Marans must face court

The CBI has taken an interminable time in making the chargesheet against the Maran brothers and other BSNL officials in the illegal telephone exchange case. The younger sibling, Dayanidhi, was Union telecom minister in Manmohan Singh’s UPA Cabinet between 2004 and 2007, which is when he is said to have used telephone facilities extended to him to help elder brother Kalanidhi’s television business. Miles of underground cables were said to have been used to link the minister’s residence to the television station so as to transfer free use of 764 telephone lines for downloading huge amounts of data, besides making voice calls in mobile phones with fancy numbers. It is almost five years since the matter was exposed in the media despite which it seems to have taken the investigating agency so long to put together a case.

The Marans have a right to believe they can prove their innocence in court, but the fact is the CBI must get on quickly with the legal process and establish the guilt. It was mentioned somewhere that while a scam running into over Rs 400 crores was initially suspected, the final figure that the CBI came up with was a loss of Rs 1.78 crores caused to the exchequer. The point is even a rupee stolen from the government treasury, which is public money, is a crime and it must be tackled, no matter how high or mighty the person indulging in such chicanery as stated in the charges made. It might seem a cheap trick to exploit telephone facilities given for official use of a Union minister, but if the conspiracy of laying optical fibre cables is established, it would show to what extent even rich politicians can go in misusing national resources.