Meet the ‘Sultan’ of Lakshadweep

A month after Omesh Saigal, a retired Chief Secretary of Delhi and a former Administrator of Lakshadweep, wrote a letter to the Home Minister Amit Shah, the Home Secretary and the Cabinet Secretary, he has received neither a response nor an acknowledgment. No, not even a Deputy Secretary has called him up to say the ministry has received the letter.

‘Normally I would have written to the Home Secretary but since the present Administrator of Lakshadweep is a political appointee, I addressed it to the Home minister’, Saigal explained to Karan Thapar in a video interview. He had suggested in his letter that the Government should withdraw the notifications issued on the orders of the present Administrator, two of which were stayed by the Kerala High Court this week.

Absence of fresh water sources, problems of desalination and difficulties related to power supply in uninhabited islands make Lakshadweep unsuitable for tourism, Saigal points out. The only island already developed for tourists is Bangaram and the only possibility is for tourists to spend the day in the island and go back to the ship for the night.

The Administrator is unaware of the Supreme Court order that no land can be acquired in Lakshadweep without consultations with the elected panchayats, he says. Banning beef in the islands, while it is freely available in Delhi’s five-star hotels, in Goa, Kerala and the North-East, he says is ridiculous.

“I spent three years in Lakshadweep and I came across one murder case registered a century ago. Nobody put a lock on doors and women did not observe purdah or wear burqas. If there is a Ram Rajya anywhere, it is there,” Saigal said firmly.

The present Administrator, Praful Khoda Patel, has antagonized the population since he was appointed in December. He is also embroiled in controversies because he is accused of having spent barely 15 days in the island in the last six months. He is also accused of using Coast Guard helicopters for his commutes and running up a travel bill far beyond his entitlement. But Home Minister Amit Shah has, not surprisingly, done nothing to rein him in or distance the government from the Administrator’s whims.

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It was in 2010 when he was inducted as the minister of state for Home in Gujarat and allotted as many as eight of the ten portfolios held by Amit Shah before Shah was jailed in a fake encounter case. The first-time MLA was chosen to fill up the vacancy in preference to other senior BJP MLAs. Praful Patel’s father was in the RSS and Narendra Modi, people remember, was a frequent visitor to his house.

With a diploma in civil engineering, Praful Patel was a contractor executing schemes of the roads and building department before getting elected as MLA in 2007. “He caught our attention because he was the only one who sported Modi-style short kurti,” recalls Bashir Pathan, former Bureau Chief of Indian Express at Gandhinagar. “As the state’s home minister, Patel’s only job was to ensure that the investigation into the fake encounter of Sohrabuddin Sheikh did not lead to indictment of Amit Shah,” says a senior reporter with leading Gujarati daily, Sandesh.

“Patel like other ministers was just a rubber stamp. Powers of all the ministers were with just one person – Chief Minister Modi. Even decisions about posting of inspectors was taken by Modi,” says a Gujarat-cadre IPS officer on condition of anonymity.

Patel won the Himmatnagar assembly seat only once in 2007 but lost in 2012. But in 2016 Patel was appointed the administrator of Daman and Diu, followed shortly thereafter as the administrator of Dadra and Nagar Haveli.

In Daman, Praful Patel came in direct conflict with tribal rights activist and Lok Sabha MP Mohanbhai Delkar who committed suicide on February 22, 2021. In his 15-page suicide note, Delkar blamed Patel and some officials of the Daman administration for compelling him to take the drastic step.

On 5 July 2020, Delkar had posted a video on Twitter threatening to resign as Lok Sabha MP because the local administration was "hounding him". Then on 19 September in Parliament he complained that on Liberation Day (2 August), he was "denied the right to address people as an MP". Delkar had led an agitation by fishermen whose residential colony was demolished by the Daman administration to make way for a beach development project on the orders of Patel.