Still waiting for Koda’s arrest!

Last Sunday (November 8) officials of the Income Tax Department and Enforcement Directorate were waiting to arrest Madhu Koda as soon as he was through with his ‘loose motion’. Newspapers and news channels breathlessly informed us that “Koda’s arrest is imminent”. Seven days later, Koda remains a free man, unrestrained by either the Income Tax Department or the Enforcement Directorate. Meanwhile, stories about how the former Chief Minister and his associates looted Jharkhand, invested the money in real estate, hotels and mines at home and abroad, and lived the high life — designer jeans, SUVs, holidays at exotic locations — have disappeared, first from the front page and prime time news bulletins, and then altogether.

It’s almost as if a decision has been taken — and such decisions can be taken only at the ‘highest level’ — not to pursue investigations into the mind-boggling cash-and-carry plunder that kept Koda busy during the two years he was Chief Minister of Jharkhand — or, at least, to go easy with the inquiry. Nothing else explains the sudden dip in the enthusiasm with which officials were raiding various premises (76 establishments in eight cities were raided in a matter of days), following up on leads and briefing mediapersons.

If there were popular expectations that Koda would be arrested (as is usually done with great fanfare in cases involving financial fraud and corruption of far lesser magnitude) they have been belied. Officials of the Enforcement Directorate have tamely handed over a ‘sealed’ brown paper envelope to Koda while repeating meaningless warnings to his two absconding associates, Binod Sinha and Sanjay Chaudhary, that they should behave like model citizens and turn up for a tete-a-tete.

A week ago we were being told how Koda and his associates had amassed anything between Rs 2,000 crore and Rs 4,000 crore in ill-gotten wealth; how nearly Rs 1,000 crore was taken out of the country through the hawala route to Dubai; how as Chief Minister he never allowed files related to granting leases for mines to accumulate in his office; and, how huge sums of money were paid to Bollywood starlets, ostensibly for the onerous task of ‘promoting’ Jharkhand. Koena Mitra probably wouldn’t be able to point out the State on the map of India. There are no more such delightful tidbits about the life and times of Madhu Koda to break the monotony of everyday news.

There are various stories doing the rounds as to why the official agencies are now dragging their feet. One story has it that the Congress, which thought exposing corruption in high places would help varnish its tattered image in Jharkhand, which goes to the polls beginning later this month to elect a new Assembly, discovered to its horror that Koda was not the only one partaking of the tainted lolly. Ranchi is awash with rumours that brakes were applied after investigators stumbled upon evidence that suggests Koda shared his riches with certain senior Congress leaders of the State. According to another story, officials had seized a diary in which Koda had made meticulous entries about whom he had paid how much and whose details, if they came to light, would embarrass the Congress leadership.

A senior journalist based in Ranchi told me that Koda, while recovering from ‘loose motion’ in the hospital where he had checked in immediately after the raids began, had called up certain Congress leaders in Delhi and told them bluntly that he would tell all if push came to shove. That did the trick and push never came to shove. Rather than risk a blowback before the coming election, the Congress appears to have decided that discretion is the better part of valour. In a country of a million scams, people would soon forget about Jharkhand’s latest plunder. Others caught with their snouts in the trough have settled their accounts by paying income tax, so too can Koda at an opportune moment.

Having sufficiently recovered from his tummy ache and ‘loose motion’, on Friday Koda left Ranchi halfway through his chat with Income Tax Department officials to participate in the election campaign. He was last spotted at Patahatu, his home base, where he shall remain for the time being. Officials of the Enforcement Directorate, who were scheduled to ‘interrogate’ him today, have rescheduled it for November 19. Seven days is a long time in politics.

Sensing that he has the Congress by the short and curly, Koda is now playing the victim of a conspiracy to harass and humiliate a tribal leader who has worked his way up the ladder and who is popular enough to be re-elected more than once as a legislator and as an honourable member of Parliament in last summer’s general election. Faced with arrest after being held guilty of committing murder, Shibu Soren, the hugely corrupt JMM leader, had tried the same trick: “I am being punished for fighting for Jharkhand and standing up for the rights of tribals.”

Koda used the same tribal card on Friday when he said, “There is a threat to my life. There is a conspiracy to annihilate me. I know who are doing all this. Whatever is published in the media is baseless. And, I am being harassed as I am a tribal belonging to a poor family.” Who is to tell him that it is he who has cheated the poor families of Jharkhand where 54 per cent of the population lives below the poverty line? That those whom he favoured with mining licences which allowed them to denude the State of its natural resources so long as they paid him a ‘fee’, that those who were given contracts to build roads and facilities which were never built, the Binod Sinhas and Sanjay Chaudharys of Jharkhand, have nothing but contempt for tribals living in gut-wrenching poverty?

Fed on relentless propaganda of the diku as the exploiter, Jharkhand’s moolvasis, the tribals whose interests Soren, Koda and their corrupt-to-the-core ilk claim to represent and protect, have become blind to the enemy within. Tribal loyalties invariably get precedence over better judgement and that explains why the tainted are elected time and again. Good governance and integrity are at a discount; if it’s caste preference in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, it’s tribal kinship in Jharkhand that plays a significant role in elections. That is the tragic reality of this wondrous land of ours.

So, we shouldn’t be surprised if the six ‘Independent’ candidates who will be contesting the Assembly election from Kolhan region with Koda’s support are elected. And if it is a fractured mandate, Koda’s MLAs, among them possibly his wife Geeta, will play an important role in Government formation. After all, that’s how he became Chief Minister. Politics, as PV Narasimha Rao was fond of repeating, is the art of the possible.

[This appeared as my regular Sunday column, Coffee Break, in The Pioneer on November 15.]

Loot of Jharkhand: Blame it on koyla?

The former Chief Minister of Jharkhand, Mr Madhu Koda, who these days represents Chaibasa constituency in the Lok Sabha, has done what others who have been caught with their snouts in the trough have been known to do: He has checked into a hospital where obliging doctors have found a bed for him in the intensive care unit. According to a health bulletin issued late Tuesday evening by Abur Razzak Memorial Weavers’ Hospital, whose doctors obviously hold the Hippocratic Oath in utter contempt, Mr Koda is suffering from a stomach-ache. Cynics would gleefully point out that it’s a case of indigestion caused by Mr Koda stuffing himself with too much lolly, but such frivolity need not distract us from the offences he has been accused of committing.

Nor should we hold Mr Koda’s humble beginnings — he was a welder and before that a mine worker till the late-1990s — against him. Others have risen from rags to riches by doing ‘social service’, which is how politicians describe their profession in their bio-profiles, and not all of them went to the right school, college and university. Indeed, politics offers a level playing field for those who have no compunctions about acquiring ill-gotten wealth. Perhaps that’s the way it should be — after all, there is no reason why those from the ‘masses’ should be at a disadvantage compared to those from the ‘classes’ when it comes to sharing the proverbial loaves and fishes of office.

Yet, Mr Koda’s alleged transgressions, ranging from illegal mining operations to kickbacks to money-laundering, are stunning because of the scale of the loot and the speed with which it was conducted. They also show that with the right determination and cunning, a nondescript milkman and the son of a chewing tobacco vendor can become the ‘business associates’ of a Chief Minister and front for him while negotiating ‘investment deals’ in places as far and wide as Dubai, Liberia and South Africa. But for their association with Mr Koda, neither Mr Vinod Sinha, who used to supply milk at homes in Ranchi, nor Mr Sanjay Chaudhary, whose father would hawk chewing tobacco (better known as khaini) from the carrier of his ramshackle bicycle, would have been among India’s most-wanted men today.

Mr Koda and his associates who are on the run would tell you that it’s all about seizing the right opportunity when it comes knocking on your door and not turning it away. For Mr Koda, who had contested and won the Assembly election on a BJP ticket, it came with the creation of Jharkhand in November 2000, a State carved out of Bihar ostensibly to ensure better governance and development for what was then considered a neglected tribal-dominated region. Statehood was considered fulfilment of the long-standing demand to protect tribal interests by delinking their fortunes from those of Bihar.

Mr Koda became Minister in the first Government of Jharkhand headed by Mr Babulal Marandi; he retained both his job and portfolio — Mines and Rural Engineering Organisation — after Mr Arjun Munda took over as Chief Minister. In 2005, Mr Koda was denied a BJP ticket, but that did not deter him from contesting the election as an ‘Independent’; he won with a handsome margin from Jagannathpur.

In a hung Assembly, Mr Koda and four other ‘Independent’ MLAs played a crucial role, first in helping the BJP to form a Government (in which they became Ministers) and later in pulling it down at the behest of the Congress, the RJD and the JMM. That was Mr Koda’s second opportunity: He manoeuvred himself into the Chief Minister’s office in September 2006 and remained in power till August 2008, when Mr Shibu Soren pulled the plug on him.

Apocryphal stories abound in Ranchi about how Mr Koda acquired huge wealth and clout in less than a decade. His iron ore-rich constituency became the hub of illegal mining: Trucks would be loaded and despatched across the border with Orissa to Paradip Port from where the ore would be shipped out to foreign destinations. A senior journalist in Ranchi recounted how industrialists were delighted when Mr Koda became the Chief Minister: He ran a ‘single window operation’ whereby those wanting to short-circuit the tedious process of submitting tenders and competing with others would pay him directly. Apparently, he had fixed ‘fees’ for favours — for example, he would charge Rs 1 lakh for every acre of mines being leased out; whoever paid the ‘fee’ got the lease.

It is, therefore, not surprising that he should have amassed assets worth Rs 4,000 crore, which is almost a fifth of Jharkhand’s annual budget, as is being claimed by the Income Tax Department. What is, however, surprising is that he should have thought of investing the slush funds in diverse businesses, including hotels, apartment blocks and shopping malls across nine cities. It is also a measure of the ingenuity of his two close associates, Mr Sinha and Mr Chaudhary, that they should have set up a bogus investment firm, Balaji Bullion and Retailers, in Mumbai, which funnelled money — according to one estimate, as much as Rs 990 crore — to a Dubai-based ‘investor’ called Abdul Bhai.

Was Mr Koda operating all by himself? Or was there somebody else, apart from Mr Sinha and Mr Chaudhary, who was advising him how to salt away the money he had looted? A former mine worker may be sufficiently brazen to demand bribes for favours and run an illegal mining operation, but would he be clever enough to invest in Liberian and South African mines? Recall how Mr Shibu Soren, far more crafty than Mr Koda, went and deposited the money he got for voting with the Treasury Benches so that PV Narasimha Rao’s Government would not fall, in a bank from where it was later seized and used to implicate him and his party MPs.

We could, of course, ignore the possibility of a larger conspiracy to mint millions by defrauding the people of Jharkhand, whom Mr Koda and tribal leaders of his ilk insist they represent, and blame it all on coal which has proved to be a boon to the unscrupulous few and a bane to the many who still wait for deliverance from gruelling poverty in one of India’s richest States.