| Published on 12-07-2007 In National |
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Written by
V.Krishna Ananth |
We are most likely to have a President who succeeded in reducing a cooperative sugar mill into a sick unit. Not just that. She has headed a women's cooperative bank set up for the express purpose of lending money to women; the bank then ended up lending money to her male relatives. And worse was that these loans turned out to be bad debts. The employees of this bank were forced into expressing their patriotism by contributing to the Kargil war martyrs fund but the money thus collected was kept by her family members.
Our President will be someone who thinks that the women in certain parts of the country began covering their face only after the Moghuls set up their empire in India. And that they did this in order to save themselves from being molested or raped by the invaders.
Well. Prathiba Patil is not the only one of the kind who reduced the cooperative movement into an instrument for money spinning and swindling. We have had the one and only Abdul Rehman Antulay, who set up the Indira Prathistan, whose objective was to recognize and encourage talent in the fields of literature and fine arts by way of grants and awards. This happened in 1980 and came to loght in September 1981.
Of the Rs. 5.2 Crores that constituted the corpus of this trust, Rs. 2 Crores came as grant from the State Government and the rest was collected as donations. The first part of the scandal was that orders were issued by the government that the Sugar Cooperatives across the state collect Rs. 2.50 for every tonne of sugar from the factories. The orders were issued in such manner that an impression was created that the trusts were under the government. They were not.
The trust deeds were drafted in such a way that Antulay would be able to take away the money with him whenever he decided to wind up the trusts. And the scandal became bigger when it was established in the Bombay High Court that Antulay had abused his office as Chief Minister and the trusts to allot large quantities of cement, scarcely available at that time, to select buyers. Among the beneficiaries of this were the Rahejas; they managed to get 700 tonnes of cement in return for a donation of Rs. 5.6 lakhs to the Indira Prathistan.
In other words, they had paid Rs. 40 to Antulay for each bag of cement they got out of turn. Antulay, now, is an important member of the Union Cabinet!
As for Prathiba Patil, it is worse. She will be the President of the Republic and all appointments to Constitutional posts will be done in her name. And in the event of a charge of corruption against her, the only way to deal with that would be to impeach her. And impeachment is not all that easy. It will be in order, now, to recall how difficult it was to impeach Justice V.Ramasami, a judge of the Supreme Court, even after it was established, with credible evidence, that was guilty of abusing his position. The move to impeach him failed at the last stage because the Congress (I) and the AIADMK decided to save Justice Ramasami.
And as we discuss the sanctity of Constitutional offices, one is bound to wonder about the Election Commission. In 2009, we will be having Navin Chawla, as Chief Election Commissioner. Who is this Chawla? Well. He is a 1969 batch IAS officer. He was Secretary to the Lt. Governor of Delhi during the 19 months between June 25, 1975 and March 21, 1977. And it is on record that he was an active participant in all the undemocratic acts that were carried out in that 19 months when the Constitution and the rights it guarantees were denied to anyone and everyone who disagreed with Indira Gandhi and her son, Sanjay Gandhi.
Some of us may recall of the Justice Shah Commission of Enquiry that went into the Emergency exceses. And the Commission indicted Navin Chawla for having been ``authoritarian and callous.'' It held him guilty of ``gross abuse of power in cynical disregard of the welfare of the citizen''. And in its report, copies of which are still available in the Parliament House library, the Shah Commission pronounced him ``unfit to hold any public office which demands an attitude of fair play and consideration for others.''
That is it. Soon, we will have a President whose record is one of reducing institutions into a means to enrich herself and her family members and a Chief Election Commissioner who was declared to be unfit to hold any public office! |
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