Amitabha Pande - Political expediency cannot trump justice
NEVER before in its
history has the Indian Administrative Service witnessed a perversion of justice
as terrifying as that evidenced in the conviction of HC Gupta (former Coal
Secretary) for his role in the alleged coal scam. Gupta is not just another
retired senior civil servant but an icon who represents the gold standard for
rectitude and probity in public service. When such an officer is made a
scapegoat, we realise how deep the rot has gone into the entrails of our
government and body politic.What really is the case against HC Gupta? The charge is that
Gupta, as Chairman of the Screening Committee for coal block allocations,
conspired to ignore a deliberate misrepresentation of facts by the applicant
relating to his company's net worth and existing capacity to secure an
allocation despite his ineligibility under the Ministry guidelines. Though the
final decision was taken by the Ministers and the Secretary Coal was only
making a recommendation, this negligence on the part of Gupta and his two
junior colleagues meant that the Ministers were misled into accepting the
recommendation.
This "lack of due
diligence" amounted to a conspiracy to cheat involving criminal misconduct
because the applicant indirectly derived a pecuniary benefit from this
"omission". In all this, did Gupta and his colleagues derive any
pecuniary or other benefit themselves? No. Was there any mala fide intention on
their part? Was the due procedure for processing applications circumvented or
short-circuited? Were any of the multiple levels of scrutiny in that an
application must go through, avoided? Is there any evidence or charge that the
officers succumbed to political pressure in making their recommendation? Was
there any knowing conspiracy to withhold information from the decision-makers?
Were the three officers convicted the only ones who handled this and 1,422
other applications for 38 coal blocks and were they personally responsible for
proper verification of the information provided to them? Have others in the
long chain of scrutiny and screening of these applications been charged or
convicted? Have the Ministers in charge of taking the final decision on all
applications been charged with conspiracy? Have officials down the chain of
command in different ministries responsible for scrutiny been similarly
charged? Have five years of investigation into allegedly one of the biggest
“scams” in government history yielded any evidence of large-scale bribery,
political-level corruption, deal fixing, blatant cronyism, political
manipulation and extortion that allegedly took place and have any persons been
charged for these offences? No, no and no.
Is this then not
bizarre and perverse? We need to unravel the multiple layers of perversity in
which this case is wrapped to fully understand its ramifications. First, at the macro
political level. CAG Vinod Rai's disastrously flawed audit of coal block
allocations perversely interpreted the screening-committee procedure for
allocations — a practice based on the extant policy — as an irregularity that
had caused a massive presumptive revenue loss. This, in turn, was made out to
be a "scam"..
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