Sushma in the Soup

Strange as it may sound, it isn’t the first time that a tainted businessman has doted on External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj, who is in the eye of the storm over celebrity fugitive and Twitter nut Lalit Kumar Modi offering a directorial position in a family company to her lawyer-husband Swaraj Kaushal. The 62-year-old lawyer who had worked with the Modis for over 20 years was meant to attend board meetings on behalf of the London- based former commissioner of the Indian Premier League (IPL) who is wanted in India for a raft of white-collar crimes.

The idea of Kaushal’s nomination to the board of Indofil, a Modi Group company, was brought up by Lalit Modi himself after several senior Group officials convinced him that he ought to have someone to fill in for him since he couldn’t travel to India to attend board meetings for fear of being nabbed by the police. Besides, he would be forced to vacate as director over non-attendance. Lalit Modi’s letter of instructions was sent in shortly: Kaushal would be alternate director, to begin with, on the board of Indofil, a chemicals company. Lalit Modi was a director at several Modi Group companies, including Godfrey Phillips India Ltd, from where he had to vacate his office as a director with effect from 28 May 2015 in accordance with the provisions of Section 167(1)(b) of the Companies Act, 2013, which deals with non-attendance at board meetings.

The arrangement suited the fugitive cricket official. Kaushal was already his legal counsel and was politically well-connected—his External Affairs Minister wife had gone out of her way and flouted norms to help him. “Maybe he thought it was payback time,” admits a Mumbai-based official of a Modi Group company. But since there was a lot of buzz growing around Lalit Modi, the company didn’t take up the matter at subsequent board meetings and neither did it list the suggestion on its agenda. “Which means it can’t be said that Kaushal rejected the offer. The offer fell through even before he could or couldn’t refuse, it seems,” says a person close to the matter. Kaushal, for his part, has maintained that he was made the offer but he had not considered taking it up.

The offer simply expired. “Whatever that is, the act of nomination itself is remarkable since it is proof of how thick the Kaushals and Swarajs are,” concedes a BJP leader. The opposition Congress party and others have launched a tirade against Sushma Swaraj for not disclosing to the Prime Minister details of her husband’s relationship with the disgraced IPL czar who faces cases against him for alleged foreign exchange violations that led to his passport being revoked soon after he fled India in 2010. Three years later, the disciplinary committee of the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) had found Modi guilty on eight counts, including financial irregularities, misconduct, indiscipline and other charges. The BCCI had also indicted Modi for reportedly rigging bids during the IPL’s 2010 auction of new franchises. According to BCCI documents, it had e-mailed a list of 22 charges in April 2010. Lalit Modi, who claimed innocence, fled India some months later claiming that he feared for his life—and he never appeared before the BCCI disciplinary committee or the Enforcement Directorate (ED), which had issued a blue-corner notice on him.

Of course, what queers the political pitch is that the whole Lalit Modi episode has badly hurt the credibility of the country’s External Affairs Minister as she gets dragged into a scandal involving corporate interests and cricket politics. Late last month, when Swaraj attracted sharp criticism from the opposition and media for helping Lalit Modi secure travel documents to be on his ailing wife’s side in a Lisbon hospital where she had undergone a cancer surgery, the former Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha had tried to fend off the offensive that had begun to gather momentum, saying she did it on “humanitarian grounds”. She also resorted to social media barbs against journalists who highlighted the impropriety of her mid-2014 decision—when she had communicated with British bureaucrats back then to ensure that Lalit Modi was free to travel to Portugal, she didn’t even follow the procedure that was required of all in the Ministry. By diplomatic etiquette, she should have had the minutes of all the communication recorded. A senior Ministry official has said the practice of keeping minutes of any conversation—referred to as ‘paper under consideration’—cannot be done away with. “Any such act is a flagrant violation of norms,” he says, emphasising that he was sure British diplomats who had received messages from her were sure to have followed the rules. “It has been an irresponsible and a highly uncalled-for action on the part of a leader of her stature, who has long experience in both the Government and in the opposition. She should have known it was a huge risk as a minister. How would she have responded if she were in the opposition and if there was any such slip on the part of a Cabinet member?” the official asks.

Swaraj, whose first big break in politics came in 1977 when she, then 25, was named a minister in the Devi Lal government of Haryana, has had a long and distinguished career in politics and now holds a position that has only once been held before by a woman leader—the late Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.

In the past, Swaraj had famously courted the ‘Bellary brothers’, the powerful mining barons of the south. The affinity had been mutual. The three ‘Reddy’ brothers— G Karunakar Reddy, G Somashekar Reddy and G Janardhan Reddy—who came under a cloud and attracted jail sentences for illegal mining had referred to her reverentially as ‘amma’ and remained her followers through thick and thin. In return, she had pitched for accommodating them within the party fold, their dubious bonafides notwithstanding. “She had had deep links with the Reddy brothers. She never listened to any complaints of local BJP leaders about these kingpins of legal mining. They treated her like a goddess and she revelled in that attention, letting them worship at her feet,” says a Karnataka BJP leader who had worked closely with Swaraj when she had contested against Sonia Gandhi in Bellary in the 1999 Lok Sabha polls and lost.

Sumantra Bose, professor of International and Comparative Politics, London School of Economics and Political Science, is usually sceptical of media hysteria that reaches ridiculous proportions, especially on TV channels. He also considers it strange that the media has given such publicity to Lalit Modi’s barrage of tweets. But, says this renowned scholar of Indian politics and its conflict-ridden areas, “I think she should step down over the issue. I don’t think India can afford to have as its Minister of External Affairs a person who has acted in the manner she has. Given her seniority both in politics and in the Cabinet, she should have known better. In most democracies such conduct by a senior Cabinet minister would definitely lead to resignation, or, failing that, dismissal. Of course, coming just after its first anniversary, the episode is an embarrassment for the Modi Government, but I doubt the damage will be lasting. India is, tragically, scam-land and its political class engages in misdemeanours and worse as a matter of routine. The problem here is Swaraj’s seniority and the importance of her role in representing India to the outside world. So she should relinquish that position.”

The media has been harsher on Swaraj, who, interestingly, has not incurred much criticism from former socialist leaders. “After all, she has forever been pally with former socialist leaders right from the time when George Fernandes was a national hero and also with the likes of former Prime Minister Chandra Shekhar,” says a BJP leader who has known Swaraj since the 1970s. Despite the fact that she was locked in bitter internal feuds with several BJP leaders, Swaraj, for her part, had maintained a camaraderie of sorts with former socialists such as Rashtriya Janata Dal chief Lalu Prasad and Samajwadi Party honcho Mulayam Singh Yadav.

The silence of India’s ‘socialist bloc’ of leaders isn’t a surprise, though. “Swaraj was in touch with all leaders, including Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, who never kept his hostility towards Narendra Modi a secret,” says a Patna-based BJP leader. Before Modi has named the BJP campaign spearhead for the 2014 General Election, Sushma Swaraj had given the likes of Nitish the impression that in the BJP Parliamentary Board, people who favoured Modi for the coveted role were in a minority, and it was that ‘confidence’ that Modi would ‘never’ be a PM candidate of the BJP that forced the likes of Nitish to hit out at Narendra Modi. All this was before Modi’s nomination was announced with the backing of a brute majority in BJP’s top echelons, much to the dismay of Swaraj and rival prime ministerial aspirant LK Advani. Similarly, Swaraj also found support from the Shiv Sena, which had publicly favoured her for PM. “Congress has no right to ask for her resignation as [Lalit Modi] escaped during the UPA’s term… I don’t want to take names of Congress leaders who were actively involved in the IPL gamble,” Shiv Sena leader Sanjay Raut said after the controversy broke out.

In her early career, Swaraj has had greater association with what is now called the ‘Janata Parivar’ than others, especially after she became a member of the Haryana Assembly in 1977 from the constituency of Ambala Cantonment and was sworn in as a state minister in the Janata Party government headed by Chief Minister Devi Lal. By 1979, she became a state president of the Janata Party in Haryana. “If you notice carefully, except the opposition Congress, the only groups that are loudly calling for Swaraj’s exit are the Aam Aadmi Party and the Left,” says a Delhi-based BJP functionary who adds that it was the “anti-Narendra Modi sentiment that made them (she and the former socialists) bedfellows. While she was quick to express her solidarity with Narendra Modi at a public forum soon after the party fielded the latter, Swaraj’s prime ministerial nominee LK Advani resigned from all his posts in the BJP on 10 June 2013 following the appointment of Modi as the head of the electoral campaign of BJP for the 2014 polls. He argued that the BJP was no longer the “same idealistic party” it was before. However, Advani was forced to withdraw his resignation a day later.

Meanwhile, a senior Congress leader based in Delhi tells Open that “even the senior leadership of the Congress doesn’t appear genuinely concerned about the issue. They are not aggressively batting for throwing Swaraj out. Most leaders do not seem to realise that it is a huge political opportunity and that they are squandering it”. He agrees that to some extent, Congress leaders “with the exception of a few” are behaving like former socialist leaders in being “less vocal” about the Swaraj-Lalit Modi issue. “The political potential is big. Getting a senior minister to admit her impropriety and then resign would be a major political plus for the Congress and the opposition, which, on the other hand, look caught by inertia following their humiliating defeat in last year’s polls. In fact, the only opposition we have now is AAP and then the feeble voice from the Left that is losing its grip on Indian politics,” he points out. “I must tell you that many leaders in the Congress are barking up the wrong tree by targeting merely Rajasthan Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje [whose business links with Lalit Modi have surfaced] and Pankaja Munde [who has been being accused of flouting norms in Maharashtra’s Rs 206 crore Chikki Scam and for awarding a contract for the construction of a dam to a private company even though it had been disqualified],” says this Congress functionary, known to be close to Rahul Gandhi. “It is important to highlight others also,” he adds, “But Raje has the backing of the state BJP unit and is, frankly, not in a position as vulnerable as Swaraj is. Munde has made a point- by-point rebuttal of the charges against her. Also, our leaders must understand the art of war. Swaraj is a big catch. If she falls, then that will bring great disrepute to a government that used to pride itself on its transparency quotient. This is the central issue. Others are ancillary, state issues. A section of leadership isn’t backing Rahul Gandhi to the fullest. That is the problem.” Congress Vice-President Rahul Gandhi had demanded that the Prime Minister sack Swaraj. “Who is Sushma Swaraj? Sushma Swaraj is a minor minister and she means nothing in this government,” he had said.

When the news of impropriety on the part of this ‘minor minister’ emerged, the knee-jerk reaction among the twitterati and a section of the media was to blame it on internecine wrangling. Swaraj, who was averse to the idea of Narendra Modi becoming Prime Minister, had to settle for a ministry that has lately been considered an annexe of the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO). Rahul Gandhi was not off the mark when he called her a minister who plays a ‘minor’ role in the NDA Government: her importance as a BJP leader had diminished thanks to Modi’s rapid rise in national politics. Swaraj, who had increasingly been fidgety about Modi’s growing popularity within and outside the party in the run-up to the General Election, had to reconcile to her fate after he came to power in an emphatic win last May, securing an absolute majority for his party. Swaraj was also forced to live down insults as many of her suggestions were shot down by the new trinity in power at the Centre: besides Modi, it includes BJP President Amit Shah and Finance Minister Arun Jaitley. Swaraj had argued that the BJP stop backing Shah after the CBI arrested him for his alleged complicity in ‘fake encounters’ in Gujarat—a charge which courts later dismissed as a political frame-up. None of it endeared her to the new power triad. Swaraj is now forced to grin and bear it whenever she is overruled on policy matters. Modi had thrown out her suggestion that New Delhi should oppose the idea of a BRICS Bank headquartered in Shanghai. He maintained that it was enough that an Indian became its first chief. Again, her choice of Chief Minister of Haryana in the run-up to last year’s state elections was shot down in favour of Manohar Lal Khattar.

Clearly, the charges now levelled against Swaraj are the result of her own acts of impropriety by putting her family’s interests above those of the collective responsibility of the Government. Proof of it lies in not keeping the minutes of a meeting she had with UK High Commissioner James Bevan in which she had favoured the grant of travel documents to Lalit Modi. “Definitely, there was a conflict of interest. Since her husband and daughter were both working for Lalit Modi, it was imperative on her part to have informed Narendra Modi of the goings-on,” says a Lucknow-based BJP leader who is upset that her family’s business ties with Lalit Modi have brought such acute embarrassment to the NDA Government.

What comes to the fore are the games that people play in the name of cricket, often just to amass money by occupying key posts. Open had reported earlier that Neeraj Gunde, a Mumbai-based self-avowed entrepreneur, had been moving around in the national capital since last December with documents that reportedly pointed to links between Swaraj and Lalit Modi. Some others also claimed to have documents on Lalit Modi’s links with various others, including Raje, Swaraj Kaushal and a few others close to them. Gunde is considered a ‘friend and spy’ of International Cricket Council (ICC) chief N Srinivasan. Both, however, had denied any association. The BJP leadership was aware that this wannabe whistleblower had documents that contained an email trail between Swaraj and British Labour Party politician Keith Vaz in which the senior BJP leader made requests for Lalit Modi. After they came to know of Gunde, he was summoned by a senior party leader to enquire about his intentions. “The BJP definitely knew about indiscretion on the part of Swaraj. It also backed her initially, but how long it will be able to support her—with more murky details of her family’s connections with Lalit Modi coming out— is the question,” said a government official close to the matter. A few “highly unintelligent guys” tried to project the whole issue as a case of discrimination against women. “Falling back on that kind of dirty gender politics was uncalled for,” he says, referring to the grave nature of charges against Lalit Modi, a highly successful cricket official who launched the highly lucrative IPL and got embroiled in a range of scams from match-fixing and money-laundering to the indiscreet award of new team franchises and cricket betting. Cricket had suddenly become popular thanks to the IPL’s 20-over format of matches.

What should worry Swaraj are precedents. The former External Affairs Minister and scholar Madhav Singh Solanki had to resign in 1992 after he was accused of trying to scuttle the probe into the multi-crore Bofors pay-off scandal. Solanki was accused of misleading the Swiss authorities that were acting on the Letters Rogatory sent by India to that country seeking assistance in the investigation. On a 1992 visit to Davos in Switzerland, Solanki had allegedly met the Swiss foreign minister Rene Felber and told him that inquiries conducted of the scam in India had failed to produce any result and that the request for mutual assistance was made for “political reasons”.

In 2004, Natwar Singh also had to quit the Manmohan Singh Cabinet after the UN’s Volcker Committee named him a beneficiary of the illegal payoffs in the Iraqi oil-for-food programme. Similarly, in 2010, Shashi Tharoor, a junior minister of External Affairs in UPA-II, had to step down for his alleged involvement in the Kochi IPL cricket franchise bid. He got into trouble after Lalit Modi, then IPL commissioner, disclosed that Sunanda Pushkar, who later became Tharoor’s wife, had a sizeable equity stake in Rendezvous Sports World (RSW), which headed the consortium that owned the Kochi team. Tharoor came under attack for misusing his office for pecuniary gain. Pushkar was found dead in a luxury hotel room in January last year.

Lalit Modi, the eccentric fugitive who has been trigger-happy on Twitter, attacking former colleagues and politicians of all hues, has managed to gain some traction among a section of internet Hindus and the loony fringe as well. He has attacked Tharoor again, suggesting that he wanted details of the investors (which included Pushkar) in the Kochi team kept under wraps.

Lalit Modi, who is now at his offensive best on Twitter, also shared on the micro- blogging site minutes of a meeting held on 11 April 2010 at Upper Crust Lounge, ITC Royal Gardenia hotel, Bengaluru.

The Chairman (Lalit Modi) stated to the consortia of owners present that he had received a call from Mr Shashi Tharoor, Union Minister of State for External Affairs, asking him not to probe into the identity of Ms Sunanda Pushkar, one owner listed in the shareholders agreement.

The Chairman stated it is the responsibility of the BCCI-IPL to ascertain the identity of all the owners in order to maintain the integrity of the league and that of BCCI. He went on to ask the following to Mr (Shailendra) Gaikwad, one of the owners of the consortia

– Declare the identity of the owners listed—Ms Puja Gulati, Ms Sandeep Aggarwal, Mr Vishnu Mohan Prasad & Ms Sunanda Pushkar. Mr Gaikwad replied Ms Sunanda Pushkar was a family friend living in the state of J&K. She is a housewife and that her husband is in the auto industry. He also said one of the others was a friend from Silicon Valley and also mentioned Ms Puja has done her MBA. However he did not know any more details and assured he will send an email with the details within 24 hours.

– The Chairman further probed if there were any direct or indirect ownerships or connection for any of the owner members with any politicians, current or past sportsmen. Mr Gaikwad in reply called his father on the phone to clarify the same and responded stating that his father said he would call him back with the details

Within a couple of minutes (0013 hrs to be precise), the Chairman received a call from Mr Shashi Tharoor on his mobile phone asking why he was asking the connection link of the owner related to Ms Pushkar. (Call received on phone no. +91 98202 333333 from the number +91 96501 11098). The Chairman though did not have to respond, informed Mr Tharoor that it is BCCI-IPLs regulations to check the credibility of all investors and will further investigate if there was any linkages with any unidentified investors. He went on to inform him, if any of the owners were found to have any linkages, the BCCI-IPL will have the absolute rights to terminate the agreement.

The Chairman further advised the consortia members that the details related to player regulation, retention and home ground for the Kochi franchise will be briefed at a later time.

Lalit Modi was the first to reveal that the owners of Rendezvous World Sports, a consortium that had successfully bid $333 million to set up a Kochi team for the IPL, included the then girlfriend of Shashi Tharoor.

Ever since he resurfaced in the news a few weeks ago, Lalit Modi has gone berserk on Twitter. While he refused several interview requests citing a gag order from his lawyers, he has dragged the names of several politicians into the mess via social media, alleging that they were out to victimise him and trying to cover up corruption involving politicians in cricket. He also bragged about meeting Priyanka Gandhi and Robert Vadra in London and also about his rendezvous with BJP’s Varun Gandhi whom he alleged was ready to help ride out the bad times with the help of his aunt Sonia Gandhi, in exchange for a hefty sum of money. “He is a loose talker. He is unpredictable and moody and is definitely a gadfly,” says a Modi Group official close to Lalit Modi’s father KK Modi.

When it comes to Lalit Modi, epithets and adjectives abound. Clearly, an association with such a man is destined to end in shame and guilt. What is all the more obvious is that the Lalit Modi affair has dealt a big blow to Swaraj who has carefully cultivated the image of being a do-gooder politician and a firebrand leader of a party that has constantly set itself apart from the corruption- riven Congress.

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