JOIN US‘40% Govt’: CM, PM can no longer hide, a probe is inevitable
That the matter of the “40% commission” allegations by the Karnataka State Contractors’ Association (KSCA) has not been investigated and resolved even more than a year after the association first made bold to go public with the charges is unacceptable. The KSCA had alleged in July last year that under the BJP government in the state, government contractors were being forced to pay “commission”, or more plainly bribes, amounting to as high as 40 per cent of the cost of projects, failing which payments were not being released to them. The KSCA had first approached Chief Minister Basavaraj Bommai with its complaint. Later, it even wrote to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, seeking his intervention. While the Prime Minister maintained a silence on the issue for almost a year before responding vaguely, Bommai did announce some steps to make the bidding process for contracts more transparent. But KSCA president D Kempanna has once again alleged that nothing has changed on the ground and that, in fact, the government continues to withhold payments totaling some Rs 22,000 crore that is due to the contractors. For the first time in this whole matter, the association has also pointed fingers at a particular minister for harassing contractors for bribes. Bommai should have ordered a probe into the matter and got to the bottom of it by now. Instead, he has reacted by demanding proof and documents from the contractors. The minister in question, Munirathna Naidu, has threatened to file a defamation suit against them. These reactions do not cut ice. No-one demanding a bribe does so in the open or leave documentary evidence of it; no one taking a bribe gives a receipt for it. The truth or otherwise of the allegations made by the contractors can only be determined by a thorough investigation that would include looking into the forensic trail of the monies involved. The fact that the government has not ordered a probe into the whole matter for more than a year suggests that it perhaps does not want the truth to come out.
It is disingenuous on the part of the Chief Minister to say that Kempanna had met Congress leader Siddaramaiah before reiterating his allegations last week and so the whole thing is Congress-instigated. This is an attempt to deny any investigation into the matter. The KSCA had first approached Bommai and Prime Minister Modi with its complaint. It seems to have gone to the Opposition only after neither of them acted on its complaint. It is also disingenuous on the part of the BJP to shield the minister named. After all, the BJP had itself called him corrupt when he was in the Congress. Did he become clean as soon as he joined the BJP? The Chief Minister has said the contractors can go to the Lokayukta. But this is an allegation against his whole government and his ministers. It is his duty to order an investigation into the matter and seek to clear his own name and that of his government.
It is well known that there is corruption and bribery in the awarding of government contracts. Had there been no corruption in the contracts, would our roads, for instance, have been in the sorry state they have been in for decades? Would the city’s garbage clearance and waste management system, for another, been so dysfunctional? Would the city not have had a proper vehicle parking system by now? It is also well known that there is a whole institutionalised system of sharing of bribe money that goes up and down the bureaucratic and political layers of government and that it has been perfected over the decades. The contractors were themselves willing partners in it and had no incentive to break a system that has worked to enrich them for decades so long as the demands for bribes were bearable. It is unlikely that they would have come out with their complaint at all had not this ‘system’ become so greedy and closed in on them so tightly as to squeeze the very life out of their businesses.
It must also be noted that it is not only the contractors who have complaints against the intense corruption in government. Similar voices are being heard even from institutions to which the government makes grants for various purposes – that the grants are not released unless a 30-40 per cent cut is given as bribe. Then there are the teacher and sub-inspector recruitment scams in which, too, the government had first denied all allegations and refused to order an investigation as long as it could, only to have to eat its own words and order probes later, however reluctantly. The latest is a complaint to PM Modi by as many as 13,000 schools over corruption in the Bommai government.
By overlooking all these, the government is simply trying to hide what can no longer be hidden. In doing so, Bommai may be hiding corruption not only during his own tenure, which may only be the tip of the proverbial iceberg, but that during previous regimes also and, in the process, perhaps killing any chance of ending this system of corruption and patronage in the future. He would be doing a great service to the state, and to the country, if instead he were to order a CBI-ED-I-T joint probe into the matter.
On August 15, PM Modi stood on the ramparts of Red Fort in Delhi and declared a war on corruption. But what we have seen so far does not inspire confidence in his words. We have seen the central probe agencies such as ED, CBI and I-T let loose on Opposition leaders and parties, in most cases without any evidence, and phishing probes being conducted in the hope of finding some dirt on them. That the Prime Minister has not yet ordered a probe into the serious allegations of corruption against the BJP government in Karnataka can only lead to one conclusion -- that the oft-declared goal to eliminate corruption is mere lofty rhetoric behind which the real goal is to eliminate all political opposition and criticism against his government and party.