POWER AND RETRIBUTION: (From top) J. Jayalalithaa, M.K. Stalin, Oommen Chandy and V.S. Achuthanandan

It’s payback time, folks. In Kerala and Tamil Nadu, the political combines that rode to power in the last Assembly polls in May are busy sharpening their knives, unearthing the sins of previous state governments and filing cases against political rivals. Policies are being reversed and commercial decisions are under the scanner.

Political vendetta is the hottest game in town. “Extra-legal and extra-parliamentary means are adopted to try and smash one’s political opponent,” notes C.P. Bhambri, professor emeritus at New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University.

Consider the evidence:

In Kerala, the United Democratic Front (UDF) government has ordered a vigilance probe against former Left Democratic Front (LDF) chief minister V.S. Achuthanandan’s son, V.A. Arun Kumar, in 11 cases. It has also ordered an enquiry into the former chief minister’s allotment of land to a relative.

On its part, the LDF during its tenure had unsuccessfully tried to rope current chief minister Oommen Chandy into an earlier palmolein import case.

In Tamil Nadu, special police cells have been set up against land grabbing. Of the 4,123 complaints received, 298 have seen FIRs being registered, mostly against DMK functionaries. Senior DMK leaders including former agriculture minister Veerapandi S. Arumugam have been arrested. That sparked a dramatic show of protests against what the DMK calls “false cases”, led by M.K. Stalin, former chief minister M. Karunanidhi’s son, who was detained briefly for demonstrating on Monday. “By arresting all our leaders in false cases, (current chief minister) Jayalalithaa just wants to demoralise our party,” says DMK spokesperson T.K. Elangovan.

That’s not all. The Sun Network, owned by Karunanidhi’s grand nephew, Kalanidhi Maran, has also come under fire. The chief operating officer of Sun Pictures has been booked in cheating, extortion and criminal intimidation cases. Maran too has been summoned in a cheating case filed by a film distributor.

J. Jayalalithaa has halted work on a new secretariat built by the previous government at a cost of Rs 1,200 crore. A health insurance scheme launched by the Karunanidhi government has been scrapped and replaced by another.

In January 2009, the Ashok Gehlot government in Rajasthan set up a commission to inquire into charges of abuse of power and corruption against former chief minister Vasundhara Raje. The Supreme Court held that these cases could be looked at by the state Lokayukta.

To be sure, settling political scores using non-political methods isn’t exactly new (see box). Political vendetta took its most vicious form in Tamil Nadu in June 2001 when TV news channels showed a screaming Karunanidhi being forcibly carried away by the police at midnight, while arresting him in a corruption case. This was retribution for Jayalalithaa’s arrest in 1996 by the then Karunanidhi government.

Inevitably, political feuds exact a toll on the citizens. One of the early actions of the AIADMK government was to defer the implementation of a common school syllabus scheme launched by the DMK and appoint a committee to study the quality of textbooks — leaving government school students without textbooks. The Madras High Court had asked the government to distribute textbooks by July 21.

The obsession with vengeance often diverts attention from pressing issues. Retired bureaucrats from Punjab say that its former chief minister Amarinder Singh concentrated mostly on strengthening the vigilance bureau and spent lakhs of rupees on setting up fast-track courts to handle corruption cases against his predecessor Prakash Singh Badal and other Akali Dal leaders. “If he hadn’t been so obsessed with teaching the Badals a lesson, we would have come back to power in 2007,” rues a Congress MP from Punjab. Amarinder Singh did not respond to requests for an interview or comment.

Bureaucrats considered close to the previous regime often bear the brunt. Those who get sidelined in some innocuous post consider themselves lucky. Transfers of officials after a change of government are common. That’s why the Central Vigilance Commission has often recommended that bureaucrats need to be protected from such political interference, says P. Shankar, former vigilance commissioner.

Political old-timers are saddened by this. “This never used to happen,” says BJP’s Kailash Joshi, former chief minister of Madhya Pradesh. The tit-for-tat actions during the Emergency and after were aberrations, he argues. The BJP used to strongly oppose successive Congress governments in Madhya Pradesh, he recalls, but the governments responded politically. “Nobody hit below the belt. No one crossed their limits.”

Even now, he insists, the phenomenon is confined to a few states, especially those where regional parties hold sway. In Uttar Pradesh, it’s common for the Bahujan Samaj Party and the Samajwadi Party to put each other’s musclemen behind bars whenever either party is in power. “The two national parties do not indulge in this kind of vindictiveness.”

What explains the malevolence that marks political battles now? Personal animosities are overshadowing political competition, explains Joshi.

In Tamil Nadu, for instance, the antagonism between Jayalalithaa and Karunanidhi goes back to their days in the film industry, says P. Radhakrishnan, professor, Madras Institute of Development Studies. In the late 1980s, when Jayalalithaa was leader of the Opposition, the DMK used foul language against her and a party leader pulled at her sari in the Assembly. When Karunanidhi returned to power in 1996, his government filed 46 cases against her and her associate Sasikala.

In Punjab, political vendetta reflects the continuation of a feudal ethos in the state, says Bhupinder Brar, dean and professor of political science, Punjab University, Chandigarh. Plus, both the Congress and the Akali Dal are dominated by Jat Sikhs. “We are clannish and don’t forgive personal slights easily,” says a Congress leader from the state.

The running feud between the Badal family and Amarinder Singh dates to the time Singh was in the Akali Dal. Singh, political observers say, was smarting at Badal senior not only denying him a ticket for the 1997 Assembly polls but also treating him shabbily. When he became chief minister in 2002, he lost little time in declaring that Badal would be put behind bars.

Deputy chief minister Sukhbir Badal denies being vengeful. “We did not follow Amarinder Singh’s path when we returned to power,” he says. Enquiries into the land scams in which Singh has been implicated, he counters, began when the Congress was in power.

But estranged cousin Manpreet Badal, chairman of the People’s Party of Punjab, wrote to the governor complaining of false cases being filed against his supporters. “If someone has killed a person and a case is filed, is that political vendetta,” asks Badal.

The scope for political vendetta arises when governments are seen to be shielding wrongdoers. Charges against a government are followed up more effectively when another party is in power, says a retired senior bureaucrat from Kerala. P. Karunakaran, CPM member of Parliament from Kerala, says the vigilance probe against Achuthanandan’s son is petty because the former chief minister had referred the allegations made during his tenure to the state Lokayukta. “But the Lokayukta is a toothless tiger,” points out the retired bureaucrat. If Achuthanandan had instituted a vigilance enquiry during his tenure, the UDF wouldn’t have needed to.

In Tamil Nadu, people didn’t have the courage to complain about land grabbing when the DMK was in power, says a senior police official. Elangovan, however, insists the government is putting pressure on people who have willingly sold their land to complain.

Warns Chennai-based political commentator Cho Ramaswamy, “If correcting the wrongs of previous rulers is not looked into, you are paving the way for anarchy.” Adds Balram Dass Tandon, senior BJP leader from Punjab, “If a government isn’t taking action against some wrongdoing, a new government must take note of it.”

Yet there’s growing public resentment against political vendetta. The people were not taken in by a planned Punjab Assembly resolution calling for an end to political vendetta and withdrawal of all cases filed by the Congress and Akali Dal governments against each other, points out Tandon. They saw it as an attempt to bail out corrupt politicians, he explains. “Vendetta politics will unfold a protective umbrella over the corrupt and not the honest,” warns K.R. Lakhanpal, former chief secretary of Punjab.

Perhaps. For some states, though, revenge is not a dish served cold — but comes hot off the stove.

SETTLING SCORES

1969 Former Punjab chief minister Lachhman Singh Gill arrested on corruption charges at Chandigarh airport by the Justice Gurnam Singh government. In 1967, Gill had unseated Gurnam Singh and become chief minister with Congress support.

1975-76 Indira Gandhi jails political opponents using laws on internal
security.

1977-78 Janata Party gets Indira Gandhi expelled from Parliament and arrested for breach of privilege.
In states, new chief ministers target Congress predecessors. In Haryana, Devi Lal gets Bansi Lal arrested and put in handcuffs. In Punjab, Prakash Singh Badal files corruption cases against Zail Singh. In West Bengal, the Left Front government sets up four commissions of enquiry against the Siddhartha Sankar Ray regime.

1996 AIADMK chief Jayalalithaa arrested on corruption charges.

2001 DMK leader M. Karunanidhi arrested at midnight in a corruption case by AIADMK government. Cases filed against son Stalin and 10 others, including two chief secretaries.

2003 Amarinder Singh government in Punjab arrests former chief minister Prakash Singh Badal and son Sukhbir in disproportionate assets case. Badals file defamation case against Amarinder Singh just before the 2007 Assembly elections.

2007-08 Badal government files cases against Amarinder Singh in two land scam cases. Singh is expelled from the Assembly for breach of privilege, which the Supreme Court overturns.

2003 Uttar Pradesh chief minister Mayawati orders a probe into misuse of chief minister’s discretionary fund by Mulayam Singh Yadav and into a Lucknow road project.
Yadav appoints commission of inquiry into Mayawati’s cherished Yamuna Expressway project. Commission gives her clean chit.

2007 Mayawati appoints commission of inquiry into irregularities in police recruitments, which the court quashes.

Additional reporting by Kavitha Shanmugam in Chennai