Guess who is the biggest beneficiary of the terror attack on the Pathankot airbase and the inevitable postponement of Foreign Secretary-level talks between India and Pakistan amid accusations and counter-accusations hurled by nuclear neighbors? Answer: A gentleman called Arun Jaitley who lives in New Delhi.
Jaitley — India’s powerful finance minister and Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s alter ego — was battling a mega corruption scandal, which threatened to finish his political career when the Pathankot airbase came under attack. National attention immediately shifted from Modi’s Mr. Dependable to the terrorist onslaught, which suddenly brought India-Pakistan relations to the brink before better sense prevailed on both sides.
It is left to be seen whether Jaitley will once again find himself in the Opposition’s and media’s firing line after India-Pakistan tensions ease, as they are bound to in the current climate of hope and fresh dates announced for the long overdue meeting of foreign secretaries in Islamabad.
No less than Arvind Kejriwal, the upright chief minister of Delhi, and Kirti Azad, a Bharatiya Janata Party Member of Parliament, have charged Jaitley with a series of scams in the Delhi and District Cricket Association (DDCA), which Jaitley headed as president from 1999 to 2013. Unfortunately, cricket in India has become a byword for corruption, and Jaitley, according to his detractors, used and abused DDCA for financial gains running into millions of rupees during his long tenure at its helm.
As a face-saving measure, Jaitley slapped a defamation suit against Kejriwal and sought record damages. But in a stinging counter-affidavit, Kejriwal asked the court: How can Jaitley possibly be defamed when he has no reputation worth protecting?
Kejriwal retorted that the common man’s perception of Jaitley can be deduced from his humiliating defeat in Amritsar by over 1,00,000 votes in the general elections despite a pro-BJP wave across India. And Azad, against whom Jaitley mysteriously hasn’t taken any legal action but got him suspended from the BJP, says that he will not rest until the guilty men are punished. But Jailtley, like four other ruling BJP heavyweights who are under a cloud, is likely to go unpunished simply because Modi — unlike former Congress Party Prime Minister Manmohan Singh who headed successive United Progressive Alliance (UPA) governments from 2004 to 2014 — doesn’t believe in ordering tainted ministers to resign and prove their innocence.
For the record, Modi promised corruption-free governance, declaring in his melodramatic style: “Na khaonga na khane doonga,” or “I won’t take bribes and make sure others don’t,” after the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) captured the reins of power 20 months ago. His announcement was greeted by everyone who had witnessed the axing of several ministers belonging to the Congress or its allies for alleged financial impropriety during UPA regimes.
While in the opposition, the BJP vociferously demanded the resignation of corruption-tainted UPA ministers and the Congress leadership repeatedly bowed before public pressure. Among those removed were Shashi Tharoor (Minister of State for External Affairs), A. Raaja (Minister for Communication and Information Technology), Dayanidhi Maran (Minister for Textiles), Virbhadra Singh (Minister for Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises), Ashwani Kumar (Minister of Law) and Pawan Bansal (Minister for Railways).
In sharp contrast, Modi defiantly stood by Sushma Swaraj (External Affairs Minister), Smriti Irani (Human Resource Development Minister), Vasundhara Raje (Rajasthan chief minister) and Shivraj Singh Chouhan (Madhya Pradesh chief minister) when they were accused of corruption or impropriety. In Jaitley’s case too, the BJP pulled out all stops to defend him even as the Pathankot attack deflected public attention from “DDCA scandal.”
The BJP’s double standards are evident from Home Minister Rajnath Singh’s assertion that “Mantriyon ke tyagpatra nahin hotey. Yeh UPA government nahin hai, NDA government hai (Ministers don’t have to resign. This is not the UPA government, this is the NDA government).”
The BJP’s lack of accountability after adopting a holier-than-thou attitude has been criticized by many public intellectuals, including internationally acclaimed film-maker, Anand Patwardhan, who observed: “The Congress government, despite massive corruption, was somewhat vulnerable to public pressure. The BJP is made of different mettle. As one can gauge from the Raje and Swaraj episodes, BJP will brazen out anything and everything, no matter what the consequences.”
The Pathankot attack definitely proved to be a boon for Jaitley giving him temporary reprieve when the going got really tough. But now he can safely bank on Modi who has calculated that the BJP must swim or sink together when it comes to coping with corruption charges.
