Prosecuting a former CM

FORMER Haryana CM Bhupinder Hooda has been in the sights of the Modi government before the 2014 poll season for his alleged links with then UPA chief Sonia Gandhi’s son-in-law Robert Vadra. The BJP dealt generously in colourful innuendoes at that time to create a perception of sleaze and cronyism in the Hooda administration. Yet it took the Centre most of its term to even book the duo. The delay allowed Vadra to claim that the government was diverting people’s attention from the real issues. ‘Election season, increase in oil prices... So let’s divert real people’s issues with my decade-old issue,’ he had then quipped.

A similar scenario is being repeated. Cast in the starring role of this second case is also Hooda. The Governor’s sanction to prosecute the former CM came almost a year after the ED submitted before the Punjab and Haryana High Court that Hooda had illegally re-allotted a plot in Panchkula to Associated Journals Limited (AJL), the publishers of National Herald. The delay has permitted Hooda, much like Vadra, to call it politically motivated. In the latest hearing on Friday, procedural lapses have delayed the case as the CBI failed to submit some of the documents related to the charge-sheet. 

In both cases, if the intention was to conclusively demonstrate that  Congress rule, at the Centre and in Haryana, was blemished by corrupt practices, the attempt to establish that perception has been diluted due to the delay in booking the suspects and getting sanction for their persecution. In case of AJL, the matter gets complicated because of parallel action in Delhi, where the Urban Development Ministry ended its 56-year-old lease and asked it to vacate the premises. This case is now sliding towards a grey area where charges of the government trying to scuttle the voices of dissent and that of the country’s largest Opposition party will find traction. The BJP’s endeavour to crack down on corrupt practices seems to have taken far too long. Its entanglement with the poll season will put a question mark on the government’s sincerity of purpose.