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"Over half" or just 7%?

The Indian Express exulted publicly. The Congress gloated privately. And the nation's Parliament harangued and holidayed for a week without the people's permission. All that because Goenka's newspaper said, on August 2, that 'over half of the 3,850 pumps and LPG agencies allotted until May this year went to relatives of his BJP colleagues and coalition partners,' the 'his' being Ram Naik, the minister for petroleum in the BJP-led NDA government.

From that day on, the newspaper splashed its findings on the front page and got juicy opinions to justify it labelling the BJP as the 'Petrol Pump Party.' On August 5, Kapil Sibal, the Congress MP with the trade mark smirk, totted up some figures to dub it as 'the biggest scam in India after Independence.'

On that day itself, Vajpayee had capitulated at the disclosure that a petrol pump had been allotted to the wife of his nephew living in the PM's Lucknow residence. In one go, he cancelled 3,158 dealerships of petrol pumps, LPG agencies and kerosene outlets allotted across the country since January 2000. Such agencies allotted to the families of Kargil martyrs remained unaffected.

That unprecedented act was not enough for the Congress and the Communist outfits in Parliament. They wanted Ram Naik to resign. That was something which the NDA government didn't offer. But Vajpayee panics so quickly when there's even a distant shadow on his image, and so self-conscious is he of his liberal image that, by the time you read this, Naik may well have been sacrificed, never mind his outstandingly impeccable record of so many years in public life, and never mind that the Opposition parties were so cussed as to deny him his say in Parliament.

It may be well be premature at this stage to come to a definitive conclusion on this unholy mess, compounded by the legal complexities of Vajpayee's mass cancellation order, revelation of Congress beneficiaries as well and the disclosure of several politicians' written recommendations in this matter of allotment of agencies for the essential products that are in short supply in the country. But certain elements of fact and fiction don't need a judicial commission of inquiry to point out.

At the centre of it all is The Indian Express self-patting expose itself.

The newspaper's bomb of 'over half of the 3,850 allotments…to BJP and its coalition partners' was dropped along with names and 'connections' of 61 allottees in Maharashtra state. On August 4 it said that Gangwar, Naik's deputy, had offered to table the list in Parliament but he gave no commitment as to when the government would do so. And so, the IE said, 'What the govt hasn't, we will' by releasing the list on its own web site.

Thereafter, the newspaper continued what it had already started doing -- releasing the state-wise list of allottees with their 'links.' Till August 11, when this is being written, IE published lists of 282 allottees in 11 states --- Maharashtra, Punjab and Himachal Pradesh (combined), Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Bihar, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Gujarat and Jharkhand. Of these 282, 12 were alleged to be Congress-connected, nine were said to be linked to PMK (a BJP coalition partner), three were without political affiliation, and one was reportedly the son of a deceased DMK member of the legislative assembly; the DMK is another coalition partner of the BJP in the NDA government. Thus, it is 267 allottees who could be said as being on the big BJP bandwagon till August 11. But what, pray, was the total number of allotments from which 267 were the 'favoured' ones? The IE didn't tell.

Yes, IE gave its lists without telling us the total number of allotments in each of the state concerned. Nor was its web site 'revealing.' Despite serious efforts on two separate days, the web site and its search engines did not show up the complete list of those 3,850 allotments or of their state-wise break-up. It's, of course, possible that they were couched in the computer somewhere, but as far as the newspaper reader without access to the Internet was concerned, the figures on newsprint were his gospel. Thus it was that though those newspaper lists told less than half of the whole story, an entire nation believed the 'over half of the 3,850 allotments' narration. Why, in his article in The Asian Age, Mumbai, of August 6, even the veteran journalist, Ajit Bhattacharjea, profusely congratulated the IE's expose as being 'outstanding in every way.'

Surprisingly, even former Supreme Court justice Kuldip Singh accepted the 'over half of the total' story at face value. In an interview (August 6) which the IE must have been itching for in the light of that judge's strictures in the Satish Sharma petrol pumps scam a few years ago, Kuldip Singh indicted the government as having 'subverted the entire system.' Now a judge, especially of the apex court, is expected to verify each and every detail of the prosecution's case; he, or she, is known to believe in the system of 'guilty beyond reasonable doubt.' In this case, Kuldip Singh convicted Naik and the Vajpayee government on the basis of a solitary newspaper statistic cleverly packaged and presented.

The IE was truly very clever. Its loaded announcement on August 4 that the government didn't commit the date on which it would table the list in Parliament concealed the episode of August 2 on which the newspaper's own report next day (August 3) had stated that 'an angry Opposition …paid little attention to what Gangwar and Parliamentary Affairs Minister Pramod Mahajan had to say' and, of course, 'walked out in protest' as has become its style of parliamentary functioning. Now, if the Opposition wanted to just shut up Gangwar, where was the question of the government committing itself to a date for laying the list before Parliament?

There have been other grey areas too. The IE's report of August 4 wanted us to believe that all it requires to earn a cool Rs 50,000 a month from running a petrol pump is Rs 1,000 as application fee and some string pulling. (Bhattacharjea relied on this finding in his own Asian Age piece.) However, just two days later, on August 6, the IE quoted Sobha Dixit, dismissed chief of a Dealer Selection Board, as saying 'Applicants had to invest above Rs 7 lakhs (700,000) if they got a petrol pump. How could it work?' An investment of 'up to a few lakhs' was confirmed in the rediff special of August 9 by Syed Firdaus Ashraf. That, wrote, Firdaus, was in the case of 'B' category pumps which IE never even mentioned. In fact, the newspaper did not tell readers that there were two categories of petrol pumps allotted by the government: 'A' category which were owned by the public sector oil companies and only run by the allottees, and 'B' category which were owned as well as run by the allottees. Ergo, IE never revealed whether its loudly publicised lists were in the 'A' category or the 'B' category. Is that too a part of the exulting brand of investigative journalism, Mr Bhattacharjea?

The newspaper naturally gave stray instances of alleged political pressure being brought by minister Naik on the dealer selection boards, but Naik himself denied his personal involvement.

The newspaper itself did not make any charge of money changing hands for allotments. That was left to Kapil Sibal. He, it said, circulated a copy of a legal agreement purportedly entered into by a particular 'BJP functionary' (whatever that means) with pump aspirants in Aurangabad district (Maharashtra); the agreement reportedly entailed a payment of Rs 45 lakhs (4.5 million) by each allottee to that 'agent.' On the basis that there were 60 district selection boards, Sibal extrapolated the sleaze amount as being Rs 250 million. The IE reported that, faithfully, without questioning Sibal's arithmetical multiplication and countrywide extrapolation from one solitary district board. It did not, however, publish that agreement. Isn't exposure of legal documents a part of investigative journalism, Mr Bhattacharjea?

The only saving grace of this 'expose' was that, on August 10, the IE graciously published an article by Balbir K Punj, a BJP member of Parliament. Punj made a point therein that ought to dramatically dowse the whole controversy but scald our scandal-searchers. Wrote Punj: 'If Petroleum Minister Ram Naik had been allowed to make the statement in Parliament, he would have pointed out that these so-called "shady allotments" constituted only 7% in four years of the BJP-led government.' Interestingly, the IE did not retort with the customary 'The newspaper stands by its report.'

So, is it 'just 7%' or is it 'over half of the total'? When, if at all, will the common man have the privilege of knowing the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth?

Arvind Lavakare