IN a season of books on corruption, here's another view. Former top cbi sleuth N.K.Singh runs through the whole gamut of corruption: beginning with the 'family rule', KissaKursi Ka and St Kitts; the fodder scam, Bofors and the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha case to theways of the judiciary, investigating agencies and graft in higher places. The book makesfor good racy reading, giving minute details and first-hand ringside accounts of whathappened.
This is Singh's second book. His first, The Plain Truth: Memoirs of a cbi Officer,dealt with the murky goings-on in the agency during the '70s and '80s, the attempts by thepowers-that-be to scuttle any fair and independent investigation. Here he argues thatpoliticians of the Nehru era, including the PM, took a mild view of corruption, anorientation that was legitimised during Indira Gandhi's reign when she publicly announcedthat corruption was no big deal, that it was not an Indian malaise but a globalphenomenon.
Written well after retirement with all the documentation at his command and no one toanswer to and coming from an officer of Singh's calibre, the book, disappointingly, offersvery little new information. What it does is to analyse in great detail some of the mostnotorious political cases in recent times, throwing light not on fashionable politicaltheories but on the dirty world of realpolitik: the pulls, pressures, subterfuge andtricks that men and women in public life deploy to commit crimes and then escapeunblemished.
The most original insights occur in the chapter entitled Criminalisation of Politicswhich reveals nuggets of the now-famous N.N. Vohra committee report on the nexus betweencrime and politics. Though the report unequivocally established the link between the two,Singh puts the focus on Vohra himself. To quote: "Unfortunately when it came tomeasures to deal with the situation, Vohra appeared more concerned with furtherconsolidation of the hegemony of the Home secretary over other professional heads ofpolice organisations than on creating an effective agency..."
Singh also quotes Vohra-damnably-as writing that "in the normal course this reportwould've been drafted by the member secretary and finalised by the committee. Consideringthe nature of the issues involved, I did not consider it desirable to burden the membersof the committee with any further involvement beyond the views expressed by them."This, argues Singh, was a curious approach to the functioning of such a high-poweredcommittee comprising heads of sensitive organisations entrusted with the finalising of thereport.
Singh also looks at a typically official manoeuvre in which the central issue isforgotten, falling prey to peripheral battles over turf: "The committee did not gointo the modalities of operations that urgently needed to be taken to deal with thesituation... The report made no mention of the recommendations of the National PoliceCommission and the L.P. Singh committee appointed by the Morarji Desai government in thewake of the Shah Commission report. It also made no mention of insulating the police andcentral police agencies from political interference and providing safeguards to top policeofficers from harassment..."
Not surprising then that the Vohra Committee report now lies gathering dust in thehallowed portals of North Block, with little chances of it being revived in the immediateforseeable future. A must-read for takes on the biggest headline grabbing 'stories' of thelast few decades, the book reveals where things could have gone drastically wrong.
