Several days ago, we observed that Mayawati's UP win hadn't gone down well with the socialists.The attacks seem to be picking up pace. CNN-IBN is running an "expose", claiming alleged financial irregularities by Mayawati:
Maya 'gifts' BSP office worth crores to brotherCompare and contrast this report with the Pratibha Patil related exposes. In those cases, the media strongly asserted:
Lucknow: The BSP Prerna Kendra is the place which is meant to act as a source of great inspiration to Dalits across the country. It is the place which bears tell tale signs of BSP's brand of Dalit revolution.
Now this place is about to become a personal property - the property of the brother of UP's Chief Minister Mayawati, Anand Kumar.
CNN-IBN has details of the deed which has been worked out.
According to the deed, the market value of the Bahujan Prerna Kendra located at 5, Lal Bahadur Shastri Marg is more than Rs 1.25 crore. [link]
a) Nothing has been proven in a court of law yet (and never will be, as we now know)
b) All Maharashtra politicans have a suger mill, a cooperative and a college - so what's the big deal?
Also, note how the report starts with the legacy of Ambedkar. As we noted before, Mayawati is being held to an absurd benchmark, conveniently defined by the sec-soc lobby. The subtext is clear, Mayawati is not upholding Ambedkar's visions. Hence she is not the right choice for Dalits. Once this framework is properly laid out by the media and consumed by gullible public, all they need to do is cry foul! No need to examine the details. For instance, if Mayawati supports retail expansion in UP, it will be a foul. Ambedkar never said retail, did he?
Another minor detail, the headline mentions that the office is worth "crores". Turns out the office is worth about 1.25 crores. The report also mentions that the office will now become "personal property" of Mayawati's brother. Well, the office will be given to a trust. Not quite the same thing, is it? Buried deep in the report is the factoid that the office was actually built from BSP funds, i.e. funds built up by political donations to the BSP party. This is not in the same ballpark as the Pratibha Patil and Co. scams. Heck, this ain't even the same game!
Mayawati should be very careful. She is up against a very determined group of people who have been running a fascist regime for decades. She should learn a lesson from history too, when the mother-in-law/daughter-in-law duo of Indira Gandhi and Maneka Gandhi used nasty techniques to arrest Babu Jagjivan Ram's political ascent.
1 comment:
Barb:
On the said subject, read this article carefully:
Of the stuff Sonia is made
Was published about 8 years ago
Imagine too the cunning she showed after her husband's demise in starting the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation and grabbing for it the land allotted to the Congress party for its national headquarters. Today, madam reigns over the massive and magnificent building of the Foundation while no one in the Congress has the spine to stake claim to it. Even Vajpayee has shockingly not asked the Congress as to why the land allotted to the political party was allowed to go over to a third party.
Incidentally, it was the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation to which the ''clean'' and ''gentlemanly'' Manmohan Singh allocated one billion rupees in his very first Budget that was presented, remember, even as part of the nation's gold lay mortgaged abroad.
Sonia Gandhi's real coup, however, has been the stranglehold she has obtained over the wealthiest cultural institution of the country, having a corpus of one billion rupees and 21 acres of prime land in New Delhi valued at 50 billion rupees. How she did that in gross violation of the law and in utter disregard of public accountability is set out in Sandhya Jain's article in The Pioneer of June 22, 1999. Below is Ms Jain's case in short:
* The Indira Gandhi National Centre for Arts was set up by a Cabinet decision as an autonomous public trust in March 1987 to promote the preservation and integrated development of all the arts. Its president was the prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi; There were six other trustees.
* IGNA's original trust deed stipulated a 10-year term for the trustees, with one third retiring in 1997 and the government filling the vacancies. The President of India, as Visitor, could appoint a Review Committee to scrutinise its functions. This Committee's recommendations were binding. Because the government had given it a corpus of over half a billion rupees, the Comptroller & Auditor General of the country was to audit its accounts.
* When Rajiv Gandhi died in 1991, Sonia Gandhi was allowed to replace him as president of the board of trustees though she had no official status or public stature.
* In the midsummer of 1995, when a Congress defeat in the general election of the coming year could be foreseen, the six supremo trustees effected radical changes to the trust deed. ''Private citizen'' Sonia Gandhi became lifetime president while the others became lifetime trustees. The government was deprived of the right to appoint the member-secretary, and the right of the Visitor (President of India) to appoint a review committee was denied. The trustees also assumed the right to appoint more ''co-opted'' members, while the government of India's human resources development minister was reduced from ex-officio chairman to ex-officio member.
* The above sweeping changes were in violation of Article 24 of the original trust deed under which all amendments required the ''prior written approval'' of the government. Indeed, that stipulation itself was not included in the amended deed.
* The then HRD minister, Madhavrao Scindia, (a trusted lieutenant of Sonia Gandhi to this day), approved the new deed within a fortnight of the trustees' meeting, and did so without reference to the Cabinet, or even the law and finance ministries.
* Both, the amendment and the approval, were kept secret until February 1996 when IGNCA approached the Centre to enhance the capital cost of the building and had to produce the amended deed with its application for financial enhancement.
* As a bewildered government sought legal remedies, the attorney general opined that the amendments were, in sum, legally invalid. Despite the government twice conveying the legal position to the Trust, it has not received even a reply. It remains to be seen what the Trust's response is to the Centre's directive to the CAG to undertake the audit that had not been allowed by the Trust since 1994.
Meanwhile, let it be noted that during the seventh and eighth Plans, the IGNCA received Rs 84.30 million from the government of which, it is not clear, how much has been spent and how much there is in the Personal Ledger Account. But charge Sonia Gandhi with using public money to create a personal fiefdom, and she is likely to say that in a democracy you have to trust people, especially the dynasty; the rest is all technical.
Tailpiece: One of the ''co-opted'' members inducted into the IGNCA by the coup of 1995 was that ''clean'' and gentlemanly ''man of integrity'' who, while being a pucca Delhiite, had become a member of the Rajya Sabha on the ground of being ''ordinarily a resident of Assam.'' His name is Manmohan Singh.
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