3 idiots and a scam that won’t die

EXTRA ORDINARY ISSUE

3 idiots and a scam that won’t die   

Pritish Nandy
    Always watch out for The Big Obsessive Scam the media goes after. It often covers up a great deal more than it reveals. It also draws away our immediate attention from issues where we were about to get close to a dangerous truth or two. Poirot famously described it as a red herring, a cunning device to draw people’s attention away from real issues to focus on a non sequitur MacGuffin.
    Like the MacGuffin, which Hitchcock made cult, The Big Obsessive Scam vanishes or becomes irrelevant once its purpose is over. This is what the spot fixing scam could be: Too much outrage chasing what matters so little to most of us. The evidence in hand is flimsy, so flimsy that it’s unlikely to get past the smallest court but the noise around it is so much one would think World War III has broken out.
    The day news channels were chasing Gurunath Meiyappan all the way from Kodaikanal to Madurai to Mumbai to the Crime Branch at midnight, millions were happily sitting in front of their TVs watching Mumbai Indians battling Rajasthan Royals at the Eden Gardens, proving yet again that there are two Indias with their own sets of concerns and priorities. I confess I was among those watching the game, rooting for Rahul Dravid whose team lost with a ball to spare.
    But this column is not about two Indias. What bothers me is the carpet bombing scam coverage that ensured there were no goodbyes for the man who with evangelical zeal exposed the sleazy underbelly of Indian politics over the past 5 years, and did his best to set it right. Worse, there was no debate over who his successor ought to be. So the Government sneaked in its own nominee, clearly to undo some of the outstanding work Vinod Rai, India’s bravest Comptroller and Auditor General did in his own low key style.
    That may not be so easy though. Rai made the 153-year-old office of CAG a powerful weapon in his fight against corruption by the mightiest in the land. Till Rai came, CAG saw its job as writing long winding reports, more often than not hugely delayed, on the inefficiencies in government systems. None of those reports had the kind of impact that Rai’s reports created, especially those on 2G (revealing $38.9 billion gifted away by the Government to its cronies), coal mining licences (involving another $34 billion loss of revenue) and the infamous Commonwealth Games that brought us so much shame. Courts intervened, including the highest court in the land; ministers landed up in jail or got shamed and sacked; investigations landed up at the Prime Minister’s door.
    Amidst all this outrage over spot fixing, Rai quietly demitted office last week. He was even more quietly replaced by someone less likely to expose the Government’s lapses. Several other crucial issues that were being debated in the public space, like China’s incursions in Ladakh, the Vadera land deals, Muslim youth arrested and held for years on trumped up terrorist charges and now being released and, above all, the Supreme Court demanding the freeing of the CBI from the Government’s unholy clutches are now on the backburner. Even the Ranbaxy issue, where intrepid whistle blower Dinesh Thakur exposed the grave misdemeanours of one of India’s leading pharma companies and the dangers implicit in those for millions of us who buy its products, have been largely ignored. All we are left discussing are 3 idiots, a C grade TV star, a lecherous umpire and a boastful son in-law of the BCCI chairman, all of whom may well be crooks and fixers but must not be allowed to hijack the nation’s attention and agenda. 
    A father-in-law is the last person to know what his sonin-law is up to. Allowing him to stay in his holiday home in Kodaikanal is not the same as endorsing his petty vices or (as yet unsubstantiated) attempts to fix IPL matches. I may be a lone voice saying this. But I really think we are all playing into the hands of those who have much more to hide than these dolts. Srinivasan’s enemies (and heaven knows, he has far too many of them) are having a field day. But ask yourself, do you really care whether he heads the BCCI or Sharad Pawar. Or Rajiv Shukla. Frankly, my dear I don’t give a damn.