The chest thumping by the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) and the euphoria witnessed in the NDA (National Democratic Alliance) on the completion of one year in office dissipated faster than mist in the morning sun after the ruling party, the BJP, found itself in the midst of a series of scandals, one more devastating than the other.
The BJP which had never missed an opportunity to raise Cain whenever the UPA government put a foot wrong during its decade in power, has now been saddled with the unenviable task of defending its own flock. Narendra Modi rode to power on the plank of good governance and a corruption free administration, both of which were conspicuously absent in the UPA years. His External Affairs Minister and one of the BJP’s seniormost leaders Sushma Swaraj, who had even served as the Leader of the Opposition in the previous Lok Sabha, has been trapped lending her considerable weight to a fugitive from Indian justice and former cricket tsar Lalit Modi, to enable him to get travel documents from the United Kingdom (UK) government. And then came even more serious charges against the Rajasthan Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje, who found herself in the dock for handing over a witness statement to the UK authorities recommending the same Lalit Modi’s continued stay in that country.
Meanwhile, two ministers in the BJP ruled Maharashtra Pankaja Munde and Vinod Tawde came under a cloud for their acts of commission and omission. But to cap it all, the Vyapam scam involving large scale malpractices in college examinations and recruitments, which could well evolve into the mother of all scams, rattled the BJP in Madhya Pradesh (MP). What distinguishes this scam from those in the past UPA government and various other scams the country has seen is that Vyapam has been leaving a cold trail of death, a macabre chain of events that shows no sign of ending. Mysterious deaths of accused in the scam, including the son of the MP Governor, whistleblowers, witnesses and a journalist probing the death of a young woman associated with the scam, have lent an eerie touch to Vyapam, investigation of which has now been handed over to the CBI by the MP Chief Minister, Shivraj Singh Chauhan, albeit reluctantly.
What has been most intriguing in every single case that has put the ruling dispensation on the mat with the opposition baying for its blood, is the silence of Prime Minister (PM) Modi, which is so unlike a leader whose communication skills have been lauded even by the opposition parties. The BJP which taunted the former PM Dr. Manmohan Singh for his lengthy silences when the UPA was sinking into a morass of corruption, and even labeled him as ‘Maun’mohan Singh, now has egg on its face. The opposition, the media and the voters expected the PM to voice his opinion on all these sordid happenings in his radio broadcast ‘Mann Ki Baat’. Here too, he skirted the issue in toto without as much as even a passing reference.
What is now emerging is a situation where the BJP’s promise of providing a corruption free government at the Centre and in the states ruled by it is going to be observed in its breach. What is worse is that it is prepared to sweep everything under the carpet and carry on defending the indefensible come what may. So the inevitable question that ought to be uppermost in the minds of the people across the country should be: ‘So what is different about this government?’
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C. V. Aravind
C. V. Aravind is a Bangalore-based freelance journalist.[/column]