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| Echoes of Andhra episode in the Valley | | |
ABID SHAH
NEW DELHI, DEC 27 – President Pratibha Patil has, indeed, accepted today the resignation of Andhra Pradesh Governor Narain Datt Tiwari in the wake of outrage following a TV sting operation exposing worst kind of lust, though grounds of failing health have been cited by the Governor for stepping down.
Sadly unlike this, similar cases involving the higher ups in public life elsewhere in the country, or outside the confines of Andhra Pradesh, may not necessarily meet a similar end.
And in case a punishment comes at all this may take as long as 19 years and may turn out to be as mild as six months in jail as has been the case with the former DGP of Haryana SPS Rathore for molesting a poor girl and a tennis player called Ruchika Grihotra who later committed suicide.
What is even more appalling is that punishment in such cases is what is mostly talked about without bringing in focus to the abysmal low that public life and its practitioners or public servants may have hit.
The audio CDs exposing a Samajwadi Party leader’s risqué telephonic talks a few years ago has almost been forgotten and so appears to have been the fate of sex scandal during the last rein of People’s Democratic Party and Congress coalition in Jammu and Kashmir though a case in this regard still lingers in a court.
It is no secret that after the infamous scandal in J&K in 2006, the CBI stepped in and traced the women behind the scandal and as the suspects were occupying high positions the Supreme Court ordered that the hearing of the case be shifted to a special court in Chandigarh. Yet an IAS officer who was one among the suspects was reinstated by the then Chief Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad in about a year’s time of being suspended as the officer was released on bail.
And as Ministers of the PDP-Congress coalition government in 2006 too were found to be in the thick of the startling sleaze involving politicos, bureaucrats and security officials by the Central Bureau of Investigation, the Congress-PDP Government found itself in the dock. Its Ministers like Ghulam Ahmad Mir from Congress and Raman Mattoo, an independent supporting the Government, became accused among others as officials were also involved in the worst ever mess of its kind that hit the State.
Yet shrewdness of the high and mighty soon appeared to be winning over public and media outcry. The powers-that-be waited until the memories of the abhorring scandal started fading out from the collective public memory and soon many of the accused were put back to business. Ghulam Ahmad Mir was elected once again to the Assembly though Mattoo could not make it to the House in the last year’s polls.
This year the sex scandal once again surfaced in the State Assembly when PDP leader Muzzaffar Ali Beg pointedly accused Chief Minister Omar Abdullah of being involved in the worst ever scandal provoking Omar to resign which was turned down by the Governor NN Vohra after consulting the CBI. Beg withdrew his charge and Omar was back; and the entire episode not only looked like shadow boxing but also pushed the infamous scandal further deeper into the wraps.
Thus, Kashmir had once reached so close to what Andhra is seeing today. The only difference may be that of the office held by those in the dock. Yet law supposedly cuts across office that one may or may not hold. But the point brought out by the latest turn of events in Andhra Pradesh is that it is the office whether in Hyderabad or in Srinagar/Jammu that needs to be redeemed from getting deeper into the morass. |
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