With the BJP on Monday releasing more information on the link between a certain Sanjeev Saxena, who gave its MPs money to support the government, and Samajwadi Party leader Amar Singh — the party alleged that Mr Saxena’s son’s college admission form has Amar Singh’s residence address on it — the circumstantial evidence in the cash-for-votes scandal appears to point in only one direction. Earlier, on Sunday, the BJP had alleged that mobile phone records showed calls were made from Mr Saxena’s mobile to Amar Singh’s residence when Mr Saxena was at the house of one of the BJP MPs, handing over the cash (how the party got the phone records could well be the next controversy!). The party also said the car that Mr Saxena used was registered at an address that belonged to Amar Singh. To establish that the two were closely linked, the party showed old SMSs sent by Mr Saxena to journalists, inviting them to Mr Singh’s press conferences. If all that the BJP says is true with regard to telephone records, car identity and college admission forms, there is strong justification for the television channel CNN-IBN to air the sting operation and let the public make up its mind.
From the manner in which the controversy is playing out, including the botched sting by ex-BJP leader Uma Bharti and the rival CD released on Monday by UPA leaders Lalu Prasad and Ram Vilas Paswan, and by Samajwadi Party chief Mulayam Singh Yadav, it is clear that this controversy has remained a live one. Appointing any official agency to probe the matter is not going to help, given the record of such probes in the past — they either take too long or deliver findings that are strongly contested by those involved. And the BJP, it is clear, is not content with letting the matter be handled by the Lok Sabha committee appointed by the Speaker.
But from the BJP’s point of view, any hope that this issue will be the next Bofors is fanciful. Trying to convince the electorate that bribes were paid in order to buy a gun of doubtful quality (which was not the case) is quite different from telling them that the government paid a bribe to secure a trust vote. Even when the proof was a lot more telling in the case of the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha MPs, who deposited in banks the money they took for supporting the Narasimha Rao government, the scandal died a natural death after a while. Whichever way the case goes, though, one thing is definite: the political climate has hotted up so much (the Jammu agitation over the land for the Amarnath shrine has not helped matters) that it is unlikely that the BJP and the Left, smarting over its fall from a position of power, will co-operate with the government on any critical Bill. So all those hoping for a slew of parliamentary reforms should be realistic about the limited agenda that the government can hope to clear before it calls for elections.