out of others, for instance, there was nobody like Sharma to get the job done quickly.
I am told that the investigators have clinching evidence of all this. The conversations with people in Dubai were recorded on tapes. A post-dated cheque of his was recovered from Romesh Sharma's house in Delhi. Of course, barely a sniff of all this has reached the media.
The businessman in question was someone with excellent political contacts. But he never bothered to use them to escape any demands from Dubai. Perhaps hispolitician-friends told him that there was no point in resisting.
It all comes down to one thing: the men who permitted Romesh Sharma to get away with what he did, perhaps even drawing profit from it. But that is not the focus of the ongoing probe.
All the talk about the possible involvement of a large industrial house is little more than a very large red herring. Why isn't anyone talking about the proven culpability of the politicians and bureaucrats who allowed the situation to deteriorate for so long?
It sounds beautifully ominous to speak of the Official Secrets Act. Accusing someone of contravening it makes it seem tantamount to high treason. I agree that men who break the laws should be punished if their guilt is proven. But let us have a sense of perspective.
Possessing a few innocuous papers is definitely not in the same league as hobnobbing with Dawood Ibrahim and his henchmen. (One of those "official secrets" recovered from a Reliance executive is the record of a petroleum committee meeting,but Mukesh Ambani is a member of that body.) Is it asking for too much to hope that the CBI and the rest will pursue politicians as enthusiastically is they follow lesser mortals?
Copyright © 1998 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
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