By Patricia Mukhim
The first complaint about illegal activities in the so-called farmhouse of BJP Vice President, Bernard Marak alias Rimpu is perhaps the first case where a BJP leader is involved. Elsewhere the Enforcement Directorate (ED) has been busy raiding or questioning non-BJP political leaders including leaders from the Congress and the Trinamool Congress’s (TMC), former Education Minister, Partha Chatterjee where at last count over Rs 50 crore was found and now the ED has had to bring in note counting machines from banks to keep track of the amounts mopped up from other flats belonging to Chatterjee’s aide Arpita Mukherjee. The TMC has distanced itself from Partha Chatterjee, stripped him of all his party posts and dropped him from the cabinet. The BJP is yet to distance itself from Bernard Marak.
Money laundering by politicians, big business, bureaucrats, technocrats in this country is a well-oiled machinery. Money laundering is a process by which those wanting to hide the illegal sources of their income use complex transfers and transactions through a series of businesses to make black money appear white and is made to appear as legitimate business profits. In September 2020, Parliament was informed by Minister of State for Finance, Anurag Thakur that a meagre one per cent of the Indian population pays income tax. For the financial year 2018-19 till February 2020, 5.78 crore income tax returns were filed by individual taxpayers out of which only 1.46 crore individual taxpayers declared income above Rs 5 lakh. Anyone earning below Rs 5 lakh annually is exempted from paying income tax. Clearly, there are far too many Indians that are evading income tax considering we have such a large population of affluent High Net Worth Individuals (HNI).
The irony is that the tribals of Meghalaya don’t pay income tax and although some of them earn several hundred crores of rupees a year from different businesses which are their own or are run vide the benami route they live a charmed life. This inequity should end. In this respect, a former bureaucrat of Nagaland while interacting with members of the National Security Advisory Board in 2014 had expressed his anxiety that non-payment of income tax by tribals and the amount of development funds that finds its way into private pockets is being routed towards purchase of smuggled arms and drugs.
That crime and politics are two sides of the same coin is a well-documented fact. Equally well-documented is the fact that surrendered militants such as the Surrendered ULFA (SULFA) in Assam and other groups in the militancy afflicted states of the North East are known to set up businesses with the ill-gotten wealth they have managed to amass from extortion while they lived their lives underground. I have always wondered how militants who have lived by their own laws (and have been outlawed) are allowed to surrender and live as ordinary citizens without undergoing any reformatory process. Is it possible for a person who has lived like an outlaw to suddenly become a law-abiding citizen? Not only that. They are also allowed to contest elections and enjoy power and perks even while they continue with their underhand activities. The case of Julius Dorphang, now serving jail time in a POCSO case is a timely reminder that it takes time to reform a criminal no matter what fancy names they give themselves such as “freedom fighters” et al.
Now that the police have accumulated mountains of evidence from the farmhouse of Bernard Marak, would it still be fair to say that this is a case of political vendetta? True Marak has been calling out corruption in the MDA Government and there is no doubt at all that the Conrad Sangma led MDA Government is riddled with scams from the MeECL to short-selling of subsidised rice, and, all these investigations are not yet made public. But two wrongs don’t make a right. The allegations by BJP karyakartas that Bernard Marak has been unfairly targeted undermines the fact that minor girls were rescued from his farmhouse and have given their statements. Altogether 164 statements have been taken by the court. Why is the BJP in Meghalaya trying to tell us that those statements are all tutored? There is a limit to defending crime.
There are also others who claim that all the resorts and guest houses in Garo Hills are run without liquor licenses but they all serve liquor. The question here is – what is the Excise Department doing? Is it not their brief to make sure that liquor is not served in hotels/guest houses that have no permission to sell them? That such intoxicants are being sold even to adolescents is a double crime. How many lives are being destroyed by such illegalities? Does the BJP in Meghalaya not care about the welfare of its own people? Does it need to continue to defend its leader when all fingers point at his wrongdoings? In any case it is said that a person is innocent until proven guilty by a court of law. Bernard Marak has every right to defend himself but until the court decides whether he is innocent or guilty as charged, no one should rise to his defence just because he is a political leader.
It has been pointed out by no less a person than the Chief Justice of India that a media trial is the last thing that should happen in this country. It is agreed that the media’s task is only to report whatever facts of the case it is able to gather from different sources. But it would be wrong to conduct a media trial and pronounce anyone guilty despite the mounds of evidence against the accused.
Even in the case of TMCs’ Partha Chatterjee where hard cash has been found at different places and which are prima facie owned by him, the law has to take its course and the judgement finding him and his aide guilty or innocent will have to be pronounced by a court of law. That’s how the judicial system works. This will of course take its own time knowing how the criminal justice system in this country works. Meanwhile, Bernard Marak who is all set to contest the 2023 Assembly elections against Conrad Sangma might perhaps find it difficult to do so given the circumstances. But one never knows. In this country many people have been known to fight and win elections from inside a jail.
All that the law-abiding citizens of this State would ask for is that the law be allowed to take its course and there should be no due political interference for or against the case. We have seen lawlessness prevail in the mining and transportation of coal for close to four years now. The police turned the other way or connived in this game for all of four years. So much so that now even if the police try to uphold the rule of law, many are not convinced that they are doing it as a call of duty. Be that as it may, it is important to give the law-enforcers the benefit of the doubt because no matter how venal the system is there are always a few in that system who still believe in discharging their duties vide the Constitution. We cannot undermine their work and doubt their integrity simply because others before them shirked their duties.
Politics should not be allowed to trump the rule of law because without the latter we will have mis-governance and a system that lacks complete accountability and where everything is dictated by politics.