By the time you read this, chief vigilance commissioner PJ Thomas may have resigned. If not, the common expectation is that he will do so in a day or two. If he does not… then frankly, what else can be expected from a person like him? The resignation is just another insult heaped upon the UPA government, coming as it does after the CWG scam, the 2G spectrum allocation scandal, food inflation in double figures … the list is long.
Yet, in all these scams, nothing implicates prime minister Manmohan Singh as directly as the appointment of the then telecom secretary PJ Thomas as CVC. The PM, home minister P Chidambaram, and leader of the opposition Sushma Swaraj, had to decide on the new CVC. The irony is hard to miss: Swaraj flatly refused to endorse Thomas while Singh and Chidambaram rooted for him. Surely these two men, rated as among the most brilliant in the cabinet, should have known better than to back a man who had a impaired history. Thomas was then being probed by the CBI for his role in the Kerala palmolein oil import case, and it would have been evident to a blind person that as a key secretary then, even if he might be proved innocent of any wrongdoing, there was no way that he was above suspicion.
Worse, at the time he was picked to be CVC, Thomas was the telecom secretary, working as the number two man in the ministry headed by A Raja, who stands accused of causing India's worst scam till date. The telecom minister was already under a cloud for the manner in which he sold the 2G spectrum, causing a notional loss to the exchequer of Rs1.76 lakh crore (no one believes Sibal when he says the loss suffered was zero!). Is it possible that Thomas was unaware of what Raja was doing? Why didn't he speak up? Why didn't he, as secretary with certain powers, refuse to allow the sale? True, that may not have stopped Raja from his misdeeds, but at least it would have made evident that the telecom minister was committing misdemeanours and might have brought about intervention from others.
Yet, using the power of brute majority, Singh and Chidambaram overrode Swaraj's arguments and appointed Thomas. Was it the UPA's way of showing that they cared two hoots for the opposition parties (and leaders)?
Hedrick Smith, in his book, The Power Game: How Washington Works, wrote that invariably, US presidents foundered in their second terms. Whether it was Nixon with Watergate or Clinton with Monica Lewinsky, presidents who actually had little to lose since they would not be standing for re-election, actually messed up much more in their subsequent terms. India too has witnessed a similar phenomenon: Nehru blundered from 1957 onwards leading to the China war, and Indira messed up her second term with the JP movement and Emergency.
Manmohan Singh started his second term with what appears to have been a winning hand: a decimated opposition and no troublesome Left as an ally. Alas, he frittered away the goodwill the country had for him. While in many cases, he might get away with the lame excuse that he was not directly involved or that as a coalition government, the Congress (and therefore, he) had its compulsions, as far as appointing a besmirched Thomas as CVC goes, he is directly responsible. He and Chidambaran decided on that, despite all the evidence pointing to the contrary. What, one wonders, will be his excuse this time?
