Fuel a change

THE Express came up with over 100 names of people who have helped themselves to petrol pumps and gas agencies through the simple expedient of utilising their family connections. A 100 people 8212; men and women, husbands, wives, sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, sons-in-law, daughters-in-law. They constitute nothing less than the Undivided Indian Family, where power and pelf are to be held and retained within the household.

Only one man in this entire list had the honesty 8212; albeit a somewhat belated expression of it 8212; to actually relinquish the allotment made to him. So let8217;s have it for Sreenivas M. Vaidya, son of RSS spokesman M.G. Vaidya, for shooting off a letter to Ram Naik as soon as his name figured on the front page. He protested loudly that his father knew nothing about this fiddle and so be it. The big question, of course, is how many others among this rather oily lot plan to take similar action. Will the relatives of the various MLAs who figured in our investigations over the last few days do the right thing? Will the nephew of the chief minister of Himachal Pradesh suffer from a twinge of conscience? Or the wife of the Punjab BJP president? What about those from the Congress who saw nothing wrong in sharing in the bounty? For instance, will the Congress president, Sonia Gandhi, demand that they make amends or face disciplinary proceedings from the party?

But, most important of all, what about the Union minister of Petroleum and Natural Gas Ram Naik? What course will he take? He has told this newspaper that if he gets complaints about wrongful allotment and they turn out to be true, he will act. But is he not struck by the curious fact that over half the 3,850 allotments made under his dispensation went to his party8217;s activists and their relatives? Also, how will he account for the fact that he had 8212; as the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Petroleum and Chemicals has pointed out 8212; set up and presided over a system that lent itself to such blatant abuse? A system so pliable to the demands of the ruling party and its functionaries that it amounted to a huge mockery of the Supreme Court ruling that the allotment system must be 8216;8216;transparent, just, fair and non-arbitrary8217;8217;? The evidence is there in black and white. We now await executive action on it.