New Delhi, Dec 25: The Bharatiya Janata Party has demanded that the Maharashtra Government should demit office owning moral responsibility for the stamp paper scam although there is no substantial evidence as yet pointing to its guilt.
As usual, the BJP is trying to draw political mileage for itself from the embarrassment caused to the Shinde government by the resignation of its Deputy Chief Minister and Home Minister Chhagan Bhujbal.
The resignation was in atonement for the involvement of Bhujbal’s Nationalist Congress Party activists in the attack on the offices of Zee TV in the western Mumbai suburb of Andheri.
They were protesting against the channel’s portrayal of the minister “in a bad and unflattering light” through insinuations and innuendoes about his complicity in the fake stamp paper scandal and his alleged nexus with the scam’s innovator, Kareem Lala Telgi.
Regardless of whether the resignation was on his own volition or under a directive from NCP chief Sharad Pawar, Bhujbal appears to have made prompt and excellent use of the opportunity provided by the attack on the media to seize the high moral ground.
Pawar himself has said that Bhujbal felt he was answerable for the maintenance of law and order as the State’s Home Minister. It is, of course, quite a different matter that the same Home Minister did not feel all that answerable for the involvement, leading to their arrests, of an unprecedented number of police officers of the state in the Telgi scam.
The long list of officers facing allegations of receiving hush money from Telgi for turning a blind eye to his activities and building up sizable personal fortunes includes many high-ranking police officials, from the former Commissioner in Pune and Mumbai, R S Sharma ( Bhujbal’s own choice for the high post) to assistant and joint police commissioners, inspectors and sub-inspectors.
Even a retired Director General of Police was questioned by the State-appointed Special Investigation Team. Maharashtra has been identified as the State from where Telgi ran his operations for more than a year before the scam was exposed.
He reportedly colluded with officials of the India Security Press in Nashik to procure machinery and printing paper, and was able to induce, obviously with monetary temptations, influential Maharashtrian politicians to help him market the fake stamp papers.
At last count, the number of officers arrested in the State was 16 and the scam is said to be in operation in as many as 18 States. However, it is extraordinary that Bhujbal remained so totally detached and insensitive to the happenings in the police department under his own control that he did not deem it his duty to atone for its sins of omission and commission.
The exposures in respect of corruption in high places by the highly respected public figure, Anna Hazare, and the sustained Opposition campaign within and outside the State Assembly for his resignation left the minister unfazed.
In view of this, those who have reacted cynically to his resignation on moral grounds citing the attack on the media as a phony excuse must be forgiven. Bhujbal’s exit is only the end of one scene in the Telgi scam drama as it affects Maharashtra.
While another scene is being played out in Karnataka, the scam obviously has widespread inter-State ramifications which must be fearlessly exposed by the CBI.
One politician has fallen victim to what is developing as a multi-crore “mother of all scams in post-independence India.” It is difficult to ignore suggestions of the involvement of more politicians (not to mention bureaucrats and police officials) in the scam. The CBI must now go after them.