Just when the Congress had seized the political advantage, news that Louis Berger had paid nearly one million dollars in bribes to a minister in 2010 has come as relief to the BJP. In the last few weeks, Goa Pradesh Congress president Luizinho Faleiro had taken the battle to the BJP side, hurling accusations of financial mismanagement. In one swift move he wiped away the ills of the previous Congress regime with respect to the regional plan and Tiracol golf course issues and charted a new course of action. He had explained away the decision of the previous government to grant permissions to the golf course as a mistake and re-positioned the party as a force opposed to it. The Berger disclosure has hit where it hurts and the Congress will have a tough time extricating itself from this mess.
The BJP, on the other hand, has seized the opportunity and demanded a CBI inquiry into the matter. On Monday, it decided to send a delegation headed by Chief Minister Laxmikant Parsekar to New Delhi to officially make the demand which in all probability will be conceded. This is an opportunity it has been waiting for. Even though Churchill Alemao was the PWD minister in 2010, the BJP has trained its guns on former chief minister Digambar Kamat, who in 2004 was blamed for making the all-important switch to the Congress side.
Politics aside, the disclosure by Louis Berger in America that it had paid bribes to secure contracts in Goa and Guwahati once again throws the spotlight on the decision-making process in the sub-continent. Berger cannot be condoned for using money to clinch deals and needs to be black-listed if necessary, but the minister or ministers who accepted bribes must be exposed and hopefully banned from politics. All foreign companies know that the only way of securing contracts in India is through bribes. It might be recalled that Enron had spent $20 million to "educate" Indians, a euphemism for bribe in order to clinch the Dabhol power project deal. Nothing moves in the corridors of power without kickbacks and Indian businessmen know just as well.
If the Congress had plans to put the government on the mat in the Assembly which is due to start on July 27, those plans have gone awry. While the issue raised by the opposition through several press conferences are still relevant, the Congress has been thrown off its high horse. More importantly, some party members may have to face a CBI inquiry even as the Congress lays the groundwork for its 2017 election campaign. For Faleiro, the revelation is an even bigger setback because he was hoping to lean on Alemao in Navelim, from where he has to contest, if he wants to be counted as a serious player.
With a BJP government at the Centre one does not need to guess the enthusiasm and tenacity with which the CBI will pursue this investigation. Both the BJP and Congress have been equally tenacious in pursuing probes against political opponents. If Manohar Parrikar pushed the probe in the ticket scam in order to nail Dayanand Narvekar, the Congress left no stone unturned in its effort to nail Parrikar on the charge of 'excess expenditure' on construction of IFFI infrastructure. The charges against Parrikar were dropped and the case closed for lack of evidence. Narvekar, on the other hand, lost his position as finance minister when the case came up at an inconvenient time. Irrespective of how the probe proceeds, the Congress will have to claw back into the game and what once seemed easy has become difficult with the advantage now shifting back to the BJP.
