Dear Congress,
Enough already! Your moves over the last week or so, to demonstrate your commitment to probity in the wake of the 3 recent scams, are way too sluggish and your lack of alacrity way too palpable to fool anybody but my 6 year old.First, Suresh Kalmadi, for many years the chief spoiler of sports in India and more recently, head panjandrum of the Organising Committee that oversaw the preparation for the Commonwealth Games and overran the original budget by a factor of between 10 and 15. Do you really think you've done the nation a favour by getting him, stubborn as he was, to resign from his position as secretary of the Congress Parliamentary Party? What is the connection between this position with his role in the CWG scam? What difference did his resignation from this position make to anything or anybody? Where did all that money go?
Second, Ashok Chavan, shameless usurper of entitlements bestowed by the nation on bereaved families of soldiers killed in the Kargil war. Do you seriously think we're going to be satisfied with his resignation from the post of CM? How is his stepping down going to change anything? When will those families get their apartments back? Or get equivalent compensation?
Third, A Raja, who imagined he was really a raja and so in his delusion, mistook the national treasury for his own personal till. Do you honestly believe you've achieved a lot by coaxing, cajoling and coercing his bosses to get him, stubborn as he was, to resign from his position as Cabinet Minister for Communications and IT? Isn't that futile, given that his bosses are still hanging on to the same portfolio, as though it was their birthright, and will in all likelihood merely replace the hands that have been milking the telecom cash cow up until now, with a fresh pair of hands? When will all that money be recovered and restored to the exchequer?
The order of magnitude of each of these scams is reportedly anywhere between, in US dollar terms, a hundred million to several billion. This is not small change we're talking here. And the people of the country have adequate reason to suspect that the individual made to resign in each case, corrupt as he himself may be, represents just the proverbial tip of this iceberg of corruption.
Your Standard Operating Procedure, when faced with public outcry against corruption, is to announce that you will launch a probe. In fact, you launch many probes, trying to make it look like more probes means greater earnestness in getting to the bottom of things. You know fully well that more probes actually make the process inefficient, with different agencies bumping into one another at every step and fighting territorial wars among one another. Clearly, this is what you want then: for the truth to get lost in the chaos of multiple probes and jurisdiction issues.
In any case, you should understand that probes do not ensure probity. Especially if the probing agency's probity itself is in question. You should recognize that the public has lost its confidence in the integrity and/or efficiency of any investigating agency in the country that you may call in to conduct a probe. The need of the hour is a complete overhaul of a corrupt culture that has been carefully protected and nurtured over all these years by people in power. Clean that up now! Stem the rot! Get all the guilty to book -- there are several culprits behind each of these three mega-scams of the season. And several more behind the scams that are not in the limelight at the moment. We want to see these fraudsters in prison, serving sentences that keep them away from civil society for a long, long time. Not merely removed from their incumbent posts for a few months, and then allowed to come back and continue to feed off the country's resources like vampires off their victim's blood. Frankly, given the nature, extent and significance of these offences, I think the guilty need to be charged with treason, not just fraud. These are crimes against the nation and its people, not just rounding-off errors in the GDP.
You know what you have to do if you want my vote. I am willing to set aside my concerns (though they run deep) over having a bigoted government run this country if only it promises to be cleaner than yours. The way I feel at this time, I'll take that chance.
Have a nice day.
