It’s Wednesday, November 27, 1991. The venue is the Cabinet room, on the second floor of North Block, a part of Thiruvananthapuram’s four-storeyed, white secretariat building. The Kerala Cabinet is meeting to take several routine decisions. Yet one item that had not been on the agenda figures at the meeting — and the Cabinet approves it.

That fateful decision to import palmolein, an edible oil that is derived from palm oil, for Kerala’s public distribution system would lead to several court cases. Nearly 19 years later, the fallout of the decision would rock Parliament, trigger an electronic media frenzy and lead to India’s Prime Minister and home minister being put on the mat. The decision would also ruin the lives of at least three Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officers, badly tarnish their reputations — and raise fundamental questions about whether upright Indians can ever obtain justice in the system.

The dramatis personae in the high voltage palmolein import drama? The late K. Karunakaran, then chief minister of Kerala; Kerala chief secretary S. Padma Kumar, now retired; Zacharia Mathew, additional chief secretary, also retired; Jiji Thomson, then managing director of the Kerala State Civil Supplies Corporation (KSCSC) and now special director general, Commonwealth Games Organising Committee; five directors of the KSCSC; two executives of Power & Energy, the Singapore firm that supplied palmolein — and Poyalil Joseph Thomas, who was then Kerala’s food and civil supplies secretary and who would go on to become central vigilance commissioner (CVC) in September 2010 and hold that post till March this year, when the Supreme Court quashed his appointment.

Early this week the government appointed a new CVC (defence secretary Pradeep Kumar), a unanimous choice after the acrimony over the appointment of his predecessor P.J. Thomas. Inevitably, that swung the spotlight back on the rumpus over P.J. Thomas’ appointment.

Cut to 1999. Kerala’s Left Democratic Front (LDF) government, which succeeded the Karunakaran government, sensed hanky panky in the palmolein import deal and chargesheeted in November of that year some of those involved in the decision to import the oil. Two of the men with peripheral roles in the decision to import palmolein were not chargesheeted: Oommen Chandy, then Kerala’s finance minister and now chief minister, and T.H. Mustaffa, then food minister. But the LDF would later make attempts to rope Chandy into the case.

The shadow of the palmolein case would hang over all of them for years. Indeed, Thomas would be vilified by the media (television channels, in particular), so much so that he had to petition the Supreme Court this year to issue guidelines to the media on the matter. If we search Google for the words “tainted CVC P.J. Thomas” the number of hits runs to hundreds of thousands, his petition said.

The case would exact a toll on two other IAS officers too. Zacharia Mathew’s wife committed suicide. The publicity surrounding this and another excise duty case was too much for her to bear. He now lives in Thiruvananthapuram as a recluse, never leaving his house except to appear on his verandah once a month for a haircut when his barber comes, or to go to hospital, according to a neighbour.

Mathew was highly regarded. “He was like God for us,” says a finance ministry boffin in New Delhi. Indeed, Chandy vigorously defended Mathew’s integrity in the Kerala Assembly. “There were three days of discussions in the Assembly. On the third day, I said on the floor of the House, ‘Do you know who is accused? Zacharia Mathew, the most honest person in the administration. If the House feels that he is guilty you can do whatever you want.’ Nobody in the Opposition uttered a single word,” Chandy says.

Jiji Thomson fared a bit better — he was parachuted from the agriculture ministry in New Delhi by the government into the Commonwealth Games Organising Committee as a special director general to salvage the Games in October 2009, since he had organised the National Games in Kerala.

But while most others brought in by the government have been posted out of the organising committee, Thomson languishes there. He was among the hopefuls for the chairmanship of the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development, but was not picked for the post. He’s said to be in the running for the chairmanship of the Rural Electrification Corporation, but won’t qualify unless he’s cleared in court in the palmolein case.

‘Defamations are not taken seriously by Indian courts’

Yet according to one version of events, Thomson had noted on a file that KSCSC had no option but to import the edible oil since the Cabinet had decided to do so — and the noting was made before the formal Cabinet decision. Karunakaran is said to have asked Thomson to remove it from the file. When Thomson refused, he was transferred out of the KSCSC. But with Karunakaran no longer alive, this version of events can't be verified.

As for Thomas, everyone who’s known him or worked with him testifies to his integrity. In a ringing endorsement, Chandy, before he became Kerala chief minister, told The Telegraph, “P.J. Thomas is an honest officer. That is known to everyone in the civil services and politics in Kerala.”

A senior functionary in Kerala’s last LDF government, who’s worked with Thomas when he (Thomas) was the state’s chief secretary, agrees, requesting anonymity because his statement would kick up a political storm. The finance ministry mandarin echoes the point. “I would categorise him as squeaky clean.” And what does he base his belief on? “When we live with a guy for 30 years, we have a general idea about this,” he replies.

In Thiruvananthapuram, Babu Paul, who retired as an additional chief secretary in Kerala, too says that Thomas is an honest man who wouldn’t even accept an invitation to dinner from private individuals or companies. Paul says that Thomas was asked by Kerala’s vigilance department to become an approver in the palmolein case (Thomas broadly confirms this) and that he told him in crude Malayalam that his father would turn in his grave if he did so. Tears welled in Thomas’s eyes, says Paul. Thomas told Paul that he had already decided against doing so.

What exactly did Thomas do in the palmolein import case? All he did was to implement a Cabinet decision by issuing a Government Order to import palmolein. “That’s it,” exclaims the finance ministry bureaucrat, who’s familiar with the case. The accusation levelled at Thomas and his colleagues is of having entered into a criminal conspiracy to import palmolein and cause a loss to the exchequer of Rs 2.32 crore and of not following government procedures.

Corruption cases are filed against public servants under the Prevention of Corruption Act (PCA). When a member of the All India Services (the IAS, IPS and Indian Forest Service) is involved, central government sanction is required for prosecution. The LDF government moved to chargesheet the IAS officers under the Indian Penal Code. It could do this for offences like forgery, cheating and criminal breach of trust.

The Kerala court in which the case was filed had asked the state government in 2001 to obtain central government sanction to prosecute the IAS officers. The LDF government then wrote to the department of personnel and training (DoPT) in New Delhi seeking central government sanction to prosecute them under the PCA. The DoPT referred the matter to the Central Vigilance Commission. It said on June 3, 2004, that no case existed against the IAS officers — if at all the officers had to be proceeded against, it had to be for procedural lapses.

If the case of Thomas and his fellow IAS officers has dragged on for over 12 years, it’s for two principal reasons. First, the DoPT sought clarifications in 2005 from the Kerala government on the case. But for over five years, the state government didn’t respond. Secondly, Karunakaran got a stay on the case from the Supreme Court in 2007. “So if Karunakaran’s trial is stayed, everyone else’s trial is stayed,” notes Arun Jaitley, Bharatiya Janata Party national executive member and leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha.

To be sure, Thomas’s plight is not an isolated one — scores of bureaucrats have been prosecuted in similar circumstances. Jaitley points to the instance of IAS officer Michael Pinto, former chairman of the Jawaharlal Nehru Port Trust (JNPT), who was accused by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) of cheating JNPT of Rs 20 lakh by awarding a contract to supply tractor trailers to a company that quoted a price lower than JNPT’s estimate. Pinto was lucky — the case was withdrawn some two years after the CBI acknowledged that the JNPT board had taken a commercial decision.

In the mid-1990s, the CBI slapped three cases against Maruti Suzuki chairman R.C. Bhargava under the PCA. Bhargava, a former IAS officer, was then managing director of Maruti, then a public sector firm. The cases related to commercial decisions he had taken. The chargesheet in one case was filed in 1994.

Seven years later, the CBI special court discharged the case without framing charges, holding that there was no evidence of any criminal act. The CBI did not appeal against this order. In the second case, also filed in 1994, the CBI special court framed charges.

But two other co-accused appealed to the Delhi High Court which dismissed the charges. Once again the CBI did not appeal against the verdict. The third case, in which the chargesheet was filed in 1996, is still pending. After several years of hearings, the CBI special court refused to frame charges. The CBI went in appeal to the Delhi High Court, where the matter is still pending.

Says Bhargava, “There is no recourse for a bureaucrat or a public sector executive but to live with the taint till the courts give relief. That takes years. Cases in India drag on; all one keeps getting are dates. The bureaucrat and his family suffer a lot. There is a lot of tension, humiliation and articles in the press. People usually get blood pressure problems. Some go into depression.”

Cases that don’t involve bureaucrats drag on too. Says Salman Khurshid, minister, water resources and minority affairs, “So many people grow old and die and don’t see light at the end of the tunnel because our legal system is so full of delays.” Indeed, injustice is rampant in the system. Lawyer and activist Prashant Bhushan points out, “In Chhattisgarh, in Jharkhand or in Orissa, thousands of innocent Adivasis are being held in jail on false charges.”

To be sure, a law to tackle corruption is required. “The Prevention of Corruption Act has stood the test of time. Nobody has called it unfair. If you don’t have a provision like this, people will become more unfair,” says Jaitley. Sure, but the law has its drawbacks. Says Bhargava, “The definition of criminal misconduct is so wide that it can cover not just any commercial decision but even out of turn allotments of, say, an LPG connection or a railway booking.”

Several questions surface here. First, who’s really guilty for the mess P.J. Thomas found himself in? The system itself, certainly. Any political system that permits the innocent to be prosecuted in the pursuit of political one-upmanship, as happened in Kerala, needs to be reviewed carefully. Political rivalries in Kerala can be fierce and very tit for tat.

Jaitley also thinks that the Centre’s rules governing the granting of sanctions to prosecute IAS officers need to be tightened.

Kerala’s LDF government is clearly guilty too of dawdling over the Centre’s requests for clarifications.

Last but not least, some of those accused in the palmolein matter privately blame Kerala’s United Democratic Front chief ministers for “lacking the guts” to withdraw the case.

Secondly, what could Thomas have done to clear his name? In theory, he could have persuaded people or the media to campaign for him, as in the Binayak Sen case. Sen, says Khurshid, got a glimpse of justice from the Supreme Court, which granted him bail. “Justice can be given by politicians, by administrators, by the media and by people’s movements. They do manage to get things done.”

But for a civil servant, seeking the support of the public or the media is not an option, because government rules don’t permit him to do this.

A former DoPT official argues that those accused in the palmolein case could have approached the Supreme Court and asked for the case to be expedited or segregated from the main palmolein case — they need not have waited for the state government to act. Adds Jaitley, “You can ask for the prosecution to be quashed, and if you are not able to make out a case for this you go for expeditious trial.”

But, replies, Thomas, “No bureaucrat ever clears his name. He can’t afford a legal battle.” He says that Supreme Court judges asked his lawyer why he hadn’t sought a discharge from the case earlier and his lawyer told them that Thomas had no money for this. One can, of course, seek legal aid, but the quality of free legal aid often is less than spectacular.

The former DoPT official notes that bureaucrats often don’t go to court because their increments and promotions are assured as long as they have not been convicted in a case.

In January this year, however, Jiji Thomson — the only IAS officer involved in this case who has still not retired — challenged the Kerala court’s right to take cognisance of the state government’s case, arguing that the state government’s sanction to prosecute was faulty because it was based just on section 120B of the IPC (the criminal conspiracy provision).

Madhumita D. Mitra, an advocate with the Delhi-based Corporate Lexport, a legal consultancy firm, backs the point that a charge against a public servant under section 120 B alone won't stand by itself.

Nonetheless, not everyone gets justice from the courts either, as Khurshid acknowledges. “Everybody has a right to access the Supreme Court, the high court and the trial court. Some people who are poor can’t afford it... So ultimately you have to be before a right judge to get justice. In no other way can you get justice conclusively, but there is an aggregate of justice in this country. Some people don’t get it and some people do.”

Thirdly, how does someone in Thomas’s position prevent his reputation from being torn to shreds? Thomas could have filed defamation suits against the television channels that tarnished his reputation. At least one IAS officer says he urged Thomas to do just that. “But,” says Bhushan, “defamations are not taken seriously by courts in India, unlike in Britain where they are taken very seriously.” Khurshid makes an additional point, “You have virtually no defamation law in this country because if you file a defamation case you won’t see any result for 30 years.”

In short, the position is grim — honest men who don’t have money to fight cases will continue to get the short end of the stick.