| Published on 10-06-2008 In National |
| Viewed 1306 times |
| BJP in MP gets jolt on Assembly poll eve |
|
|
Written by
N.D.Sharma |
On the eve of the Assembly elections, the ruling BJP in Madhya Pradesh has received a setback as its leadership had to ask health minister Ajay Vishnoi to resign following the seizure of cash and documents, hinting at a big scam, by the Income Tax department officials from the residences and establishments of Vishnoi's close relatives as well as those of top officials of the health department. Vishnoi cried foul, blamed the Opposition Congress and then claimed in an interview to a newspaper that some of his own party men had plotted against him (to engineer the I-T raids?), insisting all the time that he would not resign as he had committed no crime. However, the skeletons that tumbled during the raids probably frightened the top BJP leadership, then in session in Delhi to excogitate the strategy to win this year's Assembly and next year's Lok Sabha elections, and Vishnoi was asked to go.
The others in the I-T dragnet are home secretary Rajesh Rajora (he was health commissioner till some time back), director of health services Ashok Sharma, B.M.Singh, general manager of Laghu Udyog Nigam (a State-owned corporation through which the medicines were purchased by the department) and some builders who had been working as middlemen in the purchase of the medicines. (Incidentally, Dr Rajesh Rajora, an IAS officer of the 1990 batch, was a blue-eyed boy of Congress chief minister Digvijay Singh).
The I-T department is yet to open their three-dozen-odd lockers and examine and analyse the documents pertaining to their landed property and other business interests and the money siphoned off from the health department for various purposes. This will naturally take time. The department has, however, made it clear that all these people had been involved in the murky goings on in the health department. The preliminary reports indicate a scam of over Rs 100 crore. What was happening in the health department in Madhya Pradesh had been pretty visible for some years to every one except to chief minister Shivraj Singh Chauhan and other BJP leaders.
On a Bhopal Doordarshan programme some time back, Vishnoi explained at length how his department had put in operation a scheme to ensure that no woman in the State, not even in the rural areas, would now have to deliver without getting medical care. One of the panellists produced a newspaper clipping to show him how a village woman, in the last stages of her pregnancy, managed to reach a district hospital but was denied medical attention, with the result that she was forced to deliver at the gate of the hospital and she died from the consequent complications. Vishnoi's reply was: "now, whoever is destined to die, will have to die".
This was the extent of insensitivity with which Vishnoi was presiding over the multi-million-rupee health department and, no wonder, his trusted bureaucrats thought it better to keep the money with them for "better" use in future at their own discretion than "waste" it on the poor people whose destiny is to suffer from ailments and eventually die. The department had become a veritable haven of scamsters. Health centres in the State were in bad shape; the equipment in most of the hospitals were lying idle for want of maintenance; the bulk orders for medicines were being placed with the firms having dubious reputation, mostly through touts; and medicines were often supplied after the expiry date.
To cap it all, an Indore firm supplied medicines, meant for the cattle, to the State-level Hamidia Hospital in Bhopal where only human beings are supposed to be treated. Luckily, the hapless human being, who was administered the anaesthetic meant for the quadrupeds, had survived. Scandals had surfaced in admissions to medical and dental colleges and also in the running of the nurses' hostels.
All this was not privileged information confined to the obscure files bound in red ribbons. People wrote in newspapers. Complaints were made to the authorities, judicial as well as executive. The NGOs raised the issues occasionally. Most of all, the ills of the health department were repeatedly discussed in the Assembly during its sessions. Vishnoi remained unconcerned. All that chief minister Chauhan is really good at is delivering long speeches, rarely germane to the point at hand.
The BJP rulers of the State had become so power-blind that they failed to see when the Income Tax department raided late last year the residential premises of then director of health services Yogiraj Sharma, and found currency notes stacked in washing machines, kitchen utensils, mattresses and in all such unlikely places. While the department is yet to compute the exact extent of his wealth, it had admitted to having recovered Rs 16 crore in cash which Sharma had not been able to account for, in addition to the documents showing in his or in his family members' names hundreds of acres of irrigated land, shares in medical companies and several business links.
Dr Yogiraj Sharma's talent was spotted by Digvijay Singh who had brought him into the mainstream of the department from an obscure position and had ultimately made him the director by disregarding the existing criteria. The order promoting Sharma as director of health services was quashed by the State Administrative Tribunal with adverse comments against the government. But Digvijay Singh was Digvijay Singh and Sharma remained the director. Neither he nor the chief minister cared for the allegations of corruption and manipulations against Sharma.
He was removed from that post when Uma Bharati became the chief minister but was reverted by Babulal Gaur who succeeded Uma Bharati following her resignation in the wake of the Hubli court case. Dr Sharma, however, enjoyed his power and position more during the Chauhan/Vishnoi regime than even in the Digvijay Singh government. Dr Sharma was said to be in the habit of keeping a meticulous record of all the illicit payments and receipts. The records seized from him could have guided the I-T department to plan its raids on the establishments of so many people in several cities simultaneously. That is done now. But what about the people who continue to suffer because of the insatiable hunger of dishonest politicians and bureaucrats for money? Will it be too much to expect that Chauhan and his cabinet colleagues will now be a little more considerate of the people's basic needs?
Tailpiece: There is a rumour (unverified, of course, like any rumour) that Digvijay Singh is planning to write a book on 'How to siphon off public money and make an ass of the Law".
|
|
|
|
|
| Social Web |  |
| |
|
|
| |
Processing please wait ...
Top Stories
