Courting rebuke

When the prime minister ordered the cancellation in August of all allotments of petrol pumps and dealerships of LPG/kerosene agencies made s...

When the prime minister ordered the cancellation in August of all allotments of petrol pumps and dealerships of LPG/kerosene agencies made since January 2000, in response to this paper’s expose of the Petrol Pump Scam, it had seemed like the long-awaited break from the past.

This government promised to confront its mistakes and learn from them. Vajpayee’s government would not, it was hoped, just brazen it out, like successive Congress governments had, most notably on Bofors. Even at that time, however, it was obvious that the order could only be a first step and that a larger, lasting course correction would require both a fine-tuning of the blanket order as well as a sustained follow-through.

Now, the Supreme Court’s unequivocal quashing of the order alongwith its stinging indictment of the government’s motives confirms apprehensions that have grown since August — that the government lacked the commitment in the first place to translate its spectacular gesture into a genuine clean-up of a deeply tainted system.

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Was the order only a cover-up? A gimmick and an evasion of responsibility, or as the bench has dubbed it, a ‘piece of window-dressing for public consumption’? Was the unthinking, arbitrary clubbing of the bad apples with the good designed to help the government escape the scrutiny of the politically motivated allotments exposed by this paper? It wasn’t just the omnibus character of the order that had provoked these questions over the last many months.

It was also that almost immediately after the prime minister announced the cancellations, his colleagues set about, busily and implausibly, denying the implications. No wrongdoing, they chimed, had been detected in the allotment process and the PM’s order does not amount to an admission of guilt. The sole provocation, they insisted, for cancelling thousands of allotments and scrapping the entire system of making them, was the fuss made by the media and the Opposition in Parliament.

Petroleum Minister Ram Naik tried yet another tack: if you question the allotment process, he said, you are guilty of casting aspersions on the judiciary. After all, the Dealer Selection Boards (DSBs) were chaired by retired judges…

The court’s sharp rebuke must be the opportunity to begin afresh on the road to reform, and this one mustn’t lead into a blind alley. The court has constituted a judicial committee to probe the 417 politically connected allotments this paper had listed. But eventually, the government, the political leadership, must own the reform process. It must punish the guilty — those who bent an entire system to their will. It must also set in place a fairer, more transparent system that genuinely does away with political discretion.