Sushma-Lalit: Whodunnit?

Vibhishan hangs around the corridors of power in Delhi and hears things that others can’t.

There are multiple forces at play in the allegation that Union Minister of External Affairs Sushma Swaraj extended an out-of-turn favour to disgraced former IPL commissioner Lalit Modi. The story begins in 2010, the script takes shape in 2012 and moves in a direction hinting at an unthinkable, tacit alliance between the then ruling Congress, the chief opposition party and a section of the media perceived to be hostile to a formidable leadership of the BJP.

Were Congress and BJP sinister bedfellows?

In April 2010, when the IPL under a BCCI then ruled by the NCP’s Sharad Pawar and officiated by the Congress’s Rajiv Shukla and the cricket body’s secretary Niranjan Shah began looking murky, then chief of opposition in the Rajya Sabha Arun Jaitley strangely came to the cartel’s rescue and, using his legal prowess, pinned the entire blame on Lalit Modi.

It was not the first time the Congress and the BJP were seen helping each other out in the pre-Narendra Modi era of the right wing party’s central leadership. During NDA-1, then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee “cunningly executed amendment of the Citizenship Act to remove a major obstacle in the path of naturalised citizens seeking political office in India,” wrote A Surya Prakash in an edit page article in The Pioneer, alleging that the BJP’s anti-foreigner plank against Sonia Gandhi was an eyewash. Prakash now happens to be the head of Prasar Bharati — he is one of the appointees of NDA-2 that shows a clear pro-Sangh tilt in recruitments. Though close to LK Advani as well, Prakash, like most of the RSS’s rank and file, holds a poor opinion of the first non-Congress prime minister whose government lasted six years.

In September 2001, days after 9/11, while NDA-1 ruled India, Rahul Gandhi was reported to have been detained by the FBI at the Boston airport with cash that was unaccounted for. The right wing’s favourite conspiracy theorist Subramanian Swamy, then not with the BJP, quotes the amount as $160,000. Right wing bloggers believe Rahul’s girlfriend Veronique alias Juanita’s father had been a kingpin of an international drug mafia and she must be carrying contraband substances during her trip with her boyfriend.

Once again, the BJP had come to the Congress’s rescue. Then National Security Adviser Brajesh Mishra allegedly moved the US authorities via then Indian Ambassador to that country Lalit Mansingh to secure the beleaguered Congress scion’s release from the FBI!

Add to the three issues above — BJP’s farcical anti-foreigner stand, help to Rahul Gandhi and deflecting attention from Congress-NCP’s culpability in the IPL scam — the fact that no tangible progress was made in investigations and legal proceedings of the Bofors gun scandal case between 1998 and 2004. Even in the Robert Vadra-DLF scandal, plots acquired under the deal were shared as much by some BJP leaders as they were by their Congress counterparts — quite a few television channels had reported. It was not for no reason that by 2011-12, the people had started looking for a third political alternative, making Anna Hazare-led India against Corruption movement an overnight success and, later, Arvind Kejriwal’s Aam Aadmi Party a phenomenal new kid on the block.

RSS intervenes

Enough is enough, the Sangh must have thought when it decided to throw its weight behind Narendra Modi as a chief differentiator between the then ruling Congress and the chief opposition party, the BJP.

However, the challenge to the Gujarat chief minister’s rise on the national scene was awe-inspiring. Even as Advani was no longer the party’s president, his infamous coterie, referred to as “D-4” or “Delhi Four” — comprising Swaraj, Jaitley, Venkaiah Naidu and Ananth Kumar — ruled the roost. Being a mass-based leader and represented in the Lok Sabha, Swaraj’s candidacy was the most impressive. Therefore, even while the other three of the quartet conveniently switched to the new, rising leader, she openly sulked, never quite joining the chorus for “Narendra Modi as Prime Minister”.

What people do not know is the fact that, when the then Gujarat CM was still just the head of the BJP’s campaign committee, she went to the extent of approaching Sarsanghachalak Mohan Bhagwat to stop his further ascent. And that was a mistake that sealed her fate.

Bhagwat threw at Swaraj a typical Sanghi idiom only RSS insiders can relate to. After MS Golwalkar’s reign, the Sangh was thoroughly disappointed by the performance of the Jana Sangh in the political sphere. Seeing the party turn unruly, a frustrated Madhukar Dattatraya Deoras went into a self-imposed exile at a cowshed near Gorakhpur that was known for its huge stockpile of hay. The then sarsanghachalak refused to come back to Nagpur, come what may. If at all a Jana Sangh leader needed his advice urgently, the poor guy had to go all the way to this bhoose ka godam where he would find an indifferent Sangh chief hardly interested in his problems.

Back to 2013, believing that Swaraj would know this story, Bhagwat told her if she was unhappy with Narendra Modi’s prime ministerial candidature, the only recourse she could take was retreating into a bhoose ka godam!

The final internal factor

Before turning the face of IPL scandal, Lalit Modi’s rise in cricket administration owed to his proximity to then and now Rajasthan Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje. Till her last tenure, she was easily one of the most divisive faces within the BJP — especially in its state unit. Opposition to her within the party was so vicious that they spread a canard about her binge drinking, attaching the epithet “No CM after 8 pm” to her name, which the Congress picked up with gay abandon. This faction, no more virtuous than the Raje faction — thanks to its members savouring opium in the name of a Marwar tradition — is the part in Rajasthan BJP that was close to the Vajpayee regime, of which “D-4” was an integral part.

This faction sees in Lalit Modi an opportunity of dragging down the chief minister once again.

The next Cabinet reshuffle

This has been on the prime minister’s card for a while. But, thanks to the premier’s (in)famous aversion to interacting with the media, political observers are left with no choice but to speculate wildly who is going where in the Cabinet. A journalist finally managed to put the question across to Narendra Modi last month in Patna, suggesting a few names arbitrarily. Facing constant complaints that he has been relying heavily on Jaitley, the prime minister saw in the question a rare chance to cut his finance minister to size.

Pointing at Jaitley sitting next to him, PM Modi said, “kab main kis ko mantri banaunga, in ko bhi pata nahin chalega” (even Jaitley wouldn’t know when I decide to make someone a minister)!

Prior to this, the finance minister was reported to have met the boss on at least 12 occasions to get every punctuation mark in his Budget speech ratified. It would be naïve to assume that Jaitley, well-networked across political and industrial circles, wouldn’t activate his redoubtable machinery to salvage his position in the government — particularly when Swaraj’s name is believed to figure as a possible replacement of a minister whose name Jaitley had suggested to the prime minister on 26 May 2014: Smriti Zubin Irani of HRD.

While the facts of the next Cabinet reshuffle are still under the wraps, Narendra Modi did meet about a dozen MPs separately to know how they would take up the new jobs he was keen on passing onto them. In one such meeting, Swaraj is rumoured to have told the boss that Gen VK Singh was doing a wonderful job as the MoS in her ministry and, hence, must be promoted to a Cabinet rank. Citing her declining health, which makes frequent travels mandated by the MoEA difficult, she requested that she be moved to an ‘easier’ ministry. On being asked what ministry she had in mind, she named HRD.

This would be nothing short of a double whammy for Jaitley. One, his recommended minister Irani is slated to be demoted. Two, his bête noire in the Council of Ministers, against whom his Defence Ministry had deposed in the court, the former general of the Indian Army is all set for a promotion to one of the most prominent of portfolios. As education minister, Swaraj is going to hog no less media space either.

Aware of all such machinations within the party, BJP MP from Darbhanga Kirti Azad tweeted: “’#BJPs#AsteenKaSaanp & #Arnab conspire against BJP leaders. Guess the snake? IStandWithSushmaSwaraj @SushmaSwaraj” [https://twitter.com/KirtiAzadMP/status/610081274347171840]

Her vulnerability

That said, Swaraj does enough to embarrass her party every now and then. Before her well known sulk, it was a photograph showing her literally blessing notorious Reddy brothers that had turned into the Congress’s delight. The D-4, which acquired the pejorative reference of “Club 160” during the Lok Sabha campaign, was simultaneously playing a game to challenge Narendra Modi’s rise.

They coaxed Sagarika Ghose, wife of then chief editor of CNN-IBN Rajdeep Sardesai, in 2011 into dedicating an episode of her programme “Face the Nation” to promotion of Swaraj as the BJP’s best PM candidate. The anchor said things that were too obvious to be stated in a bid to project the then Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha as the then largest opposition party’s strongest contender for the chair of the country’s chief executive: that she was fluently bilingual and that she had an excellent record of debates and interventions in Parliament!

If D-4 had succeeded in making Swaraj the prime ministerial candidate of the BJP, her ill-repute as a compromised candidate would have most probably reduced the party’s tally to somewhere around the 160 mark; thereafter, potential alliance partners of the NDA would agree to join a BJP-led government at the Centre only under the condition that they remove a ‘divisive’ Modi from the top rank.

Nevertheless, at the time when attempts such as planting puff pieces promoting other contenders in media and moving Bhagwat to stop Narendra Modi failed, the former coterie of Advani also witnessed a split, alienating Swaraj as a lone ranger. She had been innocuous for her former club members who have dug their heels deep in the prime minister’s camp until the PM and MoEA decided to bury the hatchet, threatening to lessen the importance of the few ministers who keep performing in a way that rids NaMo’s performance of the sparkle of reformism.

Therefore, and only therefore, a story that should have broken in July 2014 breaks in June 2015. The Jaitley-friendly media does not hesitate to further the ridiculous theory that Lalit Modi, a nobody in England, can influence admission of students to the University of Sussex. This funny section of the media also looks away from the fact that lawyers who are politicians do not let politics come in the way of their professional practice. If a Ram Jethmalani is not questioned for fighting cases for Indira Gandhi’s assassins and murderers of Jessica Lall and Nitish Katara, or a Kapil Sibal faces no problem advocating the case of the TMC government of West Bengal, why should Sushma and Swaraj Kaushal’s daughter Bansuri be an exception who must be debarred from fighting Lalit Modi’s case? And this section of the media, led by a hollering Arnab Goswami, also believes that Swaraj’s actions as an opposition leader holds her in bad stead when she is part of the government. Well then, should Times Now be dragged into a fresh controversy due to the ED’s cases against Benett & Coleman’s Ashok Jain in the late 1990s?