The judiciary uses and executes its legal authority and power with the help of the government. It can issue an order to arrest a person. But, that does not necessarily leads to the arrest of the person. The latter is the function of the administration or the executive wing of the state. Even if the so-called socially proclaimed law offender is arrested under a judicial dickat, the law enforcers may make so light of the charges against the alleged offender as that the court become legally bound to bail the person out of police or prison custody. And, there lies the rub, the judiciary’s limitation to book a government-shielded law offender.

In fact, the judiciary has been able to do little with the government’s generally inexplicable lethargic, if not totally insensitive, attitude to deal with cases of high profile corruption, tax evasion, gun running, hawala transaction, willful waste of public funds, kick-backs and deliberate loss of revenue to the exchequer and terrorism, involving such persons and institutions as Syed Mohammed Hassan Ali Khan, former telecom minister Andimuthu Raja, former chief vigilance commissioner P.J. Thomas, the management committee of the Delhi Commonwealth Games, former Himachal Pradesh Congress leader and union communications minister Sukh Ram and Italian businessman Ottavio Quattrocchi. While the Rs. 67-crore Bofors kick-back case against Quattrocchi has been dumped by CBI and Enforcement Directorate (ED), after spending thousands of crores of rupees in world-wide investigation over the last quarter of a century, 84-year-old Sukh Ram, an alleged recipient of a cash kick-back of Rs. 3.62 crore from a Hyderabad-based telecom equipment supplier, P. Rama Rao, is happily moving around challenging a lower court conviction in the CBI registered graft case in 1996.

Former CBI joint director Upen Biswas, investigating into the Rs. 10,000-crore Bihar fodder scam case involving the then Chief Minister Lalu Prasad Yadav, an ally of the Congress-led government at the Centre, was unceremoniously shunted out by the investigating agency as he came close to Yadav’s prosecution which could have brought down the union government. Almost all key witnesses in the case died in mysterious circumstances. Nothing happened to Lalu Prasad. If anything, the adversity provided the Bihar politician an opportunity to get his primary drop-out wife, Rabri Devi, as the state CM. The judiciary was rendered helpless to proceed with the prosecution of Lalu Prasad. Similarly, even before the CBI could complete its preliminary investigation into the 2G spectrum allocation case and file a charge sheet against the disgraced former telecom minister, a key accomplice and CBI witness against him, A M Sadhick Batcha, allegedly ‘hanged’ himself to death giving a clean chit to his political mentor and business associate, A Raja. This is bound to weaken the case against Raja and the designated court could do little about it.

In contrast, the judiciary could do little to see through the administration’s agenda to prevent custodial death of former Bennett, Coleman & Co. chairman Ashok Kumar Jain, an accused of an illegal fund transfer case involving only Rs. 4 crore, in the face of strong objection from the ED. The media baron suffered the same fate as any ordinary small-time tax offender would. Film star Amitabh Bachchan was served with the tax notice by the income-tax department at the intensive care unit (ICU) in a Bombay hospital, where he was fighting with life to survive an aggravated abdominal injury. The Congress-led UPA government has been after Bachchan since the mega-star allied with Samajwadi Party, an arch rival of Congress in Uttar Pradesh. Political vendetta took the better of administrative prudence and ethical treatment in both the cases. Compare this with the 20-year-old $ 18-miilion Jain Hawala case, which mentioned the names of some of the who’s who of Indian politics. The CBI failed the prosecution after dishing out a series of sensational media leakage as to who took how much to fund a bunch of Kashmiri terrorists.

Hassan Ali’s recent exit from the ED custody on bail, in the face of some ‘inadmissible’ documents produced by the law enforcement body to keep him behind the bars, despite the public strictures from the Supreme Court, was hardly unexpected. This is not the first time that the administration failed to produce a strong charge sheet against Ali. Five years ago, when he himself went and surrendered before a sub-divisional judicial magistrate’s court at Bhoiwada in Mumbai’s suburb, none of the law enforcing agencies like ED, Income-Tax, ministry of external affairs (MEA) and the Pune police were able to put up even an iota of non-bailable case against him. He got the bail to move freely around and make overseas trips. This is despite the talk of Ali’s alleged tax evasion of the order of Rs. 40,000 crore , Swiss bank (UBS) deposit of US$8 billion, money transaction with notorious international Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khassogi, illegal possession of four passports, including one from London, hawala deals with Kolkata-based businessman Kashinath Tapuria, the late M P Birla’s brother-in-law, and hurling acid bomb on the face of a Pune doctor probably with the intention to kill or deface him forever.

If Ali could not be booked then in spite of all such charges against him, he is hardly expected to be booked now. Amidst all the recently raked-up controversies surrounding Ali, a senior member of the Union Cabinet had even given him a ‘clean chit’ that he does not have any deposit with the Zurich branch of United Bank of Switzerland (UBS). The minister may be absolutely right. Ali was not a fool to retain the Swiss bank account after it became an official knowledge in 2006. The concerned minister, who was a member of the UPA cabinet in 2006 as well, would know things better.

The reopening of the Ali investigation will only provides fresh opportunities for administration sleuths to travel many parts of the world for many more times and, in the process, dig a big hole into the pockets of the exchequer. The failed 25-year-long Quattrocchi investigation and prosecution attempts are said to have cost the government over US$ 2 billion. Indeed, it too proved to be a great opportunity for investigators and defender-prosecutors to squander the tax payers’ money. Hassan Ali’s case should take much longer than Quattrocchi’s, Sukh Ram’s and Jain’s considering the fact that Ali’s alleged sins are several times more grievous than all the other ones’ combined together. The judiciary could do nothing about it.

Like-wise, the CWG scam, involving overspending of some 50,000 crore, is unlikely to even properly surface as the media is busy talking and writing about only a small part of questionable contracts dished out by its comparatively small-budget outfit, the games organising committee. The CWG scam involves who’s who in the union government, the Delhi government and the municipal corporation of the capital city (NDMC). The repeated cost escalations were approved by the union cabinet and the state cabinet, headed respectively by the prime minister and the chief minister, and the NDMC. The contractors, the main beneficiaries of these huge cost escalations, made billions and so probably certain politicians and bureaucrats. So far, only the unfailing Congressman, Suresh Kalmadi, head of the organising committee, has been hogging the limelight for doggedly denying the corruption allegations. Poor Kalmadi! He is obviously angry that the administrative shield is protecting the names of much bigger players and political entities from surfacing and facing similar investigation or, at least, making a semblance of it. The court is, once again, helpless.

Therefore, it is simply unrealistic to think that the corrupt in these multiple scam cases will ever be brought to book by the Supreme Court, whose recent orders have generated such a hope or misgiving among the country’s common man. The truth is: without the administration’s honest and active support, the judicial machinery will continue to remain hamstrung. And, it would be extremely foolish to believe that the ministers and bureaucrats will ask their own underlings in administration to get themselves prosecuted for corruption. Privately, they all must be laughing at the so-called judicial activism and sporadic media noise against hi-value, hi-profile corruption cases. In public, the government would continue to repeat its oft-repeated pledge that ‘no one will be spared’ and assure the masses once again that ‘law will take its own course’ however jig-jag it may appear to be for now. (IPA Service)