Author: Editorial
Publication: The Statesman
Date: June 2, 2011
URL: http://www.thestatesman.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=371718:edits&catid=38:editorial
Presence in Cabinet travesty of justice
"ALL that is necessary for the triumph
of evil is for good men to do nothing," said Edmund Burke. Prime Minister
Manmohan Singh is a good man doing nothing when confronted with overwhelming
evidence of the misdeeds of Dayanidhi Maran while he was telecom minister
in the UPA-I government from May 2004 to May 2007. During celebrations marking
completion of two years by UPA-II last month, the PM acknowledged concern
over corruption and promised corrective action.
UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi said the Congress-led
government would take corruption head on and "demonstrate through actions,
not words, that we mean what we say." Cornered by disclosures in a financial
daily on 21 May and subsequently by a news magazine about 2G spectrum allocation
causing a presumptive loss of revenue of Rs.22,000 crore on his watch, Dayanidhi
ran to 10 Janpath for protection and emerged confidently with an outright
denial of any wrong doing. Licences were denied to Aircel; its owner Sivasankaran
sold the company to Maxis group of Malaysia owned by Ananda Krishnan for $800
million.
The new owner was given 14 licences in cash-rich
circles by Dayanidhi and its value shot up to $8 billion in just two years.
The Maxis Group invested about Rs 700 crore in the Sun TV Group companies,
owned by Kalanadhi Maran, Dayanidhi's brother. Dayanidhi's contention that
the Maxis investment in Sun TV was effected only in December 2007, more than
six months after he ceased to be the telecom minister, shouldn't fool anybody.
The process was set in motion in February
2007 when he was very much in charge of the telecom ministry. He obtained
for Sun TV Direct, a company owned by his brother Kalanidhi and wife, the
required approvals from the Foreign Investment and Promotion Board and the
ministry of Information and Broadcasting to acquire 20 per cent stake for
Astro, one of the Maxis Group companies, on 2 March and 19 March, 2007 respectively.
Dayanidhi was forced out of the UPA-I government due to a feud in the Karunanidhi
family on 13 May 2007 and reinstated in the UPA-II government in May 2009.
The CBI, which is directly under the PMO,
had investigated other misdemeanours of Dayanidhi during his two-year tenure
as telecom minister and submitted its report on 10 September, 2007, recommending
action against him for fraud. With no experience as a parliamentarian or a
minister, this first-time MP was inducted into the UPA Cabinet. One of the
first things he did was to install 323 BSNL telephones in his Boat Club Road
private residence in Chennai and connect it by underground cable to the Sun
TV office in Anna Salai, 3.5 km away, using costly ISDN lines which could
carry huge volumes of TV news programmes faster than satellites to any part
of the world. The CBI report says "these lines are normally used by medium
to large commercial enterprises to meet special needs such as video conferencing,
transmission of huge volume of digital data of audio and video." On a
sample study, the CBI found that 48,72,027 units of calls had been made from
just one telephone (No.2437-1515) in the month of March 2007 alone, "which
is indicative of the massive multimedia transfer in the underlying connections."
The existence of such an exchange created for the minister's exclusive use
was known only to select BSNL staff.
Extrapolating the calls made from one of the
323 BSNL lines, a chartered accountant had worked out that between January
and April 2007, the number of calls made would have been in the order of 630
crore units. At the prevailing rate of 70 paise per call unit, the loss to
BSNL would be more than Rs 440 crore. On the evidence, Dayanidhi showed the
way to A Raja who succeeded him and is now in jail. Dayanidhi meanwhile occupies
pride of place in the Cabinet room. Is this the way of taking corruption head
on as Sonia Gandhi promised?
Rail Travails
One year is a long time…
LAST week marked the anniversary of a day
no one in authority would like to remember. On 28 May 2010, suspected Maoists
derailed the Howrah-Kurla Jnaneswari Express at Jhargram in West Bengal leading
to an accident in which many died. The railways blamed the state government
for inadequate security, the state government blamed the then Minister for
Railways for hobnobbing with the Maoists. While not much came of the investigation,
one of the unfortunate consequences of the Maoist attack was that South-Eastern
Railway suspended night operations on its Kharagpur-Tata, Chakradharpur-Rourkela
and Kharagpur-Agra sections. Several important trains were hit, notably the
Howrah-Mumbai Mail, the Azad Hind Express, the Jnaneswari Express, the Howrah-Porbandar
Express and the Samarsata Express. Also affected were other trains including
the New Delhi-Puri Express and the New Delhi-Bhubaneswar Duranto Express.
As Railway minister, Mamata Banerjee justified this by saying that passenger
safety was of paramount importance. Implicit was the charge that the then
government of West Bengal was incapable of taking the steps necessary to make
night-running of trains safe. To this day, railway time-tables and websites
give the scheduled departure and arrival times of the affected trains; the
fine-print on press releases issued from time to time has to be studied for
information on when trains actually leave and reach. And so the charade has
continued.
Even by India's generally leisurely government
standards, one year is a long time for train operations to be thus compromised.
Hundreds of thousands of passengers have suffered inconvenience. And all those
who use trains on the affected routes do so with the threat of delay and compromised
safety staring them in the face as schedulers try to pack 24 hours of train
services into 18 hours of operation. Now Miss Banerjee heads the government
of West Bengal; and she has a crucial stake in railway safety through her
party's continued engagement with the Rail ministry. In other words, there
is no one to pass the buck to. It is high time safety on the affected sections
was beefed up, the root causes of disaffection addressed and normal train
operations resumed. If that can't be done for reasons of safety, the railways
should accept they cannot operate trains in some areas at night and recast
their time-tables. Two faces are on show, and neither is pretty.
