The Sword Of Damocles

Tehelka.com could not have dropped its bombshell at a more inopportune moment for thecountry and the government. After five years of drifting in a choppy sea without a rudder,the country had at last found a helmsman in Atal Behari Vajpayee, who was restoringpurposeful government. This was evident in his policy on Kashmir and, more subtly, in thebudget that Yashwant Sinha had presented. In a matter of hours, Tehelka has pushed Kashmironto the far backburner and come within an inch of scuttling the budget.

To understand what the latter would mean, one has only to examine what is capable ofbeing achieved if the government lasts its term. By 2003, Rs 60,000 crore would have beentrimmed from the current fiscal deficit of Rs 116,000 crore. The rise in national savingswould have begun pushing up investment. The resulting rise in economic growth and wideningof the tax base would have further reduced the fiscal deficit and paved the way, as in theUS, for budget surpluses in the future. All this is in dire jeopardy, because if MrVajpayee does not respond constructively to the Tehelka expose, there is a more than evenchance that his government will fall before the end of this year.

Mamata Banerjee has already shown how the end could come. She is facing a make-or-breakelection in West Bengal and can hardly be blamed for not wanting to rock any boats till itis over. The railway budget reflected her caution. But the main budget, which halved foodprocurement and lifted restrictions on hiring and firing, has again tilted the scalesagainst her in the industrially decrepit state. Continued association with the nda couldfurther mar her chances. If she doesn’t dissociate herself from the nda now, she willcertainly do so if her party loses in Bengal. There are four other states going to thepolls this year. If even one more important coalition partner loses and holds Tehelkaresponsible, the Vajpayee government will fall.

The government’s reaction so far shows that it has learned absolutely nothing. Twogovernments have been destroyed by exposes of kickbacks on defence deals. The Boforsscandal not only paved the way for the Congress’ defeat in 1989 but triggered ananxiety to force an agreement upon the ltte’s Prabhakaran that, arguably, cost RajivGandhi his life four years later. In 1996, the revelations surrounding the hawala scandalnot only weakened the Congress but destroyed the career of Narasimha Rao, though his only‘crime’ was to have permitted an enquiry. Since Vajpayee had personally led theattack on the Congress on both occasions, he more than anyone should have been aware ofthe Damocles’ sword the entire political system was living under. In 1996, he and hisparty spokesperson Sushma Swaraj had publicly committed the bjp to creating a state fundto meet election expenses, for that is the only way of cutting the umbilical cord that nowlinks every party and nearly every politician to the world of crime, kickbacks and fraud.

The NDA has also learned nothing from Rajiv’s discomfiture in 1987. Had headmitted frankly that in the absence of any legally permissible method of financingelections even honest and dedicated politicians had been forced into the murky grey areaof kickbacks and foreign accounts, and had he then pursued his earlier resolve to set up astate funding system for recognised political parties, the nation would have forgottenBofors in no time at all. Instead, he allowed himself to get entangled in a web ofhalf-truths that the media mercilessly exposed till the name of this decent and honourableman became a byword for corruption.
Today, for better or worse, through Jaya Jaitly, that’s happened to George Fernandes.But the fact that Bangaru Laxman was also involved has tarred everyone in the bjp from theprime minister downwards with the same brush.

Vajpayee would do well to accept the grim fact that the nation doesn’t and won’ttolerate acceptance at the highest levels of government of such blatant corruption. Thisis because the real issue is not graft but the Rule of Law. This is not a legal nicety butthe bedrock of the State itself. If people see their government bending over backwards toshield those whom the public regards to be criminals, the very ground beneath them beginsto shake.

Vajpayee has taken the first step towards limiting the damage that the Tehelka exposehas done by allowing George Fernandes to resign. He can further redeem himself and hisparty by setting up a system of state funding that is sufficiently generous to freepolitical parties from the thrall of money-gatherers.

Nor does Vajpayee need to be defensive about what he would be doing. Every party fromthe bjp to the communists has taken money hand over fist from industrialists, smugglersand other ‘special interest groups’. And every government at the Centre hascreamed money off power projects and defence deals. They have had no option as thefounding fathers of our Constitution failed to realise that democracy, like any otheractivity, requires money to run. Their model was Westminster democracy, where the averageconstituency has 50,000 voters and a candidate can reach them all simply by driving fromone village or town to the next. But the Indian parliamentary constituency has one millionvoters and manning the polling booths on election day alone requires an army of8,000-10,000 workers. Had our founding fathers studied American democracy more closely,they would have found no fewer than nine attempts since the Civil War to regulate electionfunding.

For Vajpayee as well as for India, time is running out. Political corruption has twicebrought strong central governments to their knees and stopped them from taking thedecisions that were needed to safeguard the future of the nation. Let this not become thethird time.