Report on illegal mining leaked to TV channel, Ddays before it was to be submitted to govt. No prizes for guessing why!
Lok ayukta Justice Santosh Hegde's report on illegal mining in Karnataka has been leaked. The report, which was supposed to be submitted to the government on July 23 or thereabouts, was leaked to a TV channel on Wednesday.
That's as much surprise as you will get from Wednesday's dramatic turn of events.
Here's why: On Saturday, lok ayukta Hegde dropped a bombshell by saying that Lok Sabha BJP MP V Dhananjay Kumar and Karnataka higher education minister V S Acharya came to his house to lobby for dropping CM B S Yeddyurappa's name from the report.
On Monday, All India Congress Committee general secretary and Lok Sabha MP B K Hariprasad suggested lok ayukta Hegde should resign as he was favouring the BJP, and encouraging corruption in the state. Hariprasad has taken potshots at the lok ayukta in the past too.
On Tuesday, lok ayukta Hegde hit back at Hariprasad and asked: "If a dog barks, will you bark back?"
On Tuesday, chief minister BS Yeddyurappa left for a 10-day holiday in Mauritius, ostensibly to take a break before the report was to turn on the political heat in the state.
If it is indeed a coincidence, then the break gives the CM ample time to frame his response and decide the next course of action.
The lok ayukta report had been sent to the printer and Justice Hegde suspects neither his colleagues in the lok ayukta nor the government to have done it.
It's not just the CM and BJP ministers who stand to lose face in the wake of the report—JD(S) leader H D Kumaraswamy, Rajya Sabha Congress MP and miner Anil Lad, Karnataka housing minister V Somanna, and Karnataka ministers G Janardhana Reddy and Karunakar Reddy have also been named.
The report, which is expected to run into 9,000 pages and 400 pages of recommendations, has a few surprises. CM Yeddyurappa’s Prerana Trust took kickbacks from miners to allow illegal export of iron ore, it says. Some 43 companies, owned by Karnataka ministers, are involved in illegal mining, it says.
Officials at 27 check posts, through which the illegally mined ore passed, were bribed and compromised by miners, it says. G Janardhana Reddy runs mining companies in the names of his employees, it says.
But what won’t come as a surprise is this: The government will refuse to accept the report as it has been “released” to the media first. That is exactly what the government did when V Balasubramanian, chairman of the task force for recovery of public land and its protection, submitted his report.
The committee was instituted by the BJP government, but the report was critical of the government’s complacence in cases of land grabbing.
For some time now, a smear campaign has been going on in Karnataka to discredit the lok ayukta — there have been whispers of a secret deal between Justice Hegde and the BJP, and also whispers of a deal between Justice Hegde and the Congress.
The smear campaign came about when all else failed — parts of the report were leaked in June and lok ayukta Hegde and his right hand man U V Singh got busy rewriting the report, ostensibly to include the “latest developments”.
So will Justice Hegde rewrite his report, this time round? “I am pained and surprised but I will submit my own report,” he told DNA on Wednesday evening.
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