Gnani; Express Buzz; 12 Dec 2010,
WHEN Karunanidhi and Jayalalitha engage in a statement war, it is time for celebration since both expose the skeletons in each other’s cupboards. First the DMK skeletons this week. The housing allotment scam in Tamil Nadu revealed through the efforts of RTI activist Gopalakrishnan makes the Adharsh scam of Maharashtra look like a poor cousin.
Karunanidhi’s present rule will go down in history for producing an unprecedented number of ‘social workers’ and government employees of ‘unblemished service’. Only such virtuous persons are eligible for the allotment of prime flats and plots worth several crores of rupees under the government’s discretionary quota. A worker at the DMK headquarters office is a certified social worker. Wives, daughters and daughters-in-law of party leaders, ministers, IAS and IPS officers, magazine editors towing the DMK line, all seem to have suddenly turned social workers. And the personal security staff of the CM, pushing his wheelchair from Chennai to Delhi are naturally known for their ‘unblemished service’.
And how does one define a social worker? It is very easy. Certain branches of Lions club and Rotary clubs have specialised in issuing social worker certificates. And ‘unblemished service’ is easier to achieve than becoming a social worker. The government employee has to issue such a certificate to his or her own self, as done by several IAS and IPS officers.
And what happens to the plots allotted to them? An IPS officer and a magazine editor or, rather, their wives, who got the allotment, have floated construction companies. One of the allottees, who is fresh out of college, has issued cheques for several lakhs within days of purchasing the plot from the housing board. Nothing surprising. When the grandsons of the chief minister, just out of college without any proper source of income, are able to produce movies with mind boggling budgets of several crores, can the children of IAS officers lag behind? Now to the AIADMK skeletons. Let me conserve precious paper and print space by asking readers to reread the previous paragraphs. Only the persons are different, the methodologies remain the same. The most distressing aspect is the involvement of judges in both regimes in sharing the largesse. Why should the judges be subjected to the discretionary quota of the government at all? Discretion of the ruling party is a dangerous weapon that can induce quid pro quo.
The only difference between the two regimes seems to be in the number of beneficiaries. It has gone up in the present DMK rule. Obviously, the number goes up every five years/change of regimes.
After the RTI activist exposed the housing scam last week, the response of Karunanidhi was to say ‘all rules have been followed’, ‘as done in the previous regime’. Sounds familiar? Yes. Both K and J suffer from the ‘you are also naked’ syndrome. It is a stock reply, even for the spectrum scam.
And Karunanidhi has one more valid point to make.
According to him, “`1,76,300 crores is a huge amount. How can a single individual steal all that money and take it home? It is a pity that even the educated people believe this.” This was his lament while at a recent film audio launch. He likened such a scale of loot to the mythological powers attributed to demons he had seen in films during the silent era. And then the Freudian slip! Karunanidhi rationalised that the unbelievable acts of demons were possible only through science, as shown in his grandnephew-produced blockbuster Endhiran, where a super humanoid performed all sorts of unbelievable acts in a scientific manner.
And that meant Raja could not have done it alone and that it IS possible to do such things in a scientific way. No surprise that the Justice Sarkaria Commission in the late Seventies called Karunanidhi a veteran of ‘scientific corruption’.
Scientific corruption means involving everyone the family, the bureaucracy, the media and if possible even the Opposition. Everyone must be naked, wearing only the emperor’s clothes. To be dressed in basic virtues is a sin now.
(Gnani is a tamil writer, theatreperson and filmmaker)
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