The unholy Lalu-Kejriwal-Jethmalani alliance

Politics around land has always been problematic, especially in post-Independent India. 

Maharashtra’s Revenue Minister Eknath Khadse was plain unlucky that his get-rich-quick deal was exposed even before the ink could dry  - thanks to his tiff with a Pune builder. 

But over the years, a legion of senior politicians have gone on to become billionaires - yes, billionaires - appropriating and misappropriating public land in urban Maharashtra, especially Mumbai and Pune.  

Before words like RTI and transparency entered the modern lexicon, politicians exercised near absolute powers to allocate public lands the way they pleased. Aside from giving it to family and friends, they changed land use at whim; distributed acquired lands to crony capitalists without any questions being asked. 

And not just politicians, all sections of society gained from this free-for-all policy. Members of the higher judiciary, bureaucrats, even journalists and artists - all got prime pieces of land at throwaway prices in Mumbai and other urban conglomerates.

In fact, Maharashtra politicians had exercised such unrestrained powers that till the early 80s they were requisitioning plum flats in the priciest South Mumbai buildings and allocating these to themselves or anyone else in the name of public interest. And eventually, they came to own them.  

Almost every well-known politician in Maharashtra has thus made a huge fortune,  Sharad Pawar, of course, being the biggest `landlord’ of them all.

But  Pawar only fine-tuned what had begun in earnest during the time of Chief Minister VP Naik. In league with Rajni Patel,  the high-living  Bombay Congress boss, Naik forked out plots of land in what is now  Nariman Point to hand-picked parties. 

A mere piece of paper authorising one to reclaim, say, three acres of land from under the sea was enough to turn a pauper into a millionaire overnight. 

In the late 60s and early 70s, the Naik-Patel duo made many such 'pauper multi-millionaires', with the names of some of them adorning various multi-storey towers that dot the concrete jungle on the tip of South Mumbai.  

So, if a Khadse or for that matter a Robert Vadra, is now embroiled in messy land transactions, you have to thank the growing power of ordinary citizens. 

Contrary to the general impression that corruption has grown manifold in recent years, the truth is that till the advent of the institution of Public Interest Litigation, till the enactment of the right-to-information, and a watchful 24x7 media, ruling politicians in the early decades after Independence had got away with a lot of unwholesome stuff.  

And should you think only politicians lust after land, think again? A former Chief Election Commissioner got not one, but two plots of land from chief minister’s discretionary quota against the rules, which specifically bar anyone getting more than a single plot from such quotas. The Commissioner even sold one to construct a bungalow on the other. He now pontificates to the world about probity. 

A former chief justice of Punjab and Haryana High Court got two plots out of the same quota, one for self another for a spouse,  and promptly sold both and made a huge killing. One can go on and on in this vein but suffice it to say that 'Is hamam main sab nange hain'. 

It does take an extraordinary man to resist temptation, given that everyone else is bending the rules to make a quick buck.  

Statistics do not lie 

Critics of the Modi Government will go to any length to question its performance.  They even raise doubts about GDP numbers, with Modi detractors suggesting that the figures are rigged to show that growth has picked up in the last two years. 

But the truth is that even the critics are completely in the dark about the best way to measure growth. On its part, the Congress Party is silent because, under the new system of measuring growth, GDP  in the last year of UPA too was revised upwards than it was originally estimated.

Now, in a most effective rebuke to the critics,  Pronab Sen, who recently retired as Chief Statistician of India, justified the new method of estimating national income and explained why it is the best under the circumstances. 

Sen’s sharp riposte to a business daily which incessantly spews venom against Modi should at least shut up the critics of official data. 

Yes, in purely academic terms it could be debated whether the output of small and medium industries, particularly in the unorganised sector, was being computed for estimating final numbers. 

But to suggest that the data are willfully distorted is to insult the intelligence of widely-respected experts manning the Central Statistician Organization.                                                      

And now a Lalu-Jetha-Kejriwal threesome 

Last November at the swearing-in ceremony of Nitish Kumar as Bihar Chief Minister, when Lalu Yadav and  Arvind Kejriwal raised intertwined hands much to the delight of news photographers, the AAP boss had vehemently protested. 

He claimed the fodder scamster had forcibly caught his hand and held it up. So pure and innocent was our Arvind, you see. 

Now, some six months later, according to reliable reports, the same Kejriwal put in an urgent call to the same Lalu Yadav, pleading with him to give a Rajya Sabha seat to Ram Jethmalani from the RJD quota in Bihar.  

How Lalu has now become 'respectable' for Kejriwal is for him to explain. But what we can confirm is that Kejriwal has joined Lalu insofar as he too needs the superior lawyerly skills of the 92-year-old Jethmalani to defend him in the civil and criminal defamation cases Arun Jaitley has filed against him and a couple of other loose cannons of the AAP.

As for Jethmalani, his twists and turns do not surprise anyone, having done all manner of inconceivable somersaults to retain his membership of the Rajya Sabha.  

Having once finalised the PIL in the Jain hawala case, he stunned all by choosing to defend one of the accused in the same case. Now, he will defend Lalu in the fodder scam and Kejriwal in the defamation case. 

A slight price to pay for retaining for another six years a plush bungalow in Lutyens’ Delhi, isn’t it?   

Gurudas Kamat stays firm on quitting  

Last Thursday, at the prayer meeting for Ahmad Patel’s young daughter-in-law who died after a brief illness, there were a large number of senior Congress leaders. But as soon as the meeting ended, AK Antony grabbed Gurudas Kamat by the hand and pulled him aside. 

A few days earlier,  the AICC General Secretary had threatened to quit politics in disgust at the doings of the Mumbai Congress Chief Sanjay Nirupam. Some Mumbai corporators too had threatened to leave the Congress with Kamat. 

Within minutes, Patel too joined Antony, and the two tried to persuade the former Mumbai Congress boss to withdraw his resignation but to no avail. When a journalist asked Kamat whether he had met the Congress President Sonia Gandhi or vice-president Rahul Gandhi, the answer was no.   

Apparently, the mother-and-son duo stays above the fray,  wanting  Antony and Patel to do the dirty work and then produce Kamat for them to bless the reconciliation.  

Rajan set to leave after September 3?

Apropos the on-going controversy over the RBI Governor Raghuram Rajan. It is more or less 'pukka' that the NDA would appoint someone of its own as the next boss in Mint Street come September 3. 

And this despite the fact that Rajan and Finance Minister Arun Jaitley are on the most cordial of terms. Unlike the time when P. Chidambaram’s sneering ways and his domineering attitude generated nothing but tension between North Block and Mint Street, or, for that matter, between him and everyone else in the Finance Ministry, there are no bad vibes between Rajan and any member of the Modi Government. 

Also, it is wrong to exaggerate the role of the RBI Governor, especially now that a monetary committee with equitable government representation is being constituted to fix the repo rate.  

Even without such a committee, the long-established processes and precedents govern the  policy rather than the arbitrary writ of the RBI Governor. In short, to hold Rajan responsible for not reducing the lending rates is wrong.  

The Government understands it as well. But if he is not getting the second term, it is simply because the NDA would want to have its own man as RBI chief, an understandable concern, after all. 

Virendra Kapoor is a Delhi-based journalist. The views expressed here are his own.