Mahendra Karma Recently a national daily carried a photograph that showed veteran Congress leader of Chhattisgarh Mahendra Karma offering a few hundred-rupee notes to a tribal woman as the price of her vote in a village in Dantewara district. The same paper later reported that the police in the BJP-ruled State sprang into action suo moto after seeing the photograph and the story in the paper and registered an FIR against Karma and that the Election Commission was contemplating whether Karma should be debarred from contesting the election.
This incident delineates in all vividness the state of the country after six decades of independence. When a candidate in an Assembly election offers a few hundred rupees in a remote tribal village to purchase the vote of an old woman who presumably is without any assured means of livelihood, a criminal case is promptly registered against him and there is a stirring in the Election Commission too. When the Prime Minister of the country oversees payment of crores of rupees for the vote of an elected representative of the people, the former bureaucrat in the World Bank is hailed as a mature politician.
The old worn out tribal woman shown in the photograph as receiving the money from Karma is a symbol of abysmal shame on all those who have ruled this country for over 60 years – the politicians as well as the bureaucrats. An astronomical amount of money has been spent in the name of raising the living standard of the tribals in the country under various plans and schemes, mainly the tribal sub-plans. Where have those thousands of crores of rupees gone? The tribals are by nature self-respecting people. Why should a tribal woman have to humble herself for a small amount of money before the Karmas 60 years after independence?
We, the Indians, are endowed with a divine power to turn the best of things into a veritable racket, as we have done with the reservation policy. It was a good concept to bring the socially disabled sections, the tribals and the Dalits, into the national mainstream by making reservations for them in the legislatures and services. Now we have a new Brahman class among the tribals and the Scheduled Castes because we permitted the reservations to be monopolised by a few families. Why should only Mahendra Karma or Dilip Singh Bhuria or Kantilal Bhuria have the benefit of reservation and then pass it on to their progeny, like hereditary Raj-gaddi, to the exclusion of 99 per cent of the other tribals?
Mahendra Karma is himself a tribal. He was an MP and has been MLA for three terms. He is now the Leader of Opposition in the Chhattisgarh Assembly. If he is in a position to flaunt the currency notes before a poor woman of his own community with the intention of buying her vote, it is because of the dismal failure of the Executive and the highest judiciary to discharge their duties properly. Karma should have been in jail, along with dozens of other politicians and IAS officers.
Their crime? The loot of the tribals of Bastar. The law proscribes the sale of tribal’s land to a non-tribal. It started like this. “A” was made to sell his land to “B” for a few lakh of rupees. Both are tribals and poor and illiterate. A certain politician pays a few lakh of rupees to “B” and takes, for all practical purposes, the possession of the land. There are 200-300-year-old precious trees on the land but the revenue officials show it in the records as barren land, with only a few shrubs. The IAS officials, appointed there as Commissioner, Collector, Assistant Commissioner and in other capacities facilitate the illegal transaction. The politician then earns crores of rupees from the trees alone. Called Malik Makbooja, this racket went on for decades. Karma was part of the gang of exploiters.
An NGO working for environmental protection knocked on the doors of the Supreme Court in the last decade. The apex court directed the then Madhya Pradesh Lokayukta to investigate. The Lokayukta appointed a three-member committee, headed by a retired district judge, to conduct the inquiry. The committee prepared a comprehensive report, identifying the culprits – the politicians, the IAS offices and other bureaucrats – in each case, the money paid to “A” and “B” in the transaction and the approximate amount earned by each racketeer.
The Supreme Court asked the Madhya Pradesh government (Chhattisgarh was still part of MP) to initiate action against those indicted in the report. The State’s chief secretary KS Sharma, however,
submitted an affidavit in the Supreme Court expressing the State government’s inability to proceed against the Malik Makbooja culprits. In January 1998, a division bench of the apex court comprising chief justice JS Verma, justice BN Kirpal and Justice VN Khare directed the CBI to investigate the Malik Makbooja scandal. It got stuck there, like other politically important cases.
The chief minister of Madhya Pradesh at the time was Digvijay Singh who, like a feudal lord, rewarded K.S.Sharma after his retirement by appointing his wife Shakuntala Sharma as a member of the State Human Rights Commission, even though she had never been known for any humanitarian or human rights activities.