Cong's idea of combating Modi through innuendo on his love life boomerangs

The Congress seems to have erred yet again in its assessment of Narendra Modi and miscalculated its plan to combat him.

The institution of a Commission of Inquiry by the UPA Government into the snooping scandal was supposed to have been a masterstroke to vilify the BJP’s Prime Ministerial candidate and suggest that he was as vulnerable as any other human and also didn’t devote all his time thinking about and working for Gujarat’s development. Top government and Congress functionaries spent days after days mulling over the issue they thought would “expose Modi’s fascist mindset” to create a revulsion against him nationally and halt his onward march to New Delhi.

The argument was that investigative portal Gulail.com had provided them with ammunition to target him, which in any case had for long been with the central government agencies. The Cabinet headed by the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh deliberated over the issue and an official statement after much vetting was issued by the PIB: “The Cabinet has approved a proposal to set up a Commission of Inquiry under Commission of Inquiry Act, 1952, to look into the incidents of physical/electronic surveillance in the States of Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh, and the National Capital Territory of Delhi, allegedly without authorization.” If the Commission of Inquiry by the Gujarat government was to be headed by a retired High Court Judge, then the central Commission of Inquiry is to be headed by a retired Supreme Court Judge or a retired chief justice of a high court.

The Congress’s thinking heads would obviously have factored in a vociferous reaction from the BJP but it perhaps didn’t fully take into account the things that could have progressed later in the day. As it happened, a judicial court in Ahmedabad not just gave a clean chit to Modi in the Gulberg SOciety massacre case of 2002 , but also made very strong and critical observations against the key witnesses of the anti-Modi campaign, Sanjeev Bhatt and RB Sreekumar (two former Gujarat cadre IPS officers), to the extent of terming them “untrustworthy”.

Or perhaps, the Congress had realised that the anti-Modi NGOs couldn’t present their case well enough to merit prosecution against him, so they hurried the Snoopgate commission slightly earlier in the day, as Leader of Opposition Arun Jaitley argued. Some Congress leaders have been of the opinion that apart from the 2002 allegations, the snooping scandal was the biggest, most damning handle against Modi. Calling it a “phoney commission”, Jaitley questioned the timing of the Cabinet decision and said  it was hurried through just because the Congress had sensed that that the judgment of the Ahmedabad Metropolitan Magistrate court was not going to be to their liking.

If the Metropolitan Magistrate court’s ruling had been against Modi, the Congress’s top guns would have been blazing since yesterday afternoon. Law Minister Kapil Sibal had demanded that the BJP must remove Modi from the Prime Ministerial candidate’s pedestal.

Though the terms of reference have not yet been made public, Jaitley revealed that he had come to know that the UPA2 made it a federal issue by clubbing the complaints of spying on his (Jaitley’s) phone and a two year old case of surveillance against Himachal Pradesh chief minister Virbhadra Singh, not because Gulail had claimed Modi had illegally mounted an inter-state surveillance on a woman. Union Home Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde says there was no political vendetta, no politics. The decision was taken “on basis of facts, the representation forwarded by the President and the people’s wish”.

If this was a case of protecting the rights of a citizen, whether or not she wishes to complain about it, then it would be a welcome step. The government should then logically act tough on various central agencies who conduct phone tapping, mostly unauthorised. Only a fraction of phone tapping is ever authorised through laid out procedures.

The statements made by senior Congress leaders in last few days hardly leave any doubt about the real intentions of the UPA2. It clearly appears to be a case of somehow fixing Modi and gaining some political capital in the run up to the Parliamentary elections of 2014.

Consider some facts: In summer of 2010 it came to light that the covert technical surveillance agency NTRO had tapped phones of top political leaders including Prakash Karat, Sharad Pawar, Nitish Kumar and so on. Karat’s phone was tapped during the Indo-US nuclear deal controversy, Sharad Pawar’s phone was tapped during height of IPL franchise controversy and Nitish Kumar’s while he had come to Delhi to negotiate with the union Government on issues relating to Bihar. Outlook had done a big story on that. The UPA Government claimed that it had “not authorised” anyone for phone tapping of political leaders and the issue died down after few days of sound and fury of opposition.

Two years ago came the accusation by none less than then Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee that his office was bugged by other government agencies to evesdrop on his conversations on some issues of critical importance. Adhesives were found at 16 places in his office. But again the matter was settled after a brief internal inquiry.

The UPA government obviously considers protection of privacy rights of a Gujarati woman as a matter of national importance since it has gone through the cumbersome process of ordering a commission of inquiry.

The UPA government wants this commission to give its report in three months as against the six month time given to the commission appointed by Gujarat government. This means that central commission report should be out around the time that the parliamentary election schedule would be announced. Whatever may be the findings of the commission, one thing is sure that it would raise the temperature and dust during the electioneering.

Remember in 2004-05, the UC Banerjee committee appointed by UPA 1 had submitted an interim report in the stipulated time (constituted in September 2004 and interim report in January 2005). The Banerjee committee ran parallel to the Gujarat-government appointed Nanawati commission on the same issue. The timing of this coincided with elections in Bihar, where the Lalu Yadav-led RJD at long last was facing an existential crisis. Lalu, as then railway minister, deftly used it for raising a secular communal bogey in Feb 2005 Bihar elections. Unfortunately for Lalu the voters saw through the motives and voted out 15 year long Lalu-Rabri regime. Later Gujarat High Court quashed the conclusions of Banerjee committee and ruled that the investigation was “unconstitutional, illegal and null and void”, declared its formation to be a “colourable exercise of power with mala fide intentions”, and its argument of accidental fire “opposed to the prima facie accepted facts on record.”

Though the two situations – the Banerjee committee on Godhra and the Commission of Inquiry on the snooping scandal - are not exactly the same, there is a definite political pattern running through the two tales.