Captain’s heavy hand

From Punjab, a story of the might of the state pitted against an officer. The plight of Gurnihal Singh Pirzada, jailed on charges of corruption in sanctioning two lease-rental agreements as managing director of the Punjab State Electronics and Development Corporation (PSEDC), brings to mind an uncomfortably familiar stereotype: of an administration lunging at a civil servant who has dared to stick his neck out. By all accounts, and as this paper has tracked, the Amarinder Singh government is being unduly heavyhanded in its treatment of an officer who has earned himself a reputation for making a difference. Many years ago, Pirzada was known to take on the forest mafia while he served in Tamil Nadu; he has been credited since with cutting through the red tape to notch notable achievements in making Punjab more hospitable to the infotech industry.

But l’affaire Pirzada is not really about Pirzada. The merits of the case against him will be determined eventually in a court of law. What it is about, however, is a state that shows no compunctions in acting in apparently arbitrary and vengeful ways. It raises questions about the recourse the individual citizen has against an official witch hunt. In another context, the behaviour of the present Punjab government has provoked similar questions earlier as well. There was the time, not too long ago, when Amarinder Singh’s government jailed his political rival and long-time bete noire Parkash Singh Badal, former chief minister and chief of the Shiromani Akali Dal, on charges of corruption. The overriding impression, then, was of state power being harnessed to pursue a private vendetta and of political scores being settled. The charges against Badal may yet stand up in court. But in the meantime, the Punjab chief minister has done him an unintended favour by vesting him with the halo of a martyr.

Whatever the final outcome of the Pirzada case, the Amarinder Singh government needs to make an effort to address the impression that it acts in petty ways. It must reassure all those who are concerned that no one in the state is safe from a politics conducted through the means of sudden raids and arrests. And all those who may conclude that the system is sure to strike back at whosoever takes the initiative and pursues reform.