How the Maharashtra CM is busy brushing scams under the carpet

Maharashtra’s Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis is proving to be the proverbial ostrich with his head in the sand. He seems to believe that if he brushes all corruption cases in his government under the carpet, out of sight, no one will notice them and he can continue to pat himself on the back for running a clean and transparent administration.

Neither the administration, nor the polity in Maharashtra can boast of good governance. Last week, corruption cases by both arms hit the roof as the combined onslaught of the Congress and the Nationalist Congress Party forced the treasury benches in the Maharashtra legislature to ‘walk out’ of the Assembly, itself an unprecedented move by a ruling party anywhere in the country.

Leading the charge in the Assembly was the usually mild-mannered former chief minister Prithviraj Chavan whose aggression surprised many, including the equally low-key Fadnavis. But Chavan had good reason for his aggression - documents that showed Housing minister Prakash Mehta, belonging to the BJP, had a nexus with builders in Mumbai and had benefitted not one but two of them in securing windfall gains in redevelopment of different properties.

In the first case, Mehta’s complicity was clearly visible. He allotted extra Floor Space Index to a private builder to construct a third tower in the MP Mills compound in Tardeo in South Mumbai at the cost of facilities for slum dwellers under the Slum Rehabilitation Act. The SRA provisions for free housing to the original residents of a particular piece of land in return for the commercial development of one-third of that property while the remaining third is left as open space. The award of extra FSI led to windfall gains to the builder, between Rs 500 crore and Rs 800 crore. But that is not all. Mehta awarded the FSI against the warnings of the officers in his department and to get over their objections, he made a note in the file that he had run the proposal past the Chief Minister who had sanctioned the same.

But as it turned out, Fadnavis had heard nothing of it until the matter was brought before the Assembly and denied all knowledge of the same. Mehta should have resigned. But he got around that by blatantly lying. He said he had carried many files to the CM for a meeting and “thought” he had apprised Fadnavis of the same. Common sense says he should have been sacked for taking the Chief Minister and the government officers for a ride. Strangely, though, Fadnavis bought that explanation and “forgave” Mehta for that lapse of memory.

Any other Chief Minister would have been outraged at being taken for a ride but Fadnavis’s inability to take stern action against Mehta perhaps flows from the fact that he is not his own man and is in office because of Narendra Modi’s largesse, and that none of his cabinet ministers from his own party really think of him as his or her boss. He has a crying need to be liked by them. Many of his ministers are far senior to Fadnavis and highly resentful of his position. They also are somewhat satraps in their small enclaves. Mehta is a Gujarati from Mumbai, with proximity to party president Amit Shah and Fadnavis cannot risk upsetting the Gujarati lobby in the state or the builders who are major donors to the party.

But it is not just Mehta who he has not acted against. More than a year ago. Women and Child Welfare minister Pankaja Munde was exposed in what is now popularly known as the “chikki scam”. Adivasi children in the state’s ashramshalas were provided substandard chikkis — a groundnut and jaggery snack — and the suppliers were blacklisted by the previous government. Fadnavis conducted a token enquiry and gave Pankaja a clean chit. Ditto with Textile minister Subhas Deshmukh who was caught with Rs 91 lakh of unaccounted cash in his car a few days after demonetisation. Fadnavis expressed the view that he was satisfied with Deshmukh’s explanation and no further action was needed. There were no details about this explanation except Deshmukh’s statement that the money was meant to be distributed among his workers. In the days of demonetisation, we all know that was a euphemism for money laundering.

NCP chief spokesperson Nawab Malik therefore says there is no point in blaming individual ministers —17 on last count for various cases of corruption including banking frauds, alleged rapes and murders —for the corruption . “When the Chief Minister himself is willing to overlook corruption, why would the ministers not take advantage?”

But Fadnavis’s troubles have not ended there. Chavan in the Assembly and Dhananjay Munde of the NCP —Pankaja’s cousin and former BJP leader Gopinath Munde’s nephew — have demanded an explanation for another major real estate deal struck by Mehta in Ghatkopar in northeast Mumbai. Armed with papers, they have pointed out that Nirmal Holdings Private Limited (NHPL) were allotted 18000-odd square metres of land there to develop a transit camp with around 330 units in 1999. When they failed to do so, the Maharashtra Housing Area Development Authority cancelled the allotment in 2006 whereupon Mehta rushed to them to intervene for a reallocation which was finally cancelled in 2012 when the tenements were still not built. According to both Chavan and Munde, Mehta has recently allocated the plot to NHPL — as blatant a case of land grab as they come in Mumbai.

But these are not all. Soon after these exposes, comes another. Maharashtra's Education Vinod Tawde — himself exposed in a case of filing a false affidavit about his educational qualifications — has sanctioned at least a dozen educational institutions— schools and colleges — promoted by BJP and RSS functionaries which have little in terms of classrooms or other infrastructure. His explanation is that there are many youngsters with no access to education and hence, setting up more such institutions was necessary. Considering that after real estate, education is big business in Maharashtra, there are few who buy that explanation at face value. And this is another scam likely to be brushed under the carpet by Fadnavis.