His damn-DMK report buried, Jain invokes Arafat!

Jain, still flourishing under Congress patronage in the fourth year as Lokayukta of Rajasthan, doesn’t hide his resentment. Speaking to The Indian Express from Jaipur, he says: ‘‘This (the warming up of Congress to DMK) is a suprising development…The Congress appears to have had a change of heart. If the DMK resumes to give support to the cause of Tamil Eelam as it did earlier, things may become difficult again.’’

Jain may not be too much of a soothsayer—for five years, the 17 volumes of his report have been gathering dust.

In December 1998, the Gujral Government set up the Multi Disciplinary Monitoring Agency (MDMA) to look into his report. The MDMA is unemployed but no Government wants to send it home. Least of all Justice Jain himself.

‘‘The truth must come out,’’ he says, ‘‘the MDMA must question Yasser Arafat for instance…they must look into everything.’’ This plea finds few ears in the MDMA.

Except for a lone representative of the Intelligence Bureau (IB), the MDMA has been reduced to a special unit of the CBI. It has two offices manned by 40 staffers who, a year ago, got additional responsibilities since, as one of them said, ‘‘there’s hardly any movement in the assassination case.’’

MDMA officials told The Indian Express that in five years they have found ‘‘hardly anything’’ on any of the eight terms of reference handed over to them. And this includes looking into what Jain described as his ‘‘irresistible conclusion’’ about the ‘‘tacit support (given) to the LTTE by M Karunanidhi and his Government.’’

Karunanidhi had, in fact, resisted an MDMA interrogation but was eventually questioned twice. The agency came up with nothing tangible to back Jain’s claims. The irony is that for months now, what the CBI refers to as Final Reports (FRs)—apparently there will be one bulky report for each term of reference—are lying ready in the MDMA’s office. The one subject that CBI officials claim is still being ‘‘actively investigated’’ is the ‘‘intelligence lapse’’ that occurred since some messages about a possible LTTE strike against Rajiv had been intercepted before the assassination.

So why doesn’t the MDMA wind up?

For one, its officials concede, the Ministry of Home Affairs will not let it do so and instead keeps giving it extension after extension. The existing term of the MDMA, incidentally, ends on May 31, 2004. The second reason is of the agency’s own making. For want of anything else to do and for pursuing two particular points on its charter (the role of godman Chandraswami and of LTTE financer Kumaran Padmanabhan) the MDMA had gone on a shooting spree—of Letters Rogatory (LRs) to as many as 23 countries, including some like Morocco and New Zealand!

As of date, just four countries have bothered to reply to the LRs. Having embarked on a complicated diplomatic course and having wasted years chasing wisps of the conspiracy yarn spun by Justice Jain, the MDMA is now decidedly at a deadend.Not so, it seems, Sonia Gandhi and M Karunanidhi.