JOIN USWake up, PM, and smell the corruption
Soon after contractors wrote to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, accusing the BJP government in the state of serious corruption, two school management associations have told the Prime Minister that the state Education Department is riddled with corruption, too. If the contractors said that they have to pay 40 per cent of the project cost as “commission”, the school managements have said the bribes demanded from them, too, have shot up. The two associations, representing 13,000 schools, have said that bribes are demanded for various processes, such as the issuance of annual recognition certificates, and they have named minister B C Nagesh as a prime source of corruption. They have said that instead of curbing corruption, he is driving it and that has pushed several schools to the verge of closure. The letter also talks of “two different BJP ministers”. There are other ministers, like Home Minister Araga Jnanendra, who have landed in other scandals. The schools have said they have approached Chief Minister Bommai several times about this.
This is again an indictment of the minister and the government as a whole. There has always been corruption in the state. But it is an unprecedented situation in which people and organisations with presence across the state come out in public with complaints against ministers and the government and say that levels of corruption have gone beyond tolerable limits. Very often people pay and pass, taking corruption as a fact of life, but now, they have to pay so much that they cannot pass. Everyone knows that these two departments are not alone in their corrupt ways. What is worse is the response to it. Bommai says the charges are politically motivated, Nagesh says go to the Lokayukta, and the Prime Minister says nothing. Since there are no receipts for bribes, how is the proof to be produced?
The Prime Minister had called the then Congress government in Karnataka a ‘10 per cent government’ in 2018. His party’s government and its ministers have bigger percentages to answer for. Even as central agencies are unleashed on Opposition leaders, those who are named as “super corrupt” have no investigation to fear. The way in which the complaints are dismissed shows an impunity of a terrible kind, a brazen confidence that comes from the knowledge that no agency will come asking questions. But the ministers and the government will have to answer questions from the people, and they will not be kind questions. The least that should be done now is to order independent investigations into the charges against these ministers, keeping them out of the government. But when the entire government is in the dock, how would this be done?