So Mr. AR Antulay is above the law. So far only he and his cronies had behaved as if this was the case. Now the Prime Minister too has come to concur with this view. This is the plain implication of her decision to direct the state chief minister, Mr. Vasantrao Patil, to get the Prevention of Corruption Act suitably modified. We do not know what compulsions, or calculations, or feelings have inspired the move and we do not wish to speculate on the subject. For the more pertinent point is that in acting the way she has, Mrs. Gandhi has violated two cardinal principles of democracy – respect for the rule of law and equality before law.
Perhaps she has calculated the risk in electoral terms and concluded that it is not a serious one. But it is a commonplace that electoral victory does not by itself confer legitimacy on a government. Though she would never accept that she has faced the question of legitimacy in one form or another since 1975, no serious observer of the Indian scene can be oblivious of this fact. Her present action cannot but aggravate this problem. She will now be seen to be shielding someone against whom a prima facie case has been established by a highly respected judge of a high court.
Mrs. Gandhi’s critics will be quick to recall that this is not the first but the second time that an act is being amended for the convenience of one individual, the first time being in relation to herself when the Representation of the People Act was amended to get over the difficulty created by the judgment of the Allahabad High Court. The comparison will be wholly inept. The proved charges against Mrs. Gandhi were minor ones comparable, as The Times, London, then wrote, to a parking offence. And the stakes for the country could be said to be high – survival of the Congress party and therefore of the political order over which it had presided since independence. The charges against Mr. Antulay – abuse of the office of chief minister of Maharashtra for gathering funds – are serious and he cannot be said to occupy such a critical position in the country as to justify special consideration for him in the larger national interest.
Strain On System
Millions of Indians, especially among the intelligentsia, will disagree with the first part of this proposition. They will argue, as they have argued since 1975, that the country would have been spared the trauma of the emergency and other subsequent unpleasant developments if Mrs. Gandhi had then abided by the existing law. But that controversy has not been resolved in the past nine years and cannot be resolved now. The relevant issue is that the kind of considerations which could apply to Mrs. Gandhi’s case in 1975 certainly cannot apply to Mr. Antulay’s now.
Indeed, he himself should have had the good sense not to expose the leader by whom he swears so fervently in public to the charge of cynicism and the political system to an additional strain. Mrs. Gandhi will be facing an election to the Lok Sabha some time this year and therefore needs all the help she can get from her supporters to refurbish the party’s image which has been sullied precisely by the charge that corruption flourishes under her rule. And in view of developments in Punjab and more recently in Haryana, who needs to be reminded that the Indian political order is in no position to bear further strains?
The issue is not whether the allegation against the Congress rule is true but whether it is widely believed and whether Mrs. Gandhi can afford to be seen to be acquiescing in what is widely regarded as a most blatant case of abuse of office. Again the issue is not whether Mr. Antulay’s alleged crimes are worse than those of several other former chief ministers, mostly belonging to the Congress party, but whether any other political leader in office has ever left such impressive evidence of wrong-doing. The answers to these questions cannot be in doubt. Nor can there be any question that for those who believe, as we do, that Mrs. Gandhi’s continuing stewardship is vital for the country at this critical juncture, her latest action must appear as both dangerous and wholly unnecessary. Mr. Antulay does not possess the kind of clout which could have forced her to act against her better judgment.
No New Situation
The question in Mr. Antulay’s case was not limited to corruption. He set what was perhaps a new record in arbitrariness. He saw himself as a great Moghul; he recognised no norms and no distinction between proper governmental decisions and his personal whims. He behaved as if he was the state. He demoralised the state’s bureaucracy and he gave rise to a political culture in Maharashtra which was known to flourish only in the benighted state of Bihar. It is also no great secret that he nursed great ambitions for himself. After Mrs. Gandhi, he. All this may not be strictly relevant in the present context of the decision to amend the Prevention of Corruption Act but it is, in the larger context of the kind of political order we are seeking to promote in the country. And as Prime Minister, Mrs. Gandhi cannot ignore it.
The Antulay problem has not been sprung upon her suddenly. She has been landed with it for three years and almost four if we are to believe reports that she had serious reservations about him when Mr. Sanjay Gandhi picked him up for the august office of chief minister of Maharashtra in the summer of 1980. She has even confronted it twice – first in January 1982 when in the wake of Justice Lentin’s judgment holding that there was a nexus between the allotment of cement quotas to certain Bombay builders and receipt of money for Mr. Antulay’s trusts, she asked the then Governor, Air Chief Marshal OP Mehra (Retired), to secure his resignation and then in July 1982 when she permitted the present Governor, Air Chief Marshal Latif (Retired), to sanction his prosecution. Her new move in effect repudiates both these decisions which one must assume were taken after a careful consideration of the pros and cons. The people are entitled to know the reason or reasons for it.
On the face of it, it can be argued that a new situation has arisen as a result of the recent Supreme Court judgment that a legislator is not a public servant in terms of the Prevention of Corruption Act and a private citizen can prosecute a legislator. In reality this is not a new situation. It is an old one. Before Mr. Antulay came to face prosecution, no one had ever argued that a legislator was or should be deemed to be a public servant. He invented this plea and the special judge in question, Mr. Sule, endorsed it last year. So in effect the Supreme Court has only restored the status quo ante.
Party Embarrassed
As is his wont, Mr. Antulay has used the judgment to try and frighten fellow legislators into believing that it has opened the floodgates for their prosecution on flimsy grounds by motivated citizens. This is so much hogwash and at least Mrs. Gandhi must know it to be so. In any case, she could have acted in a manner characteristic of her which is to wait till a problem arises and then resolve it. In this case, she is, as it were, anticipating that legislators would in fact face prosecution and ensuring that they do not.
Except some individual Congressmen, many of them not known either for sobriety or integrity, no one has bought this argument. The uproar in the Lok Sabha on Monday indicates that the government will find it extremely difficult to sell it on merit not only in parliament but in the whole country. Indeed, it must embarrass the ruling party to have to acknowledge that only its legislators are worried over the Supreme Court judgment. Surely it cannot contend that the others are such morons that they do not recognise the dangers to themselves.
No, the entire exercise has just one purpose – to take Mr. Antulay off the hook on which he is impaled. In the process Mrs. Gandhi has made unenviable the position of the Governor who sanctioned the prosecution, of the chief minister who let it be known that he would rather resign than yield to pressure to get the Prevention of Corruption Act amended, and above all Mr. Rajiv Gandhi who was the first important Congress leader to have taken the stand in 1981 that Mr. Antulay would have to go. All of them would, of course, continue to soldier on loyally but with what face?
The Prime Minister should bear yet another point in mind. For over 18 months Mr. Antulay has conducted himself in a manner that any move on her part to help him out of his predicament is bound to create the impression that she is yielding to blackmail. Such an impression can only ill-serve her and, more important, the country. The issue is not fully settled. She can still reverse her decision and let the law take its own course.
The Times of India, 13 march 1984
| Mr. Girilal Jain’s article was written before Mr. Rajiv Gandhi’s statement was issued. The statement was received in our office at midnight. |