The Congress and the BJP seem to have only one common minimum programme — to steal crooks and scamsters from each other’s camps in a desperate bid to win the polls.
The moral high ground has been buried. The ideologues of the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party seem to have only one common minimum programme — to steal crooks and scamsters from each other’s camps in a desperate bid to win the polls. Bank scamsters, murderers, bootleggers, and drug smugglers, who were certainly not the pin-up models of either party, have not only switched camps but have also earned poll tickets. DNA exposes the criminals in Gujarat politics to help you vote right: First, they duped you of your hard-earned money; then, under political patronage, they evaded legal action. They never repaid your dues, and never got punished for it. Now, they are making a glorious comeback, armed with more power than ever, and are seeking your vote to represent you in parliament.
The bank scamsters are back, and how. They figure prominently in the BJP’s first list of candidates for the Lok Sabha elections, that was declared earlier this week. At least four of the 24 candidates figure in complaints filed after the cooperative banks scams surfaced, and are among the accused in the half-a-dozen cooperative banking scams that rocked the state between 2002 and 2004. Some Rs312 crore of investors’ money has been lost because of the scamsters.
Prabhatsinh Chauhan, the BJP candidate from Panchmahals, is among the 20 who are accused of swindling Rs126 crore from the Panchamahals Central Cooperative Bank. Deepak Sathi, the contestant from Anand, is accused of not repaying Rs77 crore to the Charotar Nagrik Sahakari Bank, and CR Patil, Navsari’s hopeful, of defaulting on the payment of Rs55 crore to the Diamond Jubilee Co-operative Bank. Darshana Jardosh, the contender from Surat, was the director of Mahila Nagarik Sahakari Bank when it lost Rs10 crore, soon after the Madhavpura bank crash. The latest entrant is Kanaksingh Mangrola, the Samajwadi Party candidate from Bharuch, who is accused of wiping out Rs44 crore from the Suryapur Co-operative Bank in Surat.
Despite the efforts of activists who want to purge politics of criminals, a new category of wrongdoers is emerging in Gujarat — the white-collar criminal. “White-collar and financial crimes are as dangerous to society and the country as other crimes. Violence gets public odium, but in a liberalised economy like ours, we need to build public opinion against white-collar criminals too,” said Jagdeep Chhokar, a former IIM-A professor and the founder-member of the NGO, Association of Democratic Reforms, which has been effective in propagating transparency in politics.
As for action against the accused, the MoS for home, Amit Shah, defended Chauhan in the state Assembly when the Congress demanded his arrest. Patil was arrested and released on bail. Though Sathi was not given a nomination in the 2007 elections, he was never taken to task, nor was Jardosh apprehended. The money lost by the banks was never returned to the investors.
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