The Modi Government has gone after scamsters and middlemen with a rare zeal. No government in independent India has sought to cleanse the system as it has. The Opposition might counter that not one crook has so far been convicted — remember Ottavio Quottrrocchi was never convicted though there was not an iota of doubt he was a bribe-taker in several big-ticket deals.
This is essentially due to a judicial system which moves, if at all, even slower than a snail and, two, sabotage by various governments. Aside from pursuing bank defaulters under the newly-enacted bankruptcy law, the investigative agencies, especially the Enforcement Directorate, now have a free hand to pursue the thugs.
It was, thus, that the big catch, Christian Michel James, the middleman in the Augusta Westland VVIP helicopter deal, was flown from Dubai in a special plane some weeks ago. On Wednesday, the authorities followed up by flying in two noted fugitives from Dubai.
Rajiv Saxena, a close aide of Michel, and Deepak Talwar, a lobbyist, are now in the ED custody. This could not have been possible without the cooperation of the UAE authorities which have begun to fight the reputation they had acquired that their country was a haven for fugitives from India. Personal equations matter. Modi has established good relations with the ruling families of UAE.
Of the two thugs, Saxena was said to have deposited the crime money from the Augusta Westland deal, which, notably, Modi had cancelled on assuming office, in various shell companies set up abroad. His capture could lead the ED to pin down the eventual beneficiaries of the slush money in the VVIP chopper deal. Quite clearly, without the intervention of the powerful people in the Congress Party, the Italian company could not have won the Indian order.
Hopefully, incontrovertible evidence against the criminal politicians would soon be available. As for Talwar, he was a small-time tout who hit pay-dirt once he entered into an arrangement with a key figure in the Narasimha Rao Government, and has never looked back since, raking in tens of millions in bribes in all sorts of deals.
During the Rao regime, when foreign investment grew immensely following liberalization, he was the go-to man if anyone wanted clearance from the Foreign Investment Promotion Board, which at the time was under the direct charge of the PM’s all-powerful Principal Secretary A N Verma.
The FIPB would sit on applications for unconscionably long time until on the say-so of an official you hired the services of Talwar. Then the file moved at supersonic speed and within a matter of days the proposal was approved. Some of the best known multinationals took the help of Talwar to cross the FIPB obstacle.
Later, Talwar latched on to a key NCP minister in the UPA government, emerging the sole selling agent for anything and everything connected with the aviation sector, including the development of major airports under the Public Private Partnership model. Talwar found novel ways to keep his politician friends happy.
For example, the former Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister and now a force behind the Kamal Nath government would buy economy class for various trips he made to America and elsewhere and gave them to Talwar who, not unlike a magician, would promptly convert them to, hold your breath, first class.
These details emerged after Talwar’s philanthropic NGO was raided. Asked how he converted his economy class tickets into first class, Digvijay Singh was all innocence: ‘I thought Talwar knew someone in the airline’. The truth, however, was that while diverting some of the bribes into the NGO’s account he had set up to launder bribes, he actually bought first class tickets on the NGO account and promptly delivered them to Digvijay Singh.
Given the huge number of deals he was involved in as a fixer, Talwar could yield a goldmine of incriminating evidence were he to cooperate with the ED. Also, being in poor health, doing a deal with the ED to save his own skin could tear away the masks worn by our leading politicians.
However, time is crucial. But it is reasonable to believe that in the coming days and weeks, there could be a plethora of incriminating evidence against those who are currently engaged in tarring the reputations of someone who has the rare distinction of being squeaky clean.