#dnaEdit: Nailing the wrong

The Supreme Court has on Monday declared that all the 194 allocations of coal blocks made since 1992, which spans the governments of PV Narasimha Rao, Deve Gowda, IK Gujral, Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh lacked transparency, and they are therefore unfair and illegal. The largest number of allocations, 162, were made in the two terms of the UPA from 2004 to 2013. The Monday verdict reinforces the court’s decision of February 2012 cancelling 122 licenses for 2G spectrum given in 2009-10. The two verdicts were not based on the conclusions of the performance audit reports of the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) but on cases filed in the matter. But the court verdicts both corroborate and vindicate the CAG’s conclusions. 

Two of the then BJP MPs, Hansraj Ahir and Prakash Javadekar, now minister of environment and forests, and information and broadcasting, had made a complaint to the central vigilance commissioner (CVC), who found prima facie evidence for it to be referred for further investigations to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI). The government had asked the CBI to investigate allocations made during the NDA period as well. 

The political impact of the verdict will be diffused because the Lok Sabha elections this summer was fought mainly on allegations of corruption against the UPA government of Prime  Minister Manmohan Singh, and the UPA has been overwhelmingly rejected by the people. The other aspect is that the cancelled allocations spanned all the governments in the last two decades, but the political fallout for the United Front and National Democratic Alliance would be minimal. It is the Congress and the UPA which will have to bear the brunt of the latest judgment.

There was apprehension whether blanket cancellation in the cases of allocation of spectrum are fair to those few who have gone through the prescribed processes. In the case of coal blocks, the court seems to have left room for itself to consider individual cases and how they are to be treated, starting from September 1. The thrust of the court’s verdict with regard to the coal block allocations is that the screening committee did not follow its guidelines and there was casualness in following the processes. This has resulted in losses to the exchequer.

It is necessary not to collapse the conclusions of the CAG and the verdict of the Supreme Court. The CAG had opined that had the auction policy that had been recommended by the coal ministry been followed, the government would not have incurred the presumptive loss of Rs186 lakh crore. The court is not judging the government on the issue of not going the auction way and the presumptive losses that follow. It is looking at the actual allocations and the lack of transparency in them. It is the arbitrariness of the allocations that renders them unfair and illegal. This amounts to dereliction of duty. The distinction is important because they involve important and separate issues.

It is quite likely that it is the political fallout that will draw the most attention in the immediate aftermath of the court verdict. It is an important aspect of the whole issue, and the credibility of the political establishment gets battered. It is an indictment of the Manmohan Singh government, but it also serves as a warning to future governments as well. The legal liabilities of the officials and the ministers involved in the decision-making still remain to be made explicit.