Legal eagle Prashant Bhushan’s latest affidavit before the Supreme Court in a public interest litigation (PIL) case leveling charges against Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal for causing substantial revenue loss to the government by slashing down the penalty payment obligation of RCom, a firm under the Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group (ADAG), by 90 per cent. Although the Supreme Court did not admit the linkage of Prashant Bhushan’s PIL with the on-going 2G scam investigation and declined to entertain a CBI investigation into it, the charges against Sibal are by all means of serious nature especially in the present context and deserve an investigation to establish its veracity, if any.

Sibal, who had denied any wrongdoing in the case, had earlier trashed the report of the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) of a possible revenue loss up to Rs. 1,50,000 crore due to irregularities in 2G spectrum allocation by the UPA government. However, the Supreme Court intervention in the matter has so far established that the CAG report is far from being one without substance. Another Sibal sibling, a former Director General of Hydrocarbon, too is facing charges of helping Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries (RIL) make a windfall at the cost of the government.

Kapil Sibal’s defence of the government’s spectrum allocation policy and his unilateral appointment of Justice Shivraj Patil to investigate into the charges of irregularities in spectrum allocation proved to be futile as subsequent developments in the case revealed. The case is still evolving as new issues are cropping up and the scope of enquiry enlarging by day. The Justice Patil report indicted Dayanidhi Maran, the former telecom minister in UPA I, quite some time ago. But, Maran continued in the government as the minister for textiles until a CBI mention before the Supreme Court of his possible involvement in the Aircel promoter’s stake sale and money transfer cases in favour of a Maran family TV channel and distribution (DTH) network.

The defensive reaction of Sibal and the government against the allegations of wrong doing by the departmental ministers with full knowledge and implicit consent of the cabinet are doing no good to the image of the government in the face of the Supreme Court proceedings. When cornered, influential sections in the ruling Congress party in the UPA conveniently indulge in blame game giving an impression that certain individual ministers are only at fault and not the government. This is despite the fact that such an argument undermines the very concept of cabinet responsibility and the fact that cabinet ministers are not supposed to operate in silos. A minister is a component of the cabinet. If he breaks law, he does it with the consent or endorsement of the cabinet.

The shunting out of M Veerappa Moily, known for his honesty and high level of integrity, from the Ministry of Law and Justice to Corporate Affairs in the latest cabinet reshuffle, amidst the Supreme Court trials of 2G and other scams and the controversy over the resignation by Solicitor General Gopal Subramanium apparently in protest against ministerial interference in his function, have hardly enhanced the credibility of the government in its publicly vowed corruption busting exercise. Moily, like Subramanium, is clearly upset with the government decision. The former Law Minister has openly blamed departmental ministers (read the likes of Maran, Raja, Sibal, Chidambaram and senior Deora) for the failure to defend the government actions in the court of justice. His post-reshuffle remarks that “all these cases that we fail, it is the fault of the administrative ministry…… (and) for the sins of some other ministries, the law minister can’t be hanged” speak volume of the image of the present government and the Prime Minister who changed his portfolio.

Moily may find the Ministry of Corporate Affairs even a hotter spot and face both internal and external resistance if he seeks to right the wrong moves by Deora Sr. and reverse them in keeping with the suggestions of the Parliamentary Select Committee which went through the draft Companies Act. Deora ignored several key recommendations of the Committee to accommodate demands of the big business that compromise on the tenets of good corporate governance. Deora took a different view on the subject from his predecessor, Salman Khursheed, the new law minister, who was shunted out from Corporate Affairs to the low profile Water Resources Ministry in the previous portfolio reshuffle only a few months ago. Deora’s close proximity to certain big industrial house is a common knowledge. It may just be a coincidence that a particular large industrial house was the biggest beneficiary of Deora’s ascendancy to power under both the UPA I and II and his ministry’s decisions, which have allegedly robbed both the government and the common man. The most significant of them was being the price decontrol of petroleum products.

Seemingly, Moily’s rift with Kapil Sibal, the resignation of Gopal Subramaniam as the country’s solicitor general following his disagreement with Sibal, the return of the Antrix-Devas Multimedia controversy after the private telecom firm’s filing of a law suit against the government company under the Prime Minister-headed Ministry of Space before the International Court of Arbitration for restoration of the allocation contract of S-band spectrum, CAG-RIL face-off on the issue of off-shore gas-field development right at Krishna-Godavari basin (KG-D6) and gas pricing and the Supreme Court directive on the government in the case involving detection and seizure of illegal Indian bank accounts abroad, among others, threaten to make life more miserable for the government in the coming months, at least from the legal and political points of view.

A possible legal action by Vedanta against the Environment Ministry for its alleged vindictive action and withdrawal of all clearances to its Orissa project, which came on the last day of Jairam Ramesh’s stint as the departmental minister before the reshuffle, the government role in jettisoning the Cairn-Vedanta deal and the Devas law suit before the international court have the potential to open a can of worms from the government closet bringing more public disgrace to the UPA and its leadership. The office of the Prime Minister looks to be turning increasingly vulnerable to investigations into departmental wrongdoings. It would appear that the entire government has gotten into a legal trap.

Paradoxically, the government can blame none but itself for putting the administration and, along with it, the entire nation to such a precarious situation. The fear is that the government may commit more mistakes in order to untrap itself from past mistakes and the legal cobwebs. Irresponsible public statements from persons holding high political offices such as Congress general secretary and former Madhya Pradesh chief minister Digvijay Singh giving clean chit to the alleged Commonwealth Games (CWG) scam-star, Suresh Kalmadi, now in Tihar Jail, and the Mumbai’s Adarsh housing society scandal suspect, Ashok Chavan, former Maharashtra chief minister, may add to such mistakes. (IPA Service)