New Delhi : The selective leaks about involvement of Mukesh Ambani-led Reliance Industries Limited and arrest of one of his executives in the alleged corporate espionage ring in the Petroleum Ministry may be part of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s image makeover plan to shrug the charge that he tweaks the government policies to benefit only a handful of industrialist friends.
As many as nine corporate entities were said to be under the scanner as recipients of sensitive documents, including Reliance, the Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group, Essar and Cairns India, but the Delhi Police on Thursday evening chose to raid only the Reliance office in Connaught Place, sending a clear message to the media.
The general perception is that even a minister has to seek an appointment before he can access the prime minister’s residence, but a few industrialists can walk in any time and get their work done without fuss. Modi apparently wants to change that image as he has been sounded by the RSS leadership and because he wants to negate AAP leader Arvind Kejriwal’s charge that he was returning favours to Reliance for the help extended in the Lok Sabha elections.
The documents “stolen” from the ministry may not be ‘secret’ or ‘classified’ and yet the case has been dubbed as one of espionage: this again helps Modi in tom-tomming that he would not spare even his closest friend if he does some wrong.
This is not the first ‘espionage’ case in which RIL is embroiled; already pending in the court is another espionage case dating back to October 1998 in which RIL’s three top executives, including then group president and Delhi boss V Balasubramaniam, popularly called Balu, were arrested under the Official Secrets Act for possessing top secret Cabinet papers.
The corporate world was not surprised when the scandal erupted as it is no secret that important documents are regularly leaked by the ministries, tax authorities and regulators to give competitive advantage to the deep-pocketed corporate. But it is surely wandering why a company of Mukesh Ambani, who has such good equations with Modi, was being targeted. The corporate executives see in this a Modi game plan to distance himself from the corporate giant.
Mukesh has enough clout to influence key appointments and hence why should he organise break-ins into the Petroleum Ministry to access documents when he can get them on demand from friends in the government.
The ‘espionage’ ring looks more like a petty theft from all angles, as the arrested ministry employee happens to be a clerk close to retirement, along with his two sons, who were selling the documents to the oil and energy companies through two energy consultants based in Delhi — Shantanu Saikia, a former Times of India journalist, and one Prayas Jain. Both were arrested on Friday, raising the number of arrests in the case to eight.
Though the Opposition keeps accusing Modi of returning favours to all those in the corporate world, insiders say he has not delivered on several key demands of Mukesh. Modi did reject the Rangrajan formula for fixing the price of natural gas, which would have been beneficial to Mukesh, something that UPA-II was pushing for but was held back by the Election Commission as polls were due.
Apprehensive that the Rangrajan formula would double the gas price and make fertilisers expensive, Modi sat on the proposal worrying about the repercussions in rural India of a steep price hike in a vital farming input. To make sure his squeaky clean image remained intact, he signalled to Petroleum Minister Dharmendra Pradhan to go by the rule book on Reliance.
That is how an additional penalty of $579 million came to be slapped on Reliance Industries for not producing gas as per the commitment given to the Central government on KG-D6 block. It raised the total penalty on RIL for missing the targets in the four financial years beginning April 2010 to $2.376 billion.
Not amused, Mukesh first expressed his displeasure by declining to accompany Modi during his trip to Japan. Then he let loose his media outlets against the BJP in the Delhi Assembly elections, said sources.
