New Delhi: It is seldom that the Congress Yuvraj is put in the pillory: but with the party almost rudderless, Rahul Gandhi’s detractors are coming out of the woodwork and speaking up on issues on which they had maintained a stupefying silence earlier.
When former environment minister Jayanthi Natarajan had resigned from the UPA cabinet, there was a controversy as to whether she had resigned on her own, or had been eased out under pressure from the business lobbies which were sore that she was a stumbling block in the clearance of the projects. At that time, Natarajan had furiously objected to the suggestions that she had been eased out and had claimed that she had opted out of the government so that she could spare time for party work.
But since there has been no party assignment for her and she is languishing on the sidelines in Tamil Nadu, the lady has decided to speak up. No one would have listened to her but for the fact that she has decided to blame Rahul Gandhi in an explosive letter for exerting pressure on her to clear pending projects worth crores.
It is rumoured that Natarajan is gravitating towards the Tamil Maanila Congress and wants some fireworks before she walks out of the Congress. Whatever the case, she has surely rekindled the charge of crony capitalism against he Congress party by alleging that “specific requests” by Rahul Gandhi were the basis of whether industrial projects were given clearances by her ministry, and that he had changed tack from a pro-environmental position to a corporate-friendly one in view of the elections last year.
She has linked her being asked to resign in December 2013 with an address Gandhi made to industry leaders the very next day, where he assured “the corporate world that they need no longer worry about environmental clearance delays and that bottlenecks would be removed.”
Most damaging, Natarajan has claimed in her letter that she was forced by the Congress to attack Narendra Modi in the Snoopgate controversy, despite her reluctance to rake up such personal matters. The allegations made by Natarajan reinforce the belief that the industrial drift during the UPA regime was largely self-inflicted with vested interest groups trying to micro-manage the environment ministry. And from her account it is obvious that Rahul was a ready hand maiden of the industrial lobby.
Incidentally, when Jayanthi Natarajan took over as Environment Minister from Jairam Ramesh in 2011, she was perceived as pro-development who would not be a stumbling block in clearance of projects, unlike her predecessor, who was known to have peculiar Green leanings.
This, in turn, raises questions about whether we really do need an environment minister if he or she has to be subservient to the big interest
corporate groups. But detractors point out that the problem is not with the environment ministry per se but with the inordinate delay in clearing projects. It is also pointed out that while industrialisation must be given a push, environment concerns cannot take the back seat. The dichotomy arises when projects that should have got clearances get held up while others that involve serious concerns are simply fast tracked without much application of mind.
