Jagan's poll triumph doesn't wash away his corruption sins

Now that Jaganmohan Reddy’s YSR Congress has won an emphatic victory in the byelections to 18 Assembly seats in Andhra Pradesh, the corruption cases against him filed by the CBI will likely take a political turn as well.

Jaganmohan Reddy, who is in CBI custody, may well claim, as many politicians before him have done, that his electoral victory means that he has been found innocent in the “people’s court” - and that the cases against him have been shown up to be politically motivated.

He is, of course, half correct about that. The corruption may have been real, and in fact can be traced back to the time that his father, the late YS Rajasekhara Reddy, was Congress leader and Chief Minister, but the cases against Jaganmohan Reddy were foisted on him only because he broke away from  the Congress and dared to challenge its authority in the State.

As Firstpost had observed , it’s impossible to accuse Jaganmohan Reddy of corruption and accumulation of illegal wealth without talking of his father. Without YSR, Jaganmohan Reddy wouldn’t have become “ India’s richest politician ” - at top speed.

But so long as YSR delivered votes for the Congress and helped advance the agenda of the dynasty that rules at the centre, the Congress looked the other way from his corruption. But after YSR’s death in a helicopter crash,  Jaganmohan Reddy fell out with the Congress leadership, evidently because it overlooked his claims to dynastic succession of the chief ministership in the State, and so he became a marked man. And the skeletons have come tumbling out since then.

Even now, the numerous precedents involving the Congress’ partisan use of the CBI against its political opponents suggest that the cases against Jaganmohan Reddy will be used as a bargaining chip of sorts.  In much the same way that the anti-corruption cases against, say, Mayawati and Mulayam Singh Yadav have been used to secure their political pliance at various times, the cases against Jaganmohan Reddy too are open to political manipulation.

Most immediately, Jaganmohan Reddy’s landslide victory changes the political dynamics in the state, and puts the survival of the Congress government in grave peril. Even when he was in CBI custody - and away from the campaign trail - Jaganmohan Reddy demonstrated an ability to induce defections from both the Congress and the Telugu Desam Party. Those will acquire even greater intensity now.  It is in that context that the ’leverage’ that the Congress can exert over the YSR Congress with its capacity to turn up the heat using the CBI acquires significance.

But popular responses to the politicisation of corruption cases, as in this instance, reflect a disquieting readiness to lower the threshold on corruption. Ahead of the elections, many voters said they would vote for the YSR Congress even though they were convinced that YSR and his son were monumentally corrupt. They wanted to “teach the Congress a lesson” or “give Jagan a chance”.

Likewise, anyone opposed to the Congress will instinctly see the election verdict as a vindication of Jaganmohan Reddy’s claim that the cases are politically motivated and ought to be dismissed.

But this ignores the principle that even if the cases themselves were motivated by political malice, the charges ought to be investigated if they have any basis. And as a Firstpost investigation established, Jaganmohan Reddy’s officially declared wealth increased five-fold in just two years, and the CBI accusations validate this reality.

Even now, it isn’t entirely inconceivable that the Congress will,  under certain circumstances and in order to protect its own interests in the State, offer to “rehabilitate” Jaganmohan Reddy and ease up on the corruption cases against him. Jaganmohan Reddy has the political upper hand in the State, on the strength of his emphatic victory today; yet, nobody likes a corruption case to drag on endlessly, and to that extent, he too may be amenable to an ‘out-of-court settlement’.

The deal currently being negotiated between the Congress and the Samajwadi Parti at the centre to secure the Congress’ survival and the election of Pranab Mukherjee as President has a similar whiff to it; one of Mulayam Singh’s unstated demands is believed to be the quashing of the charges against him in the Disproportionate Assets cases against him and his family members, including his son and current Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav. Since Mulayam’s leverage over the Congress just increased manifold following the extreme political brinkmanship of Mamata Banerjee, he could extract his pound of flesh.

But everytime “political deals” are struck in order to dilute corruption cases, and everytime a politician claims that his election victory is vindication of his innocence, and that he needn’t stand trial on charges of corruption, justice  - and the people’s interest - is ill served.

An election victory is certainly not with political significance, particularly one so emphatic as Jaganmohan Reddy’s today. Yet, to claim that it amounts to a dip in the Ganga that washes away all one’s sins is a perversion of  the principles of justice.