Modi in a free fall
Few governments have had such a rapid free fall in public eye, as the Modi government has in past one month. It is ironical for a man like Modi who rewrote his Bharatiya Janata Party’s history and brought it in power in May 2014 on its own steam, a feat that even party founders and stalwarts like Atal Bihari Vajpayee and LK Advani could never achieve.
The Modi government had completed its first anniversary by proudly proclaiming its singular achievement that no scam had erupted during its first year in office. But this argument has been blown into smithereens. Two central ministers (Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj and Human Resource Development Minister Smriti Irani), one chief minister (Vasundhara Raje of Rajasthan), three BJP-led state governments (Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra) and two Maharashtra ministers (Pankaja Munde and Vinod Tawde) are in the dock for various alleged sins of omission and commission.
These are all prominent faces of the BJP — at the center and in states. Worse, the party that claimed zero scam during the first year of the Modi government is now staring at multiple scams involving the dramatis personae named above.
Even as the Lalit Modi scandal (unarguably the BJP government’s first scam) was still raging, more scams tumbled out from the BJP-ruled Maharashtra. After Pankaja Munde, another Maharashtra minister Vinod Tawde is facing allegations of irregularities in connection with awarding of a $30 million contract by his School Education Department without going through the laid down procedure of e-tendering. But now even a bigger scam is threatening to singe the BJP in the shape of VYAPAM scam in Madhya Pradesh. VYAPAM is the Hindi acronym for Professional Examination Board in which bungling worth hundreds of millions of dollars is suspected over past several years.
The case threatens to snowball into a huge controversy as senior Congres leader Digvijay Singh has moved the Supreme Court demanding a free and independent investigation into the scam.
Most astonishingly, while all this has happened and fresh disclosures and legal documents have been brought into the public domain by the Congress party, Modi has not uttered a single word on any of the controversies cited above.
The Congress is obviously whiffing a whale of a chance and a huge political opportunity to pin Modi down on the mat; particularly when the hugely important Bihar state assembly elections are just a few months away.
The Congress party is so busy in these politically surcharged days that it is holding press conferences daily, sometimes several times a day. On June 30, a Congress leader Jairam Ramesh accused the Modi government of “layers of falsehood, repeated attempts at hoodwinking and labored efforts to dupe the people of India …opening up the gates of collusive culpability of entire BJP leadership in Modigate Scandal.”
Vasundhara Raje and her parliamentarian son, Dushyant Singh, have been dragged into another scandal of grabbing state government-owned palace in Dholpur, an erstwhile princely state and now a part of Rajasthan, and running a private luxury hotel. The Congress party has produced 10 legal documents to support its claim and given details how Raje and her son were in cahoots with the scam-tainted Lalit Modi, the former boss of Indian Premier League (IPL). It has also alleged that the recent move by the Vasundhara Raje government to slash taxes on tobacco produces was yet another blatant attempt to help Lalit Modi owned Cigarette manufacturing company Godfrey Philips. “It is also apparent now that the quid pro quo between Vasundhara Raje and Lalit Modi have crossed all limits of rational behavior — it is all pervasive, all encompassing and stinks of the worst kind of give and take,” said Jairam Ramesh.
Clearly, the wheel has come full circle for Modi. His silence will be injurious to his reputation and credibility.
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