Wanted: fast track courts

FOR the average Indian, newspaper headlines hold a special fear nowadays. A dread that some other hallowed institution, or some other sacred reputation will be found wanting. That some Tehelka, or the CBI, or whoever, will be putting out some serious dirt on them.

How else would you react to, within the short span of less than three weeks, a wave of news reports of corruption in the Prime Minister’s house/office, the house of the Defence minister being used to openly work on deals, with people from the defence ministry also involved (that’s Tehelka). And while Tehelka was just about unfolding, there came the exposes on the capital market. Exposes, and CBI raids, that showed just how scandal-rigged the system was, of how select operators rigged it shamelessly while the regulator slept. Of how the banking system was abused, of how raids on these brokers were postponed at the last minute thanks to political manoeuvring.

It gets worse. While Tehelka and the stock market scam were vying with each other for our attention, another time bomb exploded. The CBI raided 48 customs officials for their involvement in a huge smuggling network run by an Uzbek Olga Kozireva out of the Indira Gandhi International Airport in New Delhi for over a year. The country’s top customs and excise officer B.P. Verma was also arrested on corruption charges — his son was alleged to have taken Rs 2 crore on behalf of his father in a 5-star hotel — and was also accused of turning a blind eye to the Olga case despite being aware of it.

If Harshad is still around, the problem is not so much with SEBI as it is with the courts (As we go to press, Congress chief whip in the Lok Sabha P.R. Das Munshi has alleged a huge scam where the state lost Rs 13,000 crore by favouring fixed line telecom service providers like Reliance, HFCL and the Tatas). All this is frightening, but the average Indian can still take it in his/her stride, if he/she had complete confidence that the government will be able to provide justice eventually. While there’s no surety of that yet, the familiar buck-passing game has already begun. Though the stock market regulator SEBI is still not saying it is not responsible for the actions of brokers like Ketan Parekh, Company Affairs’ minister Arun Jaitley has already begun saying that the current mess is SEBI’s responsibility, and not his. The RBI has already said it has limited powers over co-operative banks — like the Madhavpura one Ketan used to finance his ambitions — and that the state governments are responsible for them, not the RBI.

Making it all the more confusing is the current standoff between Finance minister Yashwant Sinha and the country’s chief vigilance officer N. Vittal on the Verma case — by the way, in case you want to hold Vittal responsible for Verma’s appointment, Vittal is already saying he has no real powers! After Verma’s arrest, Vittal went to town pointing out he had warned the then finance secretary against appointing Verma to the top customs/excise job as he had a terrible reputation. Since that sounded like the government had deliberately appointed a tainted person to this job, Sinha retorted by saying that Verma’s reputation was clean when he was appointed and that Vittal hadn’t read the files. That is partially correct — in all the cases Vittal mentions against Verma, the latter’s rulings on cases had been upheld by the CEGAT, an appellate court for customs/excise. And that’s also why Verma’s name doesn’t even figure in the list of 900-odd corrupt officers on Vittal’s own website. But what makes the whole episode comical (if you think tragic is funny) is that Sinha himself ordered Verma’s removal almost three weeks ago, but this wasn’t done as there were some problems on where Verma was to be transferred.

So what does the future hold for the average Indian? Can the government, any government, cleanse the system of which it is an integral part? While the Congress and other opposition parties naturally say the NDA can’t, the government says its actions speak for themselves. After all, it has ordered massive CBI and other raids on all the guilty parties, and the investigation is going ahead full steam. There is even talk of how heads may roll at the country’s stock market regulator, for their laxity in policing the markets. All this is nice, but it’s hardly reassuring. The fact of the matter is close to a decade after the Harshad Mehta scam, Harshad is still around and, till recently, was believed to be trading in the markets through front companies. Sukh Ram, in whose house over Rs 3 crore was found five years ago, is also going strong.

The problem is that, even after formal investigations are over (and these take years), the country’s courts take a decade or two to decide the matter. If we are to restore the citizen’s faith in the rule of law, we need special courts to try political-bureaucratic crimes on a fast-track basis — a Ketan or a Verma actually serving sentences within a year or so, will go a long way in making people feel the law works, for them. Of course, going by the speed at which political-bureaucratic scams are surfacing, these special courts may just have to be made permanent.

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