By Patricia Mukhim
Corruption is almost normalised in Meghalaya. The elections held this year has proven this without a shadow of doubt. But more than that this election has also seen the return of the impudent, loud-mouthed politicians who won despite their haughty speeches and couldn’t care less demeanour. To expect voters here or elsewhere in this country to use their sense of reasoning is to expect the impossible. Poverty reduces people to nothing less than beggars. There are stories of politicians fighting the recent elections who distributed dinner sets and pressure cookers. When the electorate is reduced to that level of poverty where they no longer have self -respect, then the government we get will also be one that further pulverises people into abject poverty. But this is about politics. Let’s spend some time to understand the bureaucracy and their role in corruption. And why is it that politicians alone have to carry the burden of guilt when the paper work to facilitate corruption has to be done by the babus ( with apologies to those who find this term repulsive).
In the rice scam, how is it possible that the officers in the Social Welfare Department just put their signatures blindly on something they know stinks of a scam. Why could they not blow the whistle? One of the reasons why the Meghalaya House Kolkata scam was nipped in the bud was because we had Ministers like AH Scott Lyngdoh and Herbert Suchiang who could not tolerate an outright sale of Meghalaya’s prime property at Russell Street Kolkata by signing a 99 year deal with Asian Housing Corporation Ltd, a real estate company that was going to get the entire frontage of the building at Russell street for commercial purposes and where the Meghalaya Government would only be given a few rooms for VIPs in the backyard. At the time the Peoples’ Rally Against Corruption (PRAC) comprising nearly all the main pressure groups and a few individuals blew the whistle on this scam and filed a PIL at the Gauhati High Court. The day the PIL was filed the Government of Meghalaya rescinded the deal. So the State of Meghalaya has effective control over its Russell Street property even today. At the time the late AH Scott Lyngdoh was Finance Minister. He also was a former bureaucrat and retired as Chief Secretary of Mizoram. We don’t get people with that level of uprightness today. Looks like morality and ethics have been flushed down the drain of impunity.
It is important that the Finance Department not be concentrated with the Chief Minister’s office for consolidation of powers happens at a cost. In the MDA-01 regime, Chief Minister, Conrad Sangma had to defend all the scams from the Saubhagya to the Rice Scam to the Police Construction scam, to the Assembly dome scam amongst others that perhaps did not surface because there’s no one in the Government today that has the moral fibre to call out corruption. And why? Because every minister has his fingers in the pie. A supine bureaucracy out to please the carpetbaggers today will not upset the applecart because they are all looking at upward mobility and some financial gains too.
Chief Minister, Conrad Sangma in the MDA-01 regime did away with the powers of the CBI here perhaps because the Saubhagya scam was threatening to singe his government. So he did the next best thing and quickly appointed an Inquiry Committee. These Committees are smokescreens and in any other state where the Opposition is strong it would have said “No” to inquiry committees and instead demanded an independent inquiry by a sitting judge of a High Court. The Opposition should have demanded that they would select the sitting judge. Instead what has happened is the run of the mill rigmarole of the Government choosing a retired judge and other assisting officials who would all be paid from the state exchequer. Do we actually expect such an Inquiry Commission/Committee to indict the government? We must be perennial ‘lotus eaters’ to even expect anything to come out of these Inquiry Commissions/Committees.
As for the credibility of such inquiry commissions, no less a person than a retired Judge of the Madras High Court, Justice K Chandru writing for DT Next says, “Under the Commission of Inquiry Act, 1952, the Union government can order for an inquiry in respect of all items provided in List I and III of Schedule VII of the Constitution. The State governments are empowered to order a Commission of inquiry in respect of items in List II and List III of Schedule VII. Many a time, Commissions are appointed simultaneously by both the Centre and the State so as to frustrate the effort of one or the other. Though it has the powers of the Civil Court, a Commission’s report, to be submitted merely to the Legislature, is not binding. Under Section 3(4), it will be placed before a House with an action taken report within six months – which is often breached. The time limit fixed under the Act has no meaning because many Commissions have become self-perpetuating bodies. An inquiry ordered under the Act is an eye-wash. The Commission is a toothless tiger, which is most often appointed to ward off public protest. The presiding officers – either a retired judge of the Supreme Court or the High Court – are often either anxious to give a report in favour of the State or they perpetuate their tenure by frequent adjournments, thus frustrating the effort to find out the truth regarding a matter of public importance. A classic example is the Liberhan Commission, which continued for more than 18 years. Many reports are gathering dust in the corridors of Secretariats of Central and State governments.”
This gives us enough idea of why Inquiry Commissions in Meghalaya have never yielded any results. It’s not as if we have not had them in the past. The first corruption case in Meghalaya dates back to 1984 when Mr Salseng C Marak was PHE Minister (cabinet rank) and Nihon Ksih was the Minister of State. At the time Mr Marak confessed that he was taken by surprise that a multi-crore racket had occurred in the PHE Jowai Division. He only came to know of the scam when it was raised in the Assembly. The then CM, Capt Williamson Sangma set up an Inquiry Committee. The Committee was headed by the Managing Director of the Meghalaya Govt Construction Corporation (MGCC), Mr N Rynjah. Funnily, the terms of reference of the inquiry was such that it did not specifically require a probe into the role of the two ministers, despite Chief Minister Captain William Sangma’s assurance that he would not shield anybody found guilty in the affair, even if they were ministers.
But this particular case was so simple it didn’t even require a special inquiry to pin down the culprit then – RB Giri an executive engineer in the PHED, Jowai division. Against a total allocation of Rs 40 lakh for the purchase of materials during the financial year 1983-84, Giri had placed orders for materials worth Rs 13.27 crore and had managed to pay the contractors Rs 4.63 crore before he was restrained. Apparently the contractors/suppliers were supporters of the junior minister Nihon Ksih. The executive engineer had clearly overstepped his bounds, because normally, an executive engineer cannot make payments beyond Rs 20,000 per month without prior sanction from the department. But he must have done so at the behest of the minister!
This is shocking even by today’s standards. Even at that time there was complete absence of any checks and balances and the fact that the amount paid out was not insignificant, considering that the department’s entire capital budget for the year was a little less than Rs 10 crore and the state’s annual plan size was about Rs 64 crore, is unbelievable.
The Opposition then headed by BB Lyngdoh were left nonplussed. Lyngdoh said the Committee has obviously chosen not to probe beneath the superficial facts of the case or the specific role of the two ministers. The Opposition had asked for a high-powered independent commission to probe the case but Capt. Sangma chose a serving bureaucrat to prepare an official report. The total amount involved in this scam was a whopping Rs 13 crore which was a huge sum at the time. Scams therefore are a treasured legacy of Meghalaya and if there was no scam it would be unnatural. And in such scams, technocrats and bureaucrats have been involved as they are today.
The ‘India Today’ had at the time covered this PHED ‘racket’ extensively and people across India read of it with shock and awe. The word ‘scam’ had not been invented then. But clearly Meghalaya has a healthy legacy of burying scams/rackets via inquiry committees. Yet ministers then and now speak as if they are angels descended from heaven while defending these scams. What is troubling is the silence of the bureaucracy for to be silent is to be complicit.