Opinion Fifth Column: Mistakes and more mistakes

BJP spokesmen and ministers spoke in so many different voices it became impossible to understand what the party position was on Lalit Modi.

Some said he was an ‘absconder’ who would be brought back and jailed. Others said he was a ‘victim’ of the last government’s vindictive politics. It saddened me that nobody admitted that Lalit has supported the BJP politically and financially for a very long time. The Congress party stands by its friends. The BJP clearly does not. This is not just a mistake it is folly.

Since the Prime Minister has announced on foreign shores that he has rid India of its ‘scam’ image and that he is committed to bringing probity back to public life, he should have asked both Sushma Swaraj and Vasundhara Raje to resign. Not because they helped a friend in his time of need but because they lied about it.

Resignations do not need to be accepted but had they been offered, the government’s image would have suffered not at all and there would have been no story. We would have been talking instead about the visionary new urbanisation plan that the Prime Minister spelled out in Delhi last week. It barely made a few paragraphs because the ‘scandal’ took all the headlines.

The irony is that there is no scandal. Lalit Modi is bumptious, brash and needlessly noisy but is he really a criminal? He irritated some powerful people when he created the Indian Premier League (IPL) and placed it among the most famous cricketing tournaments in the world.

He may have broken some rules but he could not have taken the financial decisions he took without the approval of the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) that just happens to have on it some of the most important politicians in India. I do not follow cricket but I have done some research on the BCCI and am willing to bet that if it was investigated by an independent agency it would throw up more dirt than the recent FIFA investigation did.

I happen to know some people on this cricket board whose mysterious new wealth has ‘ill-gotten’ written all over it. Go to Lalit Modi’s website and his Instagram account to find out more. Lalit is not a close friend of mine. I have met him hardly five times if that many. But, I would like to say that his decision to ‘abscond’ was what I would have made in his position. Instead of real charges against him in a court of law, the Enforcement Directorate has hit him with allegations and innuendoes that would probably not stand up in court.

As someone who has grown up in India he knows that before such cases come to court many years can go by. If all that the Enforcement Directorate wanted when it sent its ‘blue corner notice’ to Interpol was to question him, what stopped them from questioning him in London? He makes clear on social media daily exactly where he is and why he is not a ‘fugitive’ but a soldier in the war against corruption.

In fighting this war he also makes clear that he intends to expose the long list of politicians who have accepted money and favours from him and if he is serious about this may he be brought home soon. What has been absent in the hysteria of the past week is any serious attempt to analyse what Lalit has been saying in his defence. If anyone tried in those frenzied TV debates they were blown out of the debate by noise and fury. This happened to me when I dared to suggest that he might be the only Indian ever whose passport was revoked while he was on holiday abroad. Has this happened to any other Indian citizen?

Sushma and Vasundhara were right to try and help a friend. What they did wrong was to lie about it and that damaged Modi’s government seriously.

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