The Delay Tactics

The investigation and interrogation of Robert Vadra, has been hitting the national headlines. Every delinquent is subjected to such routine questioning, by the investigation agencies, and no one takes notice of them. The politicians make no hullabolloo, but this case is an exception, since it concerns the ‘damad’ of the Gandhi parivaar. A united Opposition, across the board, has thus termed this routine interrogation, as political vendetta. If you keep the politics aside, it has been always clear that Robert Vadra has benefitted immensely due to his prolific deal making during the UPA regime, headed by Sonia Gandhi, particularly in shady real estate deals, hand in glove with land sharks and swooning Congress leaders, ever eager to please him, as is evident from the litany of scammy land deals in Haryana in association with Mr.Hooda the then Congress CM. He illegally benefited to the tune of hundreds of crores as per cases that got revealed, much as we are unaware of many others, which have not surfaced, and there is every reason to believe that there must have been many others.

But the key issue here is that, when the shady deals of Robert Vadra had surfaced during the Congress led UPA regime itself, then why did the BJP led NDA government not expedite the investigation and prosecution in his cases, as soon as it came to power in May 2014 onward. Any delay in the pursuit of such cases, only helps to tamper evidence and influence the witnesses, such as to weaken the case and increase the chances of the accused going scot free, as we are seeing in the case of Karti Chidambaram. The fact is that apart from the services of top ranking lawyers, who help the likes of Robert Varda to dodge the law and delay the cases, they also benefit from various authorities in the system, which can be influenced in a number of ways.

Take the case of the ongoing investigation into the Saradha scam, the giant ponzi scheme of West Bengal, which has duped millions of depositors and whose links go right to the top levels of the ruling party. Though the Saradha scam was officially recognised only in 2013, it had been in operation for at least a decade prior to it. Lakhs of depositors were duped and many complained to the authorities and the cops, but no action whatsoever was taken. The reasons for such inaction into a giant criminal scam by any of the authorities were made clear, in a statement that one of the key directors of the Saradha Group of companies, a lady called Debjani Mukherjee gave to the SFIO on 2.2.2014. She said that the Saradha Group gave Rs.2-3 crores to one Ramesh Gandhi for managing the ROC and related corporate matters, it paid about Rs.18 crores to one Debrata Sarkar to keep SEBI/RBI in control and another Rs.3 crores were paid to on Jinesh Vanzara for managing the income tax department. And all these persons delivered results. None of these authorities ie. the ROC/MCA/SEBI/RBI took any action against the Saradha Group right upto 2013, even though complaints were received by them from hundreds of depositors right from 2007 onwards. And the management of so many government authorities is not possible without political support, which has been abundantly copious in the case of the Saradha Group. A similar nefarious practice was noted in the case of a Bangalore based ponzi, which was recently busted and revealed that a sum of Rs.18 crores was paid by it to the infamous Reddy brothers, to manage SEBI/RBI and the ITD.

So these time tested practices of delaying investigation and prosecution must have been deployed in the Robert Vadra case too, which explains the delay that has taken place, only to weaken the case and defeat the process of law. The latest reports say that the CBI has initiated action to prosecute all those officials of ROC/SEBI/ITD etc. who delayed action or rather took no action in the Saradha scam, who are real partners in the crime, with the main accused. A similar action maybe warranted in the Robert Vadra case.