The Congress party made a big hue and cry when Assam Police knocked on the doors of its senior leader, Pawan Khera, in New Delhi the other day. This incident occurred following an FIR filed by Riniki Bhuyan Sarma, the wife of Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma, in Guwahati. The case relates to Khera’s public allegations that Riniki Bhuyan Sarma holds multiple foreign passports and has huge, undeclared overseas assets. These damaging charges were made by him just days before Assam went to polls.
That Khera quietly slipped out of Delhi and surfaced in Congress-ruled Telangana itself suggests he had inside information of the Assam police team’s arrival. It also appears to be an indirect admission that he lacked solid evidence to substantiate his allegations.
The BJP, in response, asserted that the documents displayed by Khera at the press conference were forged. It claimed that the UAE authorities had denied issuing any so-called Golden Passport to the Assam CM’s wife.
One has to see the allegation from the correct perspective. On April 2, Rahul Gandhi, while addressing a public rally at Bokajan in Karbi Anglong, had termed Himanta Biswa Sarma the most corrupt chief minister. He also said that his family was No. 1 in corruption. Khera addressed two press conferences on April 5, one in New Delhi and another in Guwahati, where he made identical allegations against Sarma’s wife. It shows the Congress party was working systematically and under a planned strategy to drop this bomb in the public domain with an eye on the April 8 polling in Assam.
It becomes crystal clear that the allegation against the chief minister’s wife was a direct counter to Sarma’s earlier allegations against Gaurav Gogoi’s wife, Elizabeth Colburn Gogoi. A British national who has retained her British citizenship even after marrying Gogoi in 2013, Elizabeth worked as a consultant for LEAD Pakistan, a climate and environment organisation, from March 2011 to March 2012. Sarma had alleged that she was managed and paid through Pakistani national Ali Tauqeer Sheikh, a senior figure in LEAD Pakistan and advisor to Pakistan’s Planning Commission. He accused her of having a deeper connection with Sheikh and suggested the possible sharing of sensitive information, even as her husband raised defence-related issues in Parliament.
While Sarma made verbal allegations against Gogoi’s wife, the Congress went beyond by levelling counter-allegations against Sarma’s wife in its bid to do damage control with what the BJP claims were forged documents that sent Khera running helter-skelter and seeking anticipatory bail from the Telangana High Court.
Officially, Khera is the chairman of the media and publicity department of the Congress party. It is apparent that he was used as a front to project Sarma and his wife as more corrupt than Gogoi and his wife.
The Congress used to have an active dirty tricks department at its central offices even before the internet era, when software, like Photoshop, was developed. The aim was the same: to target and defame senior leaders of rival parties. The method, though, was different. Those allegations were not made public at press conferences but selectively leaked and planted in the friendly media. Long before the BJP was accused of managing media, often termed the “godi media”, the Congress used to pay fixed monthly payments to select journalists to carry out these tricks. Times have changed; so have method and tool kits. The “documented allegations” against Riniki Bhuyan Sharma were displayed on the screens of the party’s media centre, on live cameras, for greater impact. One is not sure if the dirty tricks department is part of the media and publicity vertical, headed by Khera, or if Khera was merely used as a guinea pig.
Khera owes his rise in politics to his proximity to the late Sheila Dikshit, the former Delhi chief minister, as her media advisor, and is now in the race to impress the Gandhi family for his survival in politics.
The point here is, if the allegations were true and the party had genuine documents, why did Khera run away from Delhi and seek anticipatory bail from the Telangana High Court instead of the Delhi High Court? It is clear that this was a desperate attempt by the Congress to save its projected chief ministerial face Gaurav Gogoi, a close friend of Rahul Gandhi, by levelling counter-allegations against Sarma and his wife. It was all about timing without bothering about the consequences.
Cross-state police operations against political leaders are rare and politically explosive. They often lead to accusations of political vendetta. The Congress perhaps calculated that it could escape by crying ‘vendetta’ if the BJP retained power in Assam and get the charges withdrawn if it came to power.
If the Congress party has authentic documents, it should face the probe bravely instead of indulging in shoot-and-scoot politics. And if it does not, then legal action is called for misleading Assam voters before the elections with digitally generated fake documents.
Whatever the case, it is an indication of the continued and fast degeneration of Indian politics, something that is alarming and condemnable. It needs to be arrested before Indian democracy slips further into the quagmire.
Ajay Jha is a senior journalist, author and political commentator.
