Commentary/Dilip D'Souza

What hold has Narasimha rao over these men? What's in their pasts?

Congress Working Committee meeting follows Congress Parliamentary Party meeting with nothing more transacted in them than the usual banalities and platitudes. Rao remains firmly in charge of his party.

The other day a Bombay rag carried this screaming headline: Narasimha Rao Cheater. The very mention of the word 'cheater' beside the name of a man who used to be prime minister produces a certain squeamishness inside (can you imagine Jawaharlal Nehru Cheater? or Lal Bahadur Shastri Crook headlines?).

The headline was to celebrate the latest shameful episode involving our ex-prime minister: He has been named as an accused in a cheating case involving a non resident Indian called Lakhubhai Pathak and the jailed fraudman, Chandra Swami.

Rao's so-called detractors within his party whispered loudly they were planning to use this newest scandal to get rid of the man. The press did not remind them that they had said the same thing several times earlier.

Most recently, they said it after the May elections, in which the Congress got the electoral thrashing it fully deserved. Then, we heard from them that Rao would be made to answer for the disaster by resigning as president of the party. There were even rumours of a split in the Congress party.

As of now, those were all no more than whispers. Nobody has spoken out against Narasimha Rao in any party forum. He is still president of the party.

It's clear Rao doesn't have either the statesmanship or the simple decency to quit on his own while the scandals are being investigated. The question is: Why don't any of his colleagues have the strength to toss him out? And as they don't, I can't help wondering: What is the hold he has on them?

It is not for nothing that I ask this. Narasimha Rao seems to be nursing hopes to be our prime minister again. Failing that, or in addition -- who knows? -- he wants to be our President when the current one leaves office.

I suppose it is possible that Rao is actually innocent of all the charges against him. But I am not looking forward to having as head of my country, all over again, a man whose son and nephew are implicated in a huge urea scam; who, even worse, is himself being openly called a cheater.

Actually Narasimha Rao's murky past goes back a long way into ... well, the past. In 1984, he was India's home minister when Indira Gandhi was assassinated, and so directly responsible for the country's law and order.

Well, law and order went flying out of the window after the lady died.

Congress politicians and activists went on a rampage over the next few days, killing every Sikh male they could lay their grimy hands on. As later inquiries clearly showed, powerful Congress figures like Lalit Maken, H K L Bhagat and Sajjan Kumar had led the massacre. When it was done, 3,000 Sikhs lay dead.

Home Minister P V Narasimha Rao had shown no inclination to take steps to halt the rioting. Over the 12 years since then, he has not lifted a finger to see that Bhagat and Kumar, or even some of the lesser known killers, get the punishment they should get. Of course, Maken got what he deserved when he was shot dead in 1985.

In 1989, there was the shabby St Kitt's affair. With Finance Minister V P Singh uncovering all kinds of shady dealings involving Rajiv Gandhi, including Bofors, he was expelled from the party. Foreign Minister Narasimha Rao was put on the job of undermining Singh. Documents were faked, a desk somewhere in the Caribbean masqueraded as a bank and produced 'evidence' that Singh's son had a foreign account and was violating the Foreign Exchange Regulation Act.

Three years later, the man had graduated to prime minister. The BJP's unscrupulous leaders had succeeded in convincing their supporters that the most crucial issue in the country was not drinking water, or corruption, or education, but -- you will hardly believe this -- a dusty old mosque in Ayodhya, the Babri Masjid.

Rao kept pleading for time to solve the tangle, but sat around doing nothing in that time. In December, the BJP's Chalo Ayodhya! (On To Ayodhya!) call had gathered 200,00 louts in that town. Armed as they were with sticks and crowbars and ropes and other implements, there was little doubt what they planned to do they were going to destroy that mosque. Prime Minister Rao did precisely nothing to stop them.

After it was torn down, Rao promised Muslims that the mosque would be rebuilt. He promised that the men who instigated the demolition would be punished. He lied.

Both those promises are buried somewhere in the rubble.

The destruction of the Babri Masjid set off the worst rioting since 1984. Through the end of 1992 and early 1993, Bombay burned. While Bal Thackeray of the Shiv Sena goaded his rioting thugs on, Maharashtra's then Congress chief minister Sudhakar Naik sat around -- he learned that particular skill from Narasimha Rao, obviously -- claiming impotence. Defence Minister Sharad Pawar rode into town to save it, but occupied himself with one pursuit -- pushing Naik off his chair.

Rao himself stayed in Delhi through much of the rioting. Like in 1984, he was unwilling to take steps to stop it. When he did come to Bombay on January 15, 1993, he sped through the city in an air-conditioned car, enroute to a meeting with Madhukar Sarpotdar, the man the army had arrested four days earlier for rioting. Such was his concern for a flaming Bombay.

Again like in 1984, Rao has done nothing to ensure punishment for the killers of over one thousand citizens of Bombay during the riots.

This dismal litany could go on and on. I've not even mentioned Harshad Mehta and the suitcase with ten million rupees that he says he gave Rao.

Nor the notorious stock scam in which Mehta was a major figure, in which the guilty remain, as usual, unpunished. Nor the blatant buying up of MPs to help Rao win a no-confidence vote in Parliament. And now there's the urea scam in which Rao's relatives are prominent stars.

There's the Chandra Swami cheating case in which Rao has been named.

Yes, I suppose it is possible that Rao is really innocent of all that he stands accused of. It is possible to argue that stopping rioting, while beyond his inclination, was beyond his capacity as well. It is possible that punishing the guilty, whether for riots or demolitions or for various scams, is also beyond his inclination and capacity.

But what is undeniable is that all these disgraceful events have happened while P V Narasimha Rao has been in one position of considerable authority or another in our country.

In a less corrupted political atmosphere, Rao would have either accepted responsibility for them on his own or been forced to accept responsibility for them. Just as Lal Bahadur Shastri resigned as railway minister after a single train accident; or like Richard Nixon was forced out of office by the Watergate scandal. But today, among us, Rao clings to power in his party like a crusty barnacle.

What's worse, he aspires to the highest post in the land!

And perhaps the most shameful aspect of all this is that Rao has surrounded himself in the Congress with half-men who will not stand up to him and make him answer for his misdeeds. Which raises the question: if Rao's copybook is blotted with so many disgraces, what must their copybooks look like?

That's why I want to know: What hold does Narasimha Rao have over these people?

Dilip D'Souza, who lives in Bombay, contributes a fortnightly column to these pages.