Chauhan's 'century' sees cronies celebrating

The MP chief minister's 100 days are pockmarked with irregularities; the bureaucrats are bending over backwards to please their political bosses

By N D Sharma

Early in March, Madhya Pradesh chief minister Shivraj Singh Chauhan celebrated with fanfare the completion of 100 days of his government. So had his predecessors, Uma Bharati and Babulal Gaur, creating confusion in the minds of the people about whether this was a government of the BJP, its independent factions—or a part of a wider experimentation that the Sangh Parivar occasionally embarks upon.

A few years ago, the then BJP president, Lal Krishna Advani, had told a gathering of party members elected to local self-government bodies in Bhopal that the Sangh Parivar had chosen Madhya Pradesh as its laboratory for making experimentations in politics. The Parivar has chosen as head of the government a person without even a day's experience in running one, and whose organisational skills, if any, were confined to his home district a long time back. Satyanarayan Jatiya, the new president of the state BJP, is yet to spell out his plans of containing Uma Bharati's influence and revamping the faction-ridden party.

Chauhan's inexperience, and his apparent inability to govern, is, of course, a different matter, as it directly concerns the public. Consider this, on February 18, a state government press release said that the allegations of corruption and misuse of administrative powers against former speaker Shriniwas Tiwari would be probed by the CBI, as recommended in the Shacheendra Dwivedi inquiry committee. Chauhan went a step further and announced that the matter had already been referred to the Centre.

A few days later, principal secretary to the General Administration Department, Khushi Ram, and principal secretary to the Law Department, PP Tiwari, submitted their 'opinions' (duly leaked to a section of the media) that the allegations against Shriniwas Tiwari in the Dwivedi committee report were 'superfluous' and did not merit a CBI inquiry.

Dwivedi, a retired high court judge, was appointed by the BJP government to inquire into how Shriniwas Tiwari, a socialist-turned-Congressman, had used his position as Assembly speaker to bend the law and create his own empire. The then chief minister, Digvijay Singh, was his willing accomplice and the bureaucrats were reportedly only bending over backwards to please the two.
Tiwari was accused of allotting plots to himself, his family members, close relatives and friends in violation of the Cooperative Societies Act and rules and by-laws thereunder; irregularities in the appointments and promotions of his close associates, supporters and friends; misuse of his authority and use of influence for illegal conversion of land; evasion of stamp duty; illegal gains to his close relatives in educational societies; undisclosed assets (some of them benami) in possession of Sunderlal Tiwari (Tiwari's son), his close relatives and friends; and acquiring vehicles (benami) in the name of his family members at fake addresses, and also purchasing vehicles in fictitious names.

Tiwari's modus operandi—to recruit his relatives and hangers-on—had the hallmark of ingenuity. The law empowers the speaker to create a post in an emergency for a maximum of six months without the finance department's sanction, and make an ad hoc appointment. Tiwari would create a post for six months, make an ad hoc appointment the same day, later get the person adjusted as a regular employee in a state government department, and abolish the post. Later another post would be created for six months and the entire process repeated. The chief minister would send the note sheets to an obliging chief secretary for adjustment of 'Tiwari's candidate' as a special case and the chief secretary would oblige.

Some illustrations: a post of assistant marshal in the Assembly was created for six months on April 4, 1997, and one Anil Kumar Mishra appointed the same day. On June 23, 1997, the chief minister 'adjusted' Mishra as a teacher and directed the chief secretary to post him to a school in Rewa. In similar fashion, a sub-engineer was appointed and then posted in Rewa. While Tiwari's preference was for Brahmins from his home district of Rewa, he also accommodated 11 people from Digvijay Singh's Raghogarh constituency.

Tiwari recruited over 300 people in this manner. According to Justice Shacheendra Dwivedi, there were times when as many as half-a-dozen 'illegal' orders were passed in a day, with the remark that the rules were being relaxed owing to exceptional circumstances, but should not be taken as a precedent.

The committee was appointed when Babulal Gaur was chief minister and it submitted its report during Chauhan's time. The 100-page report makes a strong case for a CBI inquiry into the malfeasance of Tiwari. While referring the matter to the CBI, Chauhan probably overlooked the potential of the babus in the mantralaya. Inexperience! Experimentation!