The opposition in India is suddenly smelling blood. The Narendra Modi government has just given them a ghost of a chance that it was looking for but didn’t get in the first year of the Modi government and saw a brief window opening in the government’s second year: A scam
But wait. This is only the Indian opposition parties’ perception. They feel that they have finally got a stick to beat the Modi government with. Well, we are talking about the latest political scandal that has erupted in India. At the core of the controversy is Sushma Swaraj, the foreign minister who is easily the best performing minister in Modi’s Cabinet. Heavens have fallen down in India, politically, after it came to light that Swaraj had helped Lalit Modi, a fallen cricket Czar, in getting him travel documents needed to travel to Portugal for attending to his breast cancer-stricken wife who was to be operated in that European country. Modi has been living in a self-imposed exile in the UK since 2010.
The case against Swaraj is that she went out of her way to get Lalit Modi travel documents from the British government because his passport had been revoked by the Indian government for his alleged violation of Foreign Exchange Management Act (FEMA), a case in which the Enforcement Directorate, India’s premier financial fraud investigation agency, had issued a blue corner notice against him.
The opposition parties have jumped to grab an opportunity in condemning the Modi government by saying that Swaraj’s act is nothing short of a moral turpitude moment as Lalit Modi is legally a fugitive who is wanted in a case of financial fraud to the tune of over $100 million when he was the Commissioner of Indian Players’ League (IPL) in 2010. Incidentally, Lalit Modi committed the alleged financial crime when the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government was in power. Today the Congress is in opposition and that too in a battered and numerically hopeless state. At that time, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was in opposition and presently the ruling party. The BJP had then spoken about the Lalit Modi affair in most unsparingly aggressive terms.
In October 2013, Nirmala Sithraman, then a BJP spokesperson and presently a minister of state for commerce and industry, had reacted to Lalit Modi’s tweets thus, “Who’s he…? A fugitive from law, he cannot question the BJP, we abide by the law of the land.”
Today the tables have been turned, politically speaking. The BJP is on the defensive while the Congress is coming out with guns blazing. The hunter has become the hunted! But this is how politics plays out in India. The Congress has cried itself hoarse in describing Swaraj’s action as a case of moral corruption and demanded her resignation. The principal opposition party has cited several emails to prove that Swaraj had blatantly favored Lalit Modi and demanded an explanation from Prime Minister Narendra Modi tauntingly asking whether Modi (Narendra) was helping Modi (Lalit). It has said that Swaraj had actually helped Lalit Modi as a quid pro quo as he had been instrumental in securing the foreign minister’s nephew’s admission in a prestigious UK university.
The Congress has twisted the knife further by alleging that the Modi government, which had come on the twin planks of zero-corruption and bringing back the nation’s black money stashed away abroad to India had actually helped a “criminal” who was responsible for hiding his ill-gotten money abroad.
However, the present case is by and large much ado about nothing. True, the previous UPA government had accused Lalit Modi of serious financial crime and had repeatedly told London that any help to him would jeopardize India-UK bilateral relations. But the fact remains that if the UPA government felt so strongly about Lalit Modi’s alleged financial crime how come he managed to slip out of India during UPA rule? The Modi government as well as the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) have come out solidly in support of Swaraj contending that her actions had flowed out of “humanitarian” considerations. For its part the Congress has shot back by asking if tomorrow India’s most wanted man Dawood Ibrahim were to make out a plea for releasing his travel documents will the Modi government oblige him too.
The Swaraj episode is not going to die out anytime soon. The Modi government too is unlikely to yield. But whatever the final result may be, the inevitable truth is that the opposition has finally cornered the Modi government.
A formal statement by PM Modi, if at all made, is unlikely to help much. On the contrary, the premier’s statement would provide even more ammunition to the opposition. Under the current circumstances it is a no-holds-barred political contest between an increasingly fragile government and an opposition, which sees itself in a resurgent mode.
