Barely two months after the Aam Aadmi Party registered a huge victory in Punjab, and a new government under the comedian-turned-politician Bhagwant Mann was installed, Health Minister Vijay Singla was dismissed on Tuesday for suspected corruption. In dramatic events preceding his dismissal, the minister’s nephew who was appointed Officer-on-Special Duty allegedly demanded one per cent of the amount of every successful work tender issued by the departments under Singla. It was claimed that initially a superintendent engineer was asked to pay two per cent of the tendered work since March when Singla was appointed minister. Having done his sums thoroughly, the OSD reportedly said that of the Rs 41 crore construction work awarded under the AAP government, a payment of Rs 17 crore had already been released. Therefore, the minister should be given Rs 1.16 crore as his share. Apparently, the SE in question was summoned by Singla to his office where he was told to follow the instructions of the OSD. According to the details in the public domain, the SE pleaded that in a few months, he was due to retire and did not want to get into any sort of trouble. But when the two, that is Singla and his nephew-cum-OSD persisted, the SE sought advice and was told to record the WhatsApp voice exchanges, which he did. And before the scandalous doings of the minister became public, the CM in a bid to make the best of a bad situation sacked Singla. A case under the Prevention of Corruption Act, 1988, was registered against the two suspects. Later, Mann claimed that Singla had ‘confessed’ to the crime. The two were subsequently arrested and remanded to police custody. It is pertinent to note that Singla, a dentist by profession, was elected with a record margin of over 63,000 votes, defeating a popular singer fielded by the Congress Party, in the recent assembly poll. He was also among the first lot of AAP ministers.
Indeed, this is not the only case of wrong-doing which has come to light against the newly-elected AAP legislators. The other day, the state media highlighted the case of another AAP MLA who was gheraoed by angry truckers who were protesting against his henchmen insisting on extracting a hafta from them. And yet another AAP MLA was shown in a video that went viral on social media intimidating a traffic cop who had challaned his close aide for using a vehicle without any registration plate. In short, the AAP’s claim to be better and uncorrupt ought to be taken with more than a pound of salt. Its leader and Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal is adept at media propagation, but in real effect, the party suffers from the same shortcomings, same failings which have dogged all other political formations, old and new, in the country. However, being the newest kid on the block, people seem to still give it the benefit of the doubt. Just how much it values moneybags can be gauged from the fact that two of its Rajya Sabha seats from Punjab were gifted to people whose only qualification was their fat bank balance.
Meanwhile, the dismissal of the Health Minister is unlikely to change the political situation in Punjab. The two main Opposition parties, the Congress and the Akali Dal, are in complete disarray, still nursing their wounds. The two would require time and a conscious effort to revive their fortunes. The ruling AAP has 90 MLAs in a House of 117. But given that Chief Minister Mann lacks any sort of administrative experience, and his party is an amorphous grouping of individuals without any programmatic unity to bind them together, there is a danger of the experiment unraveling once the popular euphoria turns into disenchantment. Already, there are murmurs of protest due to the failure to provide Rs 1,000 in cash every month to every woman above 18 years in the state. The winning slogan promised to start the above-mentioned payment from the very first month of AAP coming to power. The border State suffers from poor infrastructure, has an over-dependence on agriculture, and its population, particularly the youth, is vulnerable to drug abuse. The State was already in dire financial straits when AAP took office. The party’s freebie culture can only further worsen its financial condition. At the present juncture, it needs a safe pair of hands to steer it back to financial good health. Unfortunately, the AAP does not inspire confidence in this regard. Soon the people in the State will realise that populist slogans alone cannot bring back sanity to the governance of the State. But such is the poverty of leadership that there is no one of stature, either in the ruling party in the State or outside in the AAP who can be trusted to pull Punjab back from the brink of an administrative collapse. However, one can count on AAP to continue to play to the gallery, as it has done all these years in the national capital.
