:: Paranjoy Guha Thakurta

A short political history of crime and punishment

By Paranjoy Guha Thakurta

Mar 01 : "A corrupt public servant is a menace to society", said Judge V.K. Maheshwari on Wednesday while sentencing Pandit Sukh Ram to three years’ imprisonment for acquiring assets worth Rs 4.25 crores that were disproportionate to his known sources of income while serving as Union communications minister in the P.V. Narasimha Rao government. The court also imposed a fine of Rs 2 lakh on the 82-year-old Congress politician and ordered the forfeiture of his illegal assets while granting him bail on furnishing a personal bond and surety of Rs 50,000 each.

Thirteen years ago, Panditji — as he is known in his home state of Himachal Pradesh — had made it to the Guinness Book of World Records for the wrong reasons when the Central Bureau of Investigation found cash, all Rs 2.45 crores of it, in his Delhi residence (much of it stashed away in his puja room and inside quilts and pillow cases) and another Rs 1.16 crore at his home in Mandi, Himachal Pradesh.

Soon after the CBI raids had been conducted — during the period when H.D. Deve Gowda was the Prime Minister and Joginder Singh was the CBI director — he went off to the United Kingdom where he was reportedly "ill" for many weeks before he returned home to ignominy. The then Congress president Sitaram Kesri expelled him from the party. Thereafter, Panditji went on to form his own political outfit, the Himachal Vikas Congress (HVC).

His popularity among his constituents had clearly not diminished. To many people in Himachal Pradesh, he was the person who had ensured that a telephone was installed in every remote village in the mountainous state. It hardly mattered to them that others perceived him as being corrupt. In February 1998, Assembly elections were conducted in Himachal Pradesh together with General elections. In the 68-member state Assembly, the Congress won 33 seats and the Bharatiya Janata Party 29. The HVC, headed by Mr Sukh Ram, won four seats and one seat went to an independent candidate (elections did not take place in one Assembly constituency).

The BJP realised that the only way it could form a government in the state was by aligning with the HVC. Fortuitously for the BJP, the HVC split down the middle with two of its MLAs joining the BJP in what was curiously described by Panditji as his "master stroke". Now why would a political leader welcome a split in his own party? There was a good reason.

Given the provisions of the anti-defection law at that juncture, it might not have been that difficult for the Congress to split the four-member HVC and form the state government. This was on account of the fact that if at least one-third of a legislative party’s members had left the party, it would have qualified as a split and not a defection. Thus, by making two former HVC MLAs join the BJP, Mr Sukh Ram ensured that they would not defect — and get themselves disqualified from the legislature — since they would now be part of a larger political formation in the Assembly, in this case, the BJP. Here was a classic instance of the tail-wagging the dog in the new era of coalition politics in India.

The BJP had to pay a "small price" for its partnership with the HVC. Mr Sukh Ram became the de facto second-in-command in the Prem Kumar Dhumal Cabinet with two "lucrative" ministerial portfolios, namely, the public works department (PWD) and power. It was also not a coincidence that Panditji’s son soon became a member of the Rajya Sabha. And, of course, it is a separate matter altogether that five years later, in February 2003, the Congress returned to power in Himachal Pradesh. In April 2004, Mr Sukh Ram returned to the fold of India’s "grand old party" — roughly eight years after he had been unceremoniously expelled.

For many decades, Mr Sukh Ram has loyally served the Congress. During the period he was Union minister for civil supplies in Rajiv Gandhi’s government, he had been accused of favouring particular importers of sugar who had failed to adhere to their commitments. This had resulted in a shortfall in domestic supplies leading to the sugar prices suddenly flaring up before the 1989 General elections.

At his office at Krishi Bhavan, I remember asking him what he would do if his government lost the elections and he was blamed for not having been able to check sugar prices. "I will retire from politics", he said without batting an eyelid. As is common knowledge, Rajiv Gandhi’s government was voted out of power in 1989. But Panditji was hardly the sort who would take sanyas from political life.

In 1995, as communications minister, he initiated a contentious scheme of auctioning licences to private companies who were to operate telecommunications services to compete with the public sector. His move to auction licences to the highest bidder had the entire Opposition at that time, including the BJP, up in arms. For two weeks, the proceedings of the Lok Sabha were completely stalled on this issue. Few could have imagined then that just over two years later, leaders of the BJP would be bending over backwards to express their gratitude to him.

In July 2001, nearly five years after his residential premises were raided by the CBI, a special court in Delhi framed charges against him for possessing disproportionately large assets. A year later, in July 2002, he was convicted and sentenced to three years’ rigorous imprisonment by another court for allegedly favouring a Hyderabad-based firm, Advanced Radio Masts, while serving as minister. A former official of the department of telecommunications was also indicted in this case, alongwith with the owner of the private firm. The long arm of law is, indeed, rather long.

Paranjoy Guha Thakurta is an educator and commentator based in New Delhi