Where’s Goswami?

We’re not taken in by the sudden fuss and furore in the Bihar police department. The belated arrest warrants sought and won against Gau...

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We’re not taken in by the sudden fuss and furore in the Bihar police department. The belated arrest warrants sought and won against Gautam Goswami and other key accused in the multi-crore flood relief scam will fool no one. For too many long days after the Indian Express revealed just how the funds meant for those rendered helpless by the flood in Bihar were hijacked by the official and the contractor, government remained unmoved. In Delhi and in Patna, they only watched as Patna’s former DM preened and postured on the public stage. It didn’t seem to matter, then, that this was the man who had, by all accounts, jumped out of his government job, literally without a by-your-leave, hopped into another one, leaving behind a scandalous trail that had just been meticulously followed and exposed. It didn’t seem to matter that this paper had put out enough evidence in the public domain for government agencies to follow up. No, the hyperactivity by government agencies in overdrive now is too belated to look true.

You don’t have to be a proven cynic to see a pattern here. It is now the established common sense that it requires something more than the law of the land to ensure that cases of official corruption and criminality are pursued rigorously to their fair conclusion. The government is all too vulnerable to political pulls and pressures. Then, it may simply give in to the default option of inertia. The list is long of cases that made an almighty splash and were then left to fade without trace — remember Dilip Singh Judeo? That other list is lengthening as well, of inquiries ostentatiously begun and unendingly pursued against political opponents with no hope of closure. Quite frankly, the government’s laggardly follow-through on the flood relief scam is part of a pretty damning picture.

No government can afford to be either unmindful or complacent about this loss of credibility in the public eye. It cannot but know that each and every time it shows ineptitude or lack of will to bring the scam guilty to book, it risks a corrosion of its mandate in particular and, what must be seen as far more worrisome, popular alienation from democratic institutions. It cannot allow the impression to gain ground that but for the media and the court, it would protect the guilty and hound innocents. The flood relief scam is emblematic, in a sense. It is about official misappropriation and abdication on such a scandalous scale, of funds meant for the neediest of the needy. For a government to err on this one, it must have a very dark, very cynical core indeed.