The Indian polity has been thrown into ferment and chaos following serious allegations against prime minister Narasimha Rao that he received Rs 1 crore bribe from Harshad Mehta, a share broker from Bombay. Mehta early this week released a sworn affidavit which is being printed in this issue. Nani Palkhiwala, a leading Indian lawyer respected for his balanced views, feels that the Mehta charges have a ring of truthfulness. But the Prime minister sought to wriggle out by his one line bland denial. Instead, Rao Summoned meetings of various for a of the ruling party which dutifully supported their leaders.

A moral lapse is being sought to be defended with the might of the ruling party’s for a. it almost amounts to doing what the Soviet leadership did by summoning support from the various party for a completely ignoring the masses, the media and the calls of Conscience, Corruption in India’s high places is a matter of fact. When a high court judge set aside Mrs.Gandhi’s election to Indian parliament in 1975 on account of allegations of corruption against her, Gandhi’s response too was similar. Her refrain was that it was a conspiracy of internal and external forces (it was then the USA’s CIA) to destabilize India and its leadership. To further pursue this line, she imposed on the country an iron mule of emergency which continued for two years culminating in her defeat in the 1977 election. Rao now says Harshad Mehta made allegations at the behest of BJP which wants to destabilize his government. In between, grave charges of corruption we remade against Rajiy Gandhi in Bofors gun deal who too took up the refrain that India was being destabilized by internal and external enemies. At the mass level in India such a line is not cutting much ice but is being pursued by the ruling class, nevertheless, Rao’s own record is far from clean. His political background makes charges against him credible. What with his involvement in the sale of his vast personal estates by violating land reforms Taws, a fact that was pulled out recently by a land reforms tribunal of Andhra Pradesh: he was the one who lent his hand to Saint Kit’s forgery case seeking to invent the involvement of former prime minister V.P.Singh’s son to even the score with Rajiv Gandhi. This gentleman was at the helm of India’s home ministry when thousands of innocent Sikhs were killed by the hired goons of the ruling party. Also remember how this man tried of white wash the Bofors scandal by delivering to the Swedish government a note purported to have been prepared by an unknown advocate pleading for withdrawal of the case. He could not later account for who that advocate was, In this scandal, Rao made his foreign minister Madhavsingh Solanki the scapegoat, In the multibillion share scandal, the then joint director of CBI sought premature retirement after realizing that certain high ups were involved in the scandal, Rao himself held the department investigating the share scandal but did nothing to find out who those high ups involved in the scandal were and let the joint director (K. Madhavan) retire from service, It is equally well known that it is Rao probably who is responsible for the killings of Sikhs in Punjab and Muslims in Kashmir all these years. Not long ago, Rao’s government faced the charges from his own minister Arjun Singh that his telephone was being tapped and that he was being shadowed by intelligence agencies. This background should be sufficient to treat the Mehta charge against him totally credible. His own weak defence and the blatant operations of his intelligence agencies to bring round Sunil Mittal and Manmohan Sharma to deny the charges days after Mehta released to the media his affidavit all clearly Put Rao on the defensive and leave no doubt in the minds of common people within India and outside that he is a guilty men who should resign forthwith, But in the CUFIOUS Sort of Indian democracy this is unlikely to happen. It did not happen in the case of Mrs.Gandhi nor did it happen in the case of Rajiv Gandhi. Rao’s adamant attitude is creating tensions with in the Indian polity with opposition parties gearing themselves to force him to leave the stage.

 The western governments which pinned too high hopes on the present Indian government must be feeling cheated. We, on the other hand, have all along been suggesting that the Indian governmental system was not stable; it represented forces of computation, decadence and conservatism which all said and done cannot produce liberalism. The U.S. administration’s self-appointed role of bringing about stability in Index must be seen in the context of the current turmoil in India. The inevitable Conclusion is that the administration’s policy is unrealistic based as it is on wrong premises about India being a democracy with self-regulating checks and balances. The Way a corrupt prime minister has been clinging to office and his ruling coterie is lending him all support should make one wiser about the real nature of the Indian state.

Article extracted from this publication >>  June 25, 1993