17 December,2010 06:32 AM IST | | Arindam Chaudhuri
Rs 1,76,000 crores and counting! The scam is the biggest in the country ever ufffd or rather, the sum total of all the other scams (that have been exposed), multiplied by two and more! If not a joint parliamentary committee (JPC) probe now, then when?
A great democracy is one with a thriving opposition. After the last elections, I had raised a question. Is this the end of the road for the BJP for long? It looked so. But not anymore. Congress did two big blunders ufffd first, it promoted its biggest trump card Rahul Gandhi in a haste and secondly, itu00a0 ruined its Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh's personal image of crystal clear integrity by entering into a series of mega scams.
And in this failure of Congress to provide clean governance, comes the hope for BJP and NDA for 2014. Forget Hindutva; concentrate on the massive dacoity of India. The masses understand it and they are totally convinced today that the UPA has started to rot inside out.
Except for JPC, every other agency in India can be manipulated and managed by the party in power during investigations
The BJP needs to keep up its demand for a JPC probe and even take to the streets if necessary, but a JPC is a must. It should also make sure that the probe is totally transparent with complete media access during hearings. That's the way it happened in Watergate, the Iran Contra, the Clinton case. That's how it happens in real democracies.
A JPC is also the only way everyone can be brought to the questioning table as every other agency can be manipulated and managed in this country by the party in power.
A few weeks back, I wrote that our Parliamentarians have no right to waste the taxpayers' money due to non-functioning of the Parliament. But as the magnitude ofu00a0 scams increases, it's clear that there's more of tax payers' money at stake in the scam than in the non-functioning of the Parliament.
BJP to indulge in some pro-people democracy here. And why not? After all, this perhaps is the sure-shot route for the NDA to be back in power in 2014 and nothing works with the aam junta better than the corruption plank.
Then again, an NDA victory could be a blessing in disguise for Rahul Gandhi who is still very young by Indian standards and needs to learn a lot about communication techniques by looking at the videos of his father, grandmother and great grandfather.
A stint as opposition leader will give him the time to finish the party rebuilding process that he has started.
