What the impetus to corruption probes in Rajasthan signals

November 5 was a day of setbacks for the Congress. The Supreme Court quashed a Rajasthan High Court order that had upheld the closure of a corruption case against Shanti Dhariwal, a prominent minister in the previous Congress government in Rajasthan, led by Ashok Gehlot, and three former officials.
In a separate development, the Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB) of Rajasthan registered a case against Mahesh Joshi, another minister of the Gehlot regime, and others for alleged irregularities in execution of the Jal Jeevan Mission in the state.
Both developments have come ahead of the November 13 by-elections to seven assembly seats and in the backdrop of a perception of considerable dilly-dallying by the current Bhajan Lal Sharma-led BJP government.
RTI (right to information) activist Ashok Pathak had challenged in the Supreme Court the closure report of the ACB against Dhariwal and retired bureaucrats G.S. Sandhu, Nishkam Diwakar and Onkarmal Saini. The high court had accepted the closure report when the complainant, Ram Sharan Singh, died and his son expressed no objection to the closure.
The case involved the issue of single lease (ekal patta) by the Jaipur Development Authority in 2011 for valuable land to real-estate businessman Shailendra Garg in alleged violation of norms.
Sandhu had been arrested along with Diwakar, Saini and Garg in the case, and they spent a few months in jail. Dhariwal, on becoming the urban development and housing minister in the Gehlot cabinet, had appointed Sandhu as advisor on urban development and housing projects as well as an ambitious project for a cricket stadium. He also recommended closure of the case against officials, which the government and ACB agreed to and was accepted by the high court.
After the BJP came to power in December last year, the government, in an affidavit in the Supreme Court, had given a clean chit to all. But in a new affidavit, it changed its stand and said that a case is made against Dhaliwal and the three others.
The case against Joshi and 21 others, including top officials of the public health engineering department (PHED) and two firms associated with the Jal Jeevan Mission, is under investigation, with three officials being arrested by the ACB in August 2023 for allegedly taking bribes.
The entire case relates to tenders worth Rs 979 crore for work orders allotted to firms that apparently lacked expertise and had allegedly bagged them on the basis of fraudulent certificates. The investigations, among other things, pointed to alleged use of substandard pipes, including those stolen from government works in Haryana.
The Enforcement Directorate (ED) has also been investigating the case and had last year recommended to the ACB to register a case against Joshi, his aide Sanjay Badaya and former additional chief secretary (PHED) Subodh Agarwal.
It was only last month that chief minister Bhajan Lal Sharma gave sanction for prosecuting officials. The two firms named in the FIR are Shri Shyam Tubewell Company and Shri Ganapati Tubewell Company. One of the engineers who verified the fake certificates reportedly told the ED that he did so on instructions from the top and, in his statement, claimed that hefty bribes were paid to bag the tenders.
The movement in these two cases is welcome given the perception that both BJP and Congress governments avoid investigating cases of the previous regime. If the Gehlot government looked the other way on projects in which heavy corruption was alleged, such as the Dravyawati river restoration work in Jaipur and four medical colleges awarded to central PSUs for construction during the BJP’s tenure, the current BJP dispensation is yet to take a call on Gehlot government projects, such as the Kota riverfront development and the 27-storey in-patient department tower at the SMS Hospital in Jaipur.
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