The media should be forgiven for its varying estimations of the money involved in the scam masterminded by one-time vegetable vendor, Abdul Karim Telgi. The truth is nobody, but nobody, has the slightest clue as to its full contours — and now they have even unearthed a cache of foreign stamps and currency from a location in Nashik that is linked to another accused in this case. The original cancer has, it appears, grown to unimaginable dimensions and has given rise to secondaries. It would require a decisive scalpel to excise it from the system. In other words, the scam demands concerted criminal-judicial action at every possible level. The arrest of the former Mumbai police commissioner, R.S. Sharma, is an important step forward. The fact is that if the cops had done their appointed job, scamsters like Telgi would have been brought to book and this racket stamped out much earlier. It was precisely because of the elaborate protection afforded to them by a network comprising politicians and policemen, that they could flourish in the way they did, leaving the country poorer by thousands of crores in the process. Sharma’s arrest — less than a month after that of IGP Sridhar Vagal — indicates how deeply compromised is a police force that was once regarded the best in the country. It is a pointer to how corruption has permeated the highest ranks, ranks that were once considered incorruptible and which providing the normative framework for the entire police force. It is also a pointer to the manner in which the system of transfers and appointments is manipulated to further crime and reward wrong-doers. Despite Sharma having come under a cloud earlier on in the Telgi investigations while he was the Pune police commissioner, he still made it to the top police post in Mumbai, with the Maharashtra home minister’s explicit support. The political angle promises to be just as intriguing as the police angle, although the identity of the ministers involved has thus far not made it to public attention. In fact, it is in unravelling the politician-police-scamster nexus that the criminal-judicial system will be most put to the test. The Telgi scandal extends to over five states and involves sums of mind-boggling proportions. It concerns the sanctity of the country’s financial transactions. It involves the reputations of public servants at the highest level. Given these facts, given the general outcry that has met the revelations to date, the ordinary citizen has a great stake in getting to the bottom of the scandal. We would now need to summon the political will to do so.
