How To Wash A 2 Lakh Crore Sin With A 100 Crore Detergent?

The truth about what is arguably the biggest—and the longest running—mining scam in the country now increasingly looks like remaining buried in the mining pits of Keonjhar and Sundargarh districts of Odisha forever. That is the impression that has gained ground at the end of the third and presumably last round of hearing into the scam—running into Rs 2 lakh crore by a conservative estimate and stretching over nearly a decade since 2000, the year Naveen Patnaik came to power in the state – by the Justice MB Shah Commission of Inquiry on 4 April.

In the middle of the three-day hearing at the Commission’s headquarters in Ahmedabad, scheduled to hear mining companies on violation of Rule 37 of the Mineral Concession Rules, 1960, Gopal Subramaniam, counsel for the Tatas, one of the biggest beneficiaries of the scam, sprang a surprise: a ‘blueprint’ for a Rs 100 crore outlay for welfare activities in the two minerally rich but economically poor tribal districts. In the words of Justice Shah, the blueprint is aimed at ensuring that “the lessees do something for society”. Hospitals and schools would be set up and mid-day meals served to the poor children with the corpus of Rs 100 crore raised by miners and run through a trust, Justice Shah said. As per the ‘blueprint’, the final shape of which is to be unveiled on 13 April, the mining companies would pool in money to form a corpus of Rs 100 crore, which would be spent on developmental activities in the two districts.

Discussions on the ‘blueprint’, which was not part of the agenda, took up the better part of the second day. By the end of the third and last day, Justice Shah announced that there would be no more hearing on violation of Rule 37, which bars mining lessees from sub letting extraction to another company. “Since the Commission has taken a keen interest in CSR activities in the area, we (lessees) would request the Centre to extend the deadline for submission of its report,” said a relieved Ashok Parija, counsel for a few of the companies in the dock. The Commission, it may be noted, is scheduled to submit its report by July.

With their offer of the Rs 100 crore bounty, the mining companies appear to have washed their sins for good. The sudden change of heart in these companies, which represent the virtual Who’s Who of the mining industry in the country, has to be taken with a bagful of salt because these very same companies plundered the two districts—Keonjhar in particular—for nearly 10 years without ever bothering about the effect their rapacity would have on the people and environment in the area. Each one of them benefited to the tune of much more than they are now collectively offering to atone for their greed.

There are two reasons to believe that the miners would get away with some ‘fines’ while the ‘big fish’, which include politicians and bureaucrats, would go scot-free. First, a helpful UPA government amended the Mineral Concession Rules in June last year taking ‘excess’ extraction of ore outside the purview of ‘illegal’ mining. Second, during his visit to Bhubaneswar in the second week of March, Justice Shah all but exonerated the politicians saying, “Nobody has deposed before the Commission about the involvement of politicians.”

Justice Shah’s statement exposed the duplicity of the Congress and the BJP, which have gone after the Naveen Patnaik with gusto, both inside and outside the Assembly, accusing the chief minister and his ministers of involvement in the scam. Even Kanak Vardhan Singhdeo, the newly appointed state BJP chief who first broke the scam in July 2009, has chosen to restrict his barbs to the Assembly and public meetings rather than go the whole hog and depose before the Commission. Curiously, despite his reluctance to depose before the Commission, the senior BJP leader, in his first public meeting in the state after becoming state unit president, said Naveen would end up at the ‘cell next to Madhu Koda’ after the Shah Commission report comes out. May be the fact that the BJP was part of the government while the loot was taking place had something to do with the party’s decision ‘to fight it politically’. On the other hand, the Congress’ pusillanimity stems from the fact that some of its leading lights are beneficiaries of the scam.

With the two major opposition parties restricting themselves to shadow boxing, Naveen Patnaik has reasons to believe that he has weathered the storm that at one time looked like ripping apart the veneer of probity and transparency carefully built by him over the years. There is one thing which may still upset his plans though: the decision of the High Court on a petition seeking a CBI probe into the massive scam, which has been pending after the completion of hearing for an unprecedented two years. Then there is also the petition filed in the Supreme Court by journalist-activist Rabi Das. Naveen would be hoping that the superior courts would reject the plea for a CBI inquiry, which would put him at the mercy of the UPA government a la Mulayam Singh Yadav and Mayawati, or—at the very least—delay the decision beyond the next elections.