NDA’s crisis appears to be looming large

It is evident that the shadow of Lalit Modi, the flamboyant former cricket organiser and businessman who skipped India in 2010 when grave allegations against him were made for money-laundering and foreign exchange violations, is lengthening over the Narendra Modi government.

It is also evident that the Prime Minister, his party, and the RSS — which gives ideological and political guidance to the BJP — have been able to develop no plan so far to cope with the political crisis that appears to be looming large. This is clearly the reason the Prime Minister is mum, although he has been urged repeatedly in public discussions to reveal his mind on “Lalitgate”. Without mercy, commentators have likened the unusually silent present Prime Minister to his predecessor, Dr Manmohan Singh, who was known to maintain a state of “maun”, or silence, when the going got tough.

The Prime Minister’s silence when numerous members of his government, and other senior colleagues, are being sucked into the vortex of controversy emanating from the charge of corrupt action, is mystifying. It undercuts Mr Modi’s assiduously cultivated image of a decisive man of action, the leader who would do away with all that was unwholesome in the political culture of the past. All the crowing about scandal-free government has begun to sound hollow.

First external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj was revealed to have urged the British authorities to issue a travel document to Lalit Modi, a man wanted by the law in India. If this wasn’t bad enough, Rajasthan chief minister Vasundhara Raje came under the scanner for having backed Lalit Modi’s application for immigrating to Britain on the strict condition that her backing was not brought to the notice of the “Indian authorities”. Ms Raje denied this outright but since then the document has come floating into the public domain. No less damaging, the absconding businessman was shown to have put in crores of rupees in a company run by Ms Raje’s son, a BJP MP, at a rate that was 1,000 per cent higher than the rate of the company’s shares.

Two other irregularities were highlighted on Wednesday. A Delhi court found maintainable a suit against Union HRD minister Smriti Irani for making false statements before the Election Commission in respect of her educational qualification, raising the demand that she be arrested (as was the Delhi law minister Jitender Singh Tomar of the AAP). In Maharashtra, it has been alleged that state health minister Pankaja Munde has been awarding contracts worth some '206 crore without tender.

Each one of these cases provides enough material to keep the government tied up in knots for a long time to come, and to paralyse Parliament, but Union home minister Rajnath Singh has said that the NDA is not the UPA, and that its ministers won’t resign.