What Jayanthi Natarajan exposes: Double standards of 'pro-poor' Rahul Gandhi

The most revealing aspect of the sensational letter of former environment minister Jayanthi Natarajan to Congress president Sonia Gandhi, published by The Hindu on Friday, is the emptiness of Rahul Gandhi’s pro-poor, pro-tribal and pro-environment public posturing.

In her desperate letter , in which she literally pleads with Sonia Gandhi and asks for reasons for her unceremonious exit 100 days before the Lok Sabha elections, Jayanthi makes it very clear that she had received specific requests from Rahul Gandhi to block environmental clearances for some big projects and she had acted accordingly. However, what followed were Sonia’s axe and Rahul Gandhi’s indifference. Rahul’s office even planted stories in the media saying that her resignation was not for party work even as her attempts to meet him went unanswered.

But this is what really exposes Rahul Gandhi’s so-called concern for the environment. A day after Jayanthi was forced to resign, Rahul in his address to FICCI referred to the delays in environmental clearances and their impact on the economy.

Evidently, he wanted to pander to big businesses and dispel the swelling criticism, by both industrialists and the opposition, that UPA’s government’s love for nature was retarding growth. The media stories, planted by Rahul’s office as alleged by Jayanthi, were obviously to make the message to industries clearer that she was indeed dropped for her obstinacy and not deputed elsewhere.

Jayanthi’s disclosure completes the sequence that shows that Rahul’s Bhatta-Parsol and Niyamgiri campaigns were mendacious: He takes out protests marches, asks Natarajan to block clearances, gets her expelled to mollify industrialists, plants media stories against her, and speaks in a pro-business language in which her ministry is directly blamed.

The Rahul who emerges from this sequence of events is not a true pro-poor or pro-environment activist, but yet another disingenuous politician who publicly professes something and does exactly the opposite.

Going by Jayanthi’s letter, Sonia Gandhi is also party to the plan to scapegoat her and placate big businesses. It was Sonia who asks the then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to drop her. Manmohan has only good words for her work, both orally and in writing, and offers no reasons other than the fact that Sonia didn’t want her in the ministry. Jayanthi says, in her letter, that since December 2013, she has been waiting to hear from Sonia the reasons for her sudden exit. Her efforts to meet Rahul Gandhi also have been in vain.

According to Jayanthi, she hasn’t been assigned any party responsibility since her resignation and has been removed from the list of Congress spokespersons. She bemoans that her career has been ruined and the reputation of both herself and her family has been sullied. In fact, from a young politician who had been brought to national prominence by none other than Rajiv Gandhi thirty years ago and an unflappable party spokesperson, she became a political untouchable overnight. “My entire career is ruined, and above all, the sacred and venerable legacy of my family, which served our nation and party with immense distinction, and patriotism stands in danger of being tarnished. As you are aware, I am a fourth generation Congress worker,” she says.

If not to please big businesses, is there anything else that made Jayanthi unfavourable to both Rahul and Sonia? Was there any truth in allegations that files were blocked by her ministry for bribes as alleged by Narendra Modi during the Lok Sabha election rallies last year? Modi was, in fact, quite frontal, when he had said that without paying a “Jayanthi tax”, files wouldn’t move. “There was a storm over the environment ministry and all files were blocked. No file was moving without money. We had heard of income, sales and excise taxes but for the first time, we heard about a Jayanthi tax in Delhi without which nothing was moving. Till the time that was not paid, files could not be moved in the environment ministry,” he had said.

Was the allegation of “Jayanthi tax” the handiwork of industrialists and politicians sympathetic to them who were aggrieved by her action? Or was it really true? Almost at the same time, there were also media commentaries singling her out for the country’s slow economic growth. Economic Times wrote: “It is amazing that she was given such a long rope and not relieved of her ministerial responsibility earlier. The long rope, instead of tripping her up, has choked off the economy’s oxygen supply. The fall in real capital formation as a share of GDP by about six percentage points is at the root of the slowdown in economic growth over the last several quarters.”

After being rendered an outcast, Jayanthi waited for a year and has now left the Congress. By making her side of the story public, she has now thrown down the gauntlet to Sonia and Rahul. Rahul, who even alleged that Narendra Modi was made the prime minister by industrialists has to certainly come clean before further pontificating on poverty and environment.

Equally important is that Jayanthi deserves natural justice. If Rahul doesn’t speak, allegations of “Jayanthi tax” will stick.