Things are falling apart in the innards of Ministries at the Centre. Nobody is in control of anything, or owns up to anything, and matters are left to take their own directionless course. Letters on vital issues of national and international importance, issue by themselves, with even the signatories being ignorant of their contents.

The Home Ministry pioneered this chaos by passing on to Pakistan sometime ago a list of wanted terrorists, some of whom were actually living in India right under the nose of official agencies. Next was the strange case of the Finance Minister, Mr Pranab Mukherjee, coolly denying any knowledge of an Office Memorandum (OM) of his Ministry sent to the Prime Minister's Office (PMO), on the chronology of the 2G scandal. He also asserted that its contents, seeming to cast reflection on his predecessor, Mr P. Chidambaram's role, didn't reflect his views, although there was clear evidence on the file that his approval was taken for its issue.

Now comes the indefensible epistle sent to the Delhi Administration by a Director in the Home Ministry, prodding it to withdraw three FIRs registered against a hotelier, M. S. P. Gupta, who was also a former client of Mr Chidambaram. The Delhi police had already carried out investigations and filed cases before the Court, charging Mr Gupta with the offences of cheating and forgery.

The Home Ministry's formal directive, which explicitly says that it has the Home Minister's approval, has been disowned by the Minister, down to the Joint Secretary, the Home Secretary going so far as to say that “it didn't reflect the proper deliberations of the Home Ministry”!

Mr Chidambaram has vehemently rejected any accusation of conflict of interest or connivance, arguing that he couldn't have lifelong “subsisting” interest in more than 25,000 cases he represented as a lawyer in the last four decades.

He takes refuge in the time-(dis)honoured excuse of persons confronted with inconvenient facts that he “is unable to recall at this distance of time” if he appeared in a case concerning Mr Gupta at any time between 1999 and 2003.

CONTEMPT FOR THE PEOPLE

His further plea is that the file related to Gupta's representations came to him only once on May 4, 2011, when he recommended that the Home Ministry shouldn't give any directions and “may” only convey the advice of the Ministry of Law.

The Law Ministry's advice was a mere reiteration of Section 321 of the CrPC, giving the Government the power not to proceed with cases that were being investigated or pending before the Court, in the interest of proper administration of justice. This was, without any justification, expanded in the Home Ministry's letter into an order on the Delhi Administration, to withdraw the cases against Mr Gupta “immediately”.

The whole episode, shrouded in prevarication in its worst form, emits a foul odour. First of all, the importance attached by the Home Ministry to the numerous letters of the hotelier, in the midst of its pressing duties relating to the nation's security, arouses suspicion. This is especially so when the hotelier's representations were patently untenable. There was absolutely no need for Mr Chidambaram to have the Law Ministry's advice passed on to Delhi Administration, unless it was meant to be an indication of his Ministry's interest in the case.

SELECTIVE AMNESIA

Second, Mr Chidambaram is demonstrating his contempt for the people by pleading selective amnesia regarding a client, for whom he had appeared before the Delhi High Court and the Company Law Board in 2001, for the purpose of pressing for the withdrawal of some FIRs. It is impossible to believe that Mr Chidambaram could so quickly erase the memory of Mr Gupta, who has also been accused of misusing the names of Rajiv Gandhi and Sonia Gandhi, and had floated a charitable trust named after Rajiv Gandhi, with Sonia as its chief patron.

Have the Ministerial echelons of the UPA Government come to the conclusion that they could palm off on people whatever concoction of absurdities they could come up with? Then alas for the people of India!

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