Sonia Maino - Italian waitress.

Because I am on a roll, pilfering articles over the net, here is one more, though probably only of interest to people with an eye on the Indian political scene. Heartbreaking! To be ruled by the mafiosi a mere 50 years after the plundering shopkeepers left us...

by Sudheendra Kulkarni from the Indian Express:

All IFS of history are flights of imagination. Yet, despite their implausibility, their use is permissible when a reasonable argument is sought to be made. So here are two ifs about the history of the Congress party, and both involve Feroze Gandhi, Indira Gandhi’s estranged husband, between 1942 and 1960 (when he died of a heart attack at age 48).

What if Feroze, a Parsi patriot who went to jail for India’s freedom, had a surname other than Gandhi? What if his name were, let’s say, Feroze Batliwala? Surely, it would have deprived Indira and her progeny of a profitable surname that evoked, and continues to evoke, a subliminal association in the Indian psyche between Mahatma Gandhi and the Nehru Parivar. For Sonia Gandhi, it would have meant a double handicap since her metamorphosis from Sonia Maino to Sonia Batliwala would have made her far less familiar to the ordinary Indian than she still is.

Hence, she must be grateful to Feroze Gandhi for giving her family a trophy surname.

There is, however, another legacy of his that Sonia Gandhi would be distinctly uncomfortable with. What if her father-in-law were to confront her in Parliament in the same way that Feroze Gandhi challenged his father-in-law on the issue of corruption and cover-up in the late 1950s? The Congress party probably has several reasons to downgrade his name in the annals of the dynasty, but chief among them is that he was ‘‘gutsy and self-respecting’’ (this tribute comes from Gopalkrishna Gandhi, the Mahatma’s grandson and currently the Governor of West Bengal) enough to expose the biggest corruption scandal in Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru’s tenure. The Mundhra scandal involved then finance minister T T Krishnamachari, who pressured the government-owned Life Insurance Corporation of India into bailing out Haridas Mundhra, a Calcutta-based industrialist, by buying shares worth Rs 1.24 crore in six companies owned by him. LIC did so dutifully, bypassing its own investment committee. Mundhra was swindling the companies and, simultaneously, rigging up their stock prices to camouflage his fraud. TTK, as the FM was popularly known, least expected that this shady deal would be exposed by the PM’s own son-in-law.

Although Feroze Gandhi belonged to the ruling party, he did not hesitate to speak out against the government because he argued that corruption in high places was a betrayal of the ideals of the newly independent nation. To be fair to Pandit Nehru, he quickly appointed a one-man commission headed by Justice Mahommedali Currim Chagla, one of the most respected legal luminaries of the time.

The speedy and transparent manner in which Chagla conducted the inquiry—it was all over, and the guilty were punished, in less than two years—ought to have been a model for all such probes. All its hearings were public and the proceedings were aired on loudspeakers. Mundhra was sentenced to 22 years in prison, and TTK lost his job. Chagla wrote later: ‘‘The inquiry has been an education for the public. It should also act as a corrective to administrators all over the country because in future they will act with the consciousness that their actions may be subjected to public scrutiny.’’ The Mundhra scandal is now history, but of immense contemporary relevance are the principles that Justice Chagla enunciated as the outcome of his inquiry: (a) The government should not interfere with the working of autonomous corporations and agencies and if it does, it should not shirk responsibility for directions given; (b) The minister concerned must take full responsibility for the actions of his subordinates. Sonia Gandhi would not like to know how Chagla praised, in his autobiography Roses in December, her father-in-law’s role in busting the Mundhra scam. ‘‘He fought the battle for probity in public administration,’’ writes Chagla, ‘‘with all the zest and persistence of which he was capable.’’ If Feroze Gandhi were alive today, would he have been a silent spectator to the official cover-up and sabotage of the Bofors probe? His poser to his daughter-in-law would probably run like this:

1. ‘‘You told some Left MPs who met you on January 18 that the government had no knowledge about the defreezing of Quattrocchi’s bank accounts. How do you explain the fact that your government dispatched its senior law officer, B Dutta, to London to tell the Crown Prosecution Service to defreeze Q’s account? That too without the concerned investigating officers of the CBI accompanying him? And, moreover, when the CBI had all along been opposed to defreezing of Q’s account?

2. Since Q proudly claims to be your family friend, why have you done nothing so far to assist the Indian authorities to bring him to India for trial? Why have you encouraged the public perception that you are defending a fugitive, especially one who has said that he has no faith in Indian justice?

3. Since the CBI’s chargesheet against Q mentions the close ties that he had with you and my late son Rajiv, why haven’t you offered to be questioned by the CBI to clear our family’s name?
4. I was both pained and astounded by the answer, in response to a question on Q, given by your nominated Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, during his press conference on February 1. He not only reiterated what you had said, but also added that the CBI acted on its own as per ‘the right legal advice’ it received. Isn’t it outrageous that the Prime Minister of India should be calling Additional Solicitor General K P Pathak’s dubious opinion on the Hinduja matter (in which he gave the unsolicited advice that Q should be discharged from the Bofors case) ‘right legal advice’?

5. Lastly, when almost every single newspaper in the country called for the resignation of Law Minister H R Bhardwaj in the wake of the defreezing scandal (I consider it to be a scandal within a larger scandal), why didn’t you ask the PM to drop him in the recent cabinet reshuffle?

In view of all this, I am afraid you have not proved to be my worthy daughter-in-law. Judged by the standards that my father-in-law and I set in our time, you are much less worthy of being the de facto ruler of India. How I wish I could ask you some tough questions in Parliament.’’