Raja makes it to the global rogues’ gallery

This is one dubious honour the disgraced telecom minister A Raja won’t quite grasp. He shares an ’elite’ space with Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, North Korean leader Kim Jong-II and the sex crazy Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi and comes ahead of them in a rogues’ roll call.

He ranks second on the list of “ignominious club of privileged leaders who stepped too far” prepared by Time magazine . His ‘stepping too far act’, the 2G scam, also hogs the same rank in Top 10 Abuses of Power category. He is in exotic company. The list is headed by ex-American President Richard Nixon’s secret unit ‘Plumbers’. The unit was tasked with digging up dirt on Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg.

Raja is now cooling his heels in Tihar jail with some high profile CEOs for company.

Raja, “a relatively green lawmaker from a regional party’’ won his post as minister as a result of India’s usual parliamentary political horse-trading, the magazine says. He presided over the underpricing of bandwidth to mobile companies — apparently in return for bribes — which some estimate may have cost the Indian government around USD 7 billion.”

“That figure makes it hands down the largest episode of graft in Indian history…. Raja himself now languishes in jail as the snail-paced Indian judicial system inches the case forward,” the magazine says.

Other on the list include former Tyco CEO Dennis Kozlowski, former president of Israel Moshe Katsav, Roger Vangheluwe, who stepped down as Bishop of Bruge, former head of China’s State Food and Drug Administration Zheng Xiaoyu and US secretary of the interior in 1922 Albert Fall.