Spurious anger might land BJP in soup
By Harihar Swarup
Forcing repeated adjournment of both the houses of Parliament by the BJP on the Coalgate issue and persisting with its demand for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s resignation is proving to be counterproductive. Almost the entire media, allies of the UPA and the constituents of the NDA favour a debate on the issue, stressing that Parliament is meant to be the site of incisive deliberations and that the constructive opposition amounts to debating issues, not disrupting Parliament. Congress members say in the fuss over CAG report on coal, the BJP has shown its destructive streak, choosing disruption over debate. As the main opposition party, the BJP shares equal responsibility with the ruling Congress to restore Parliament its fine tradition of debate and discussion.
The BJP’s case is that since Coalgate happened under Manmohan Singh’s watch, he must resign owning moral responsibility for the scam. Congress leaders argue as the CAG report records manifest, two BJP state governments of the time—Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan, had opposed the competitive bidding in coal block allocation.
In response to a 2005 letter from the Union Coal Ministry, Chhattisgarh’s Chief Secretary had argued that bidding of coal blocks would make steel projects vulnerable. For her part, Vasundhara Raje, who was Rajasthan’s Chief Minister at that time, had taken cover under federalism, projecting bidding as Central interference in the state’s autonomy and decision-making powers.
Doubts are being raised about BJP’s intentions? Could the BJP be avoiding a discussion on Coalgate because the auditing story has turned out to be equally unflattering to itself? By dodging a debate the BJP is giving the impression that it has something to hide. The BJP’s problem is that for every finger it points at its opponent, it has three pointing back at itself. It cannot start a crusade against corruption without the questions being raised about the liberties it offered to the mining mafia of Karnataka.
The spurious moral indignation of some in the opposition takes its rise in the recent report of the CAG on the allocation of coal blocks for mining to the country’s leading private companies with the explicit purpose of feeding power plants which function well below capacity on account of a desperate shortage of coal. The Public Sector Coal India Ltd lacks the capacity to simultaneously extract coal across the minefields. The CAG has held that the government cause a presumptive or notional loss—not a real one—to the exchequer of Rs. 1.86 lakh crore by allotting coal acreage to companies through the old system of screening applications by a committee of top officials, not by right away setting in motion a system of competitive bidding, as proposed by some senior officials. In this period, Dr Singh himself oversees the coal portfolio.
Although there are no complaints on record from an aggrieved competitor who may have overlooked in allotment, or any other quarter, the CAG’s implied suggestion is that allocations were made were made to cronies and bribe takers, and this became possible because the screening arrangement lacked transparency. This is what the BJP is seeking to exploit to further their cynical aims.
But they ran into hot waters when the coal blocks were allotted, governments of states where coal is found were run by the BJP, the CPI-M led Left and the BJD-BJP coalition. These vociferously argued – in writing—against switching over to a system of competitive bidding for coal blocks, maintaining that the auction route would cause power tariffs to rise. (IPA Service)