Hide and raid

Whatever motivated the government to raid the premises of Reliance Industries, it could not have been a quest for truth in the continuing sa...

Whatever motivated the government to raid the premises of Reliance Industries, it could not have been a quest for truth in the continuing saga of Romesh Sharma and his malevolent network. Short of issuing a gazette notification, the government and its megaphones had made it apparent to anybody who cared to know that raids were being planned. So when the CBI teams came calling it almost amounted to ending the agony of the recipients of their attention.

The raids were an eyewash, a political gambit for whose sake and why are questions that must be raised now. It is not this newspaper8217;s intention to prejudge the veracity of the allegations against Reliance. It is also not our argument that anybody should be above the law simply by virtue of being India8217;s most significant corporate family. The issues are more fundamental.

Why single out Reliance when there have been no raids, or even the semblance of an investigation, into the conduct of senior police officials and bureaucrats or politicians who haveprotected Dawood Ibrahim8217;s alleged aide? Is the intention now to divert attention from all that? Or is it that the Sharma affair has threatened so many who wield unbridled power in New Delhi that the system is fighting back by targeting Reliance, a convenient scapegoat because it has a controversial past?

It is too early yet to pronounce anyone guilty in this complex, ugly and diabolical case. But the implications of the Romesh Sharma affair are so sinister that it is particularly important that investigations are neither derailed by the influence of his powerful patrons and other vested interests nor sidetracked to serve other political purposes. The ostensible reason for the raid on the Ambanis is, of course, that one of the so-called secret documents found in Balasubramaniam8217;s office had been faxed to the Ambanis in Mumbai.

Now it is no one8217;s case that Reliance was not exceptionally well-wired into the political-bureaucratic decision-making structure in the capital. The licence-quota raj may have beendismantled. But as the continuing ordeal of Tata Airlines shows, the babu-neta nexus still controls far too much power. As long as this is so, there is no getting away from corporate lobbying or fixing.

Two points, however, need to be made. One, the documents seized from Balasubramaniam8217;s offices, though secret, did not add up to any great violation of national security. They were certainly not budget documents as has been alleged in many places. Second, and more important, the Sharma case is not about the outdated and anachronistic Official Secrets Act. It is about extortion and abetting terrorism, about a system so abused that it allows Dawood to get his mother8217;s passport made in a couple of days with the help of police officials and top bureaucrats. It is about how neither the police nor the Home Ministry acted on complaints against Sharma for years.

And what are we talking about today? Corporate warfare, falling markets, acceleration in the loss of international business confidence in India and so on.If the central issue was corporate fixing and lobbying, if Reliance or the Ambanis were suspected to be running a network of extortion, blackmail, murder and rape, all this would have been a small price to pay for getting at the truth. Unfortunately, the whole thing smacks of shortsighted vendetta and won8217;t make India a more attractive investment destination for the foreigner, NRI or even Indian entrepreneurs.