Fodder Scam: Lalu Yadav convicted but may still have the last laugh

“This campaign will only benefit the BJP,” said Lalu Prasad Yadav. He was the chief minister and a plea for a CBI inquiry into the ‘fodder scam’ was still pending before the Patna High Court. A worried chief minister had called a few trusted officials and this writer, who was then the Resident Editor of The Times of India at Patna, to discuss the fallout.

Upset at the full-blown coverage in the newspaper of the hearing in the High Court and accompanying reports that suggested a growing financial scandal, the chief minister demanded that the state Government’s version too be carried.

The then Director (Vigilance) produced a file and pointed to a letter addressed to the chief minister by the Public Accounts Committee of the Assembly headed by an opposition leader. The letter was written some time in 1993 and asked the chief minister to order Police and Vigilance against making any move in the AH (Animal Husbandry) scam till the PAC completed its investigation. For good measure, the letter informed that the PAC had taken all AH files and documents in its custody.

Three years later one could see the noting of the chief minister on the letter forwarded to the DGP (Police) and DGP(Vigilance) for ‘further action’. The point Lalu Prasad Yadav was making was that his Government had not acted against AH officials because of the PAC. As soon as he had been informed of the scam in January, 1996, he pointed out, he had ordered FIRs to be lodged and the culprits arrested.

He was right. Within the first three months in 1996, the state police had arrested over 60 officials and suppliers and lodged a dozen or more cases in different districts of what are now in Jharkhand but were in Bihar at the time.

But 1993, when the PAC chairman wrote the letter to the CM, was important because of a dramatic scene at the Ranchi Airport, which was sparsely reported in the media. Ranchi based Hindi newspaper Prabhat Khabar was the first and possibly the only newspaper to report on it.

The Income Tax Department, acting on a tip off, had forced several AH officials and their family members to deplane from an Indian Airlines plane bound for Delhi. Indian Airlines staff and porters had apparently watched in disbelief as the family members and spouses of the officials discarded cash and jewellery from their hand baggage as they were walked back to the terminal building for search, seizure and interrogation.

The lavish, extravagant expenditure by AH officials had always been the talk of the town in Ranchi in the seventies. Even in those days it was common for actors from Bombay flown in to dance at weddings in the families of AH officials. Wedding guests would often return with extravagant gifts. Therefore, there was always a whiff of corruption around the department but there was no inquiry, far less any action taken to stop it.

The PAC, it now appears, had swung into action after the airport incident and stonewalled further inquiries and punitive action against the errant officials. But as this writer had argued at that time, the letter established that the Government, and the chief minister, had known of the scam and yet had taken no action.

It seems possible that Lalu Prasad Yadav was not even aware of how public funds were being siphoned off. He almost certainly was one of the beneficiaries and accepted donations and various other favours from the scamsters but unlike Dr Jagannath Mishra, for example, Lalu Prasad had no head for numbers. He was no economist as Jagannath Mishra fancied himself. And he probably trusted ministers and officials a lot more than was healthy for him.

But the fact remains that as finance minister of the state, he presented the budget year after year without noticing the bizarre figures that were staring at his face. To be fair, nobody noticed the figures in the budget documents. Not the legislators, not the officials and the media and not the CAG.

That is why the AH department, which would normally have an annual budget of around ₹50 Crore or so, would end up spending a lot more every year. In one year it actually spent more than ₹200 Crore but the very next year asked for the ‘normal’ allocation of around ₹50 Crore.

Everybody was complicit, it would now appear in retrospect. As the Patna High Court observed then, a daylight robbery of this nature could not have continued for so long without political patronage of some kind. And that is why it ordered a CBI investigation to uncover the political conspiracy that led to the fodder scam.

The siphoning of public funds, it is worth recalling, had started even before Lalu Yadav became chief minister in 1990.

At the time of writing, it is not clear why the court let off former chief minister Jagannath Mishra. But surely it couldn’t be because Mishra is now with the BJP? In any case, Lalu Prasad Yadav, in prison or outside, will remain a potent, political force. If anything, the acquittal of Jagannath Mishra will lend an extra edge to his claim that he has been unfairly hounded and discriminated against.