A House for Mr Vadra

The new pattern of insinuation is becoming familiar. A government ‘agency’ — sometime it is the IB, sometime it is the enforcement directorate, sometime it is just ‘sources’ — makes available to a friendly news outlet a nugget of loaded information. And, then the politician steps in and the anchor takes over. Name calling begins, fingers are pointed, motives are attributed, and, the country is treated to one more veritable ‘scandal’. The bad blood among political antagonists becomes thicker; the ruling establishment preens itself on one more score against ‘corrupt’ rivals. The attention shifts away from the government’s presumed successes and failures. And, soon we are in for another round of assembly election in this or that state. The polity remains in grip of cultivated animosities, seriously distracting from the serious business of governance. 

This distressing pattern is easily discernible in the latest controversy involving Robert Vadra, son-in-law of Congress president Sonia Gandhi. Vadra is a businessman, dabbling in ‘real estate’. No businessman can possibly come out clean after a total scrutiny from a hostile auditor. Vadra would be no exception. It has been suggested that he has experimented with considerable, perhaps ill-deserved, prosperity, precisely because he is Sonia Gandhi’s son-in-law; now that there is a government that makes no secret of its determination to send the Sonia Gandhi family packing, Vadra’s business deals would naturally get put under a microscope. The Congress would cry ‘witch-hunt’ but that will only provide amusement and fodder to the nightly televised circus-wallahs. 

The Modi establishment finds itself caught between two demands. The first comes from the Subramanian Swamy faction that seeks to bend every rule and jettison every convention to want to destroy the Congress’ first family. This faction has the edge because it enjoys complete blessings of the Nagpur high priests. The second but counter-demand is that the middle classes and the business community at home and abroad would not like India to get converted into a witch-hunting jungle raj. Vendetta may have its allure for the political partisan but a government worth its salt has to put a high value on the citizens’ faith and the global investor community’s confidence in India’s rule of law and its presumed fairness. It is a choice between short-term political gains and long-term institutional reputations.