MUMBAI, November 21: In the ongoing saga of the sugar war between the Congress and the Shiv Sena-Bharatiya Janata Party alliance, the former appears to have knocked up a victory for itself with a recent High Court judgement decreeing that the appeal on a case regarding the Chhatrapati Rajaram Co-operative sugar factory in Kolhapur be decided within a month, instead of the nine months sought by the State Government.

The petition, filed by Congress MLA from Kolhapur Digvijay Khanvilkar, related to the massive misappropriation of funds as well as the illegal procurement of cane from outside the decreed zoning area for the factory. According to the zoning laws, every factory is bonded to crush at least two acres worth of cane grown by farmers who are members of the co-operative factory.

However, the Chhatrapati Rajaram factory directors were accused of having procured 47,536 tonnes of excess cane from the neighbouring state of Karnataka to the detriment of its own member-farmers.

Following an adverse judgement against it by the High Court last year, the directors of the factory allegedly took advantage of the ongoing war between the Congress and the Sena-BJP to seek the intervention of the State Government in order to prevent the reconstitution of the factory's board.

However, Khanvilkar's persistence with the judiciary appears to have paid off: The court has denied the government the privilege of appointing an administrator of the factory as also the government request that they be a minimum of three, if not nine, months to reconstitute the board.

The fresh orders decree that the factory's appeal be decided within the month and a new board be reconstituted forthwith.

``It is a clear victory for us considering that such maladministrators as those on the board of the Rajaram factory have been routinely seeking the intervention of the State Government. They conpsire with the ministers to appoint administrators who are anyway their own people. And it is business as usual for them to the detriment of the poor farmers,'' Khanvilkar told The Indian Express.

The High Court decree has given him some cause for jubilation. Apart from the fact that he has been long fighting against the mismanagement of such factories, sugar barons belonging by and large to the Congress recently suffered a major setback in the so-called ``dezoning'' of the sugar co-ops.

An earlier law bonded farmers within a specified area to a particular factory making it incumbent upon them to lift and crush all the cane grown by their member-farmers. However, the zoning was often used to settle political scores: For example, if a particular election went against the interests of a particular sugar baron, farmers from a village that might have voted for the opposition found that their cane was neither procured nor crushed, leading them to suffer major financial losses.

A government committee that studied the process, however, decided that only two acres of land per farmer need bond itself to a particular factory. Farmers were free to sell the rest to the highest bidder.

Sugar barons decried the award on the grounds that rival factories would misuse the dezoning law to drive them out of business by offering higher procurement prices to farmers. They sued the government. However, the High Court upheld the dezoning award as fair and protecting the interests of both farmers and factories.

The decree against the unfair use of administrators against recalcitrant sugar barons has now come as a shot in the arm to the entire sugar co-operative industry. Moreover, the Rajaram judgment also makes it binding upon the factories to dutifully lift the specified cane from farmers. If not, uniquely, it has ordered that the victims of arbitrary policies by the factories or the government, feel free to file another petition to redress their grievances.

Copyright © 1997 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.