By Ranjit Devraj
NEW DELHI, Nov 17 2003 (IPS)

Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) suffered a setback amid heated campaigning for state elections after a party leader, filmed allegedly receiving bribes to facilitate mining rights, was forced to resign as junior environment minister on Monday.

Dilip Singh Judeo, heir to the erstwhile royal family of mineral-rich, central Chattisgarh state and ‘shadow chief minister’, said the video of him supposedly getting bribes had been fabricated.

Still, he was made to resign as minister of state for environment and forests, the agency that influences the award of mining contracts in the government of Vajpayee, who returned Sunday from an official tour of Russia, Tajikistan and Syria.

On Monday, Vajpayee convened a meeting of top-ranking members of his cabinet, attended by Deputy Prime Minister Lal Krishna Advani, Finance Minister Jaswant Singh and BJP general secretary Venkiah Naidu.

Judeo’s resignation was announced at the end of that meeting, the statement contradicting Vajpayee’s earlier stand that he saw no reason for it.

Judeo will, however, continue to lead the BJP’s election campaign in Chattisgarh in spite of allegations – supported by video footage widely circulated over the weekend on several television news channels – that he had accepted bribe money from the agents of an Australian mining company.

Speaking at a press conference, Judeo claimed that the video was fake and had been fabricated by his political rival Ajit Jogi, incumbent chief minister of Chattisgarh and top leader of the Congress party. Jogi and the Congress party have denied the charges.

The existence of a compact disc recording of the video was first broken by the ‘Indian Express’ newspaper, whose Sunday edition published frames showing Judeo accepting money. The paper refused name the source, but said it was recorded by someone seeking a mining lease in Chattisgarh.

Later on Sunday, several television channels aired the CD in which Judeo was seen and heard discussing mining licences in Chattisgarh and India’s other mining state of Orissa, and then receiving wads of currency that he raised aloft with the comment that ”money is no less than God”. On film, an aide is heard saying there would be no more problems with mining licences if the BJP came to power in Chattisgarh – known to have vast reserves of valuable minerals and diamond deposits large enough for world leaders like De Beers and Rio Tinto to obtain mining leases.

Apart from Chattisgarh, the states of central Madhya Pradesh, Delhi, which houses the national capital and western Rajasthan state are scheduled to elect new assemblies on Dec. 1, in what is regarded as a semi-final to general elections due in September 2004. The BJP hopes to wrest all four states from the opposition Congress party, which at present rules them along with 10 other major Indian states. A fifth state, Mizoram in the remote north-east, is due to go to polls separately on Nov. 20.

The Congress party, which aims to return to national power at the centre after a gap of eight years, has lost no time in demanding the arrest of Judeo and turning the episode into an election issue.

”If a man is seen taking bribes, he should be arrested under the Prevention of Corruption Act,” said Ambika Soni, official spokeswoman of the Congress party.

Corruption in high places can exact a high electoral cost. The Congress party, which led India to independence from British rule in 1947 and ruled for most of the years afterwards, has lost much of its pre-eminence through a series of scams running into billions of dollars and has not won a general election since 1991.

But critics say that the BJP, which once claimed to be a ‘party with a difference’, turned out to be no better after it wrested national power in 1998. Its rule has been punctuated by a series of scams related to defence deals, privatisation of public sector institutions, the stock market and the handling of mutual funds. Soni said by accusing Jogi of fabricating the tapes, the BJP was only trying to divert public attention from its responsibility to see that corrupt people in its midst are punished. ”This is just another in a series of scams for which BJP government has been constantly in the public view,” she said.

The four-year-old Vajpayee government faced the worst crisis of its rule in March 2001, when the web-based news portal Tehelka went public with tapes showing BJP president Bangaru Laxman accepting money from one of its reporters who had posed as an arms dealer.

The Tehelka reporter also induced Jaya Jaitly, leader of the Samata Party, a close ally of the BJP in the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) coalition, to accept money in return for promises to help facilitate the purchase of defence equipment.

Such was the sensation created by Tehelka in its attempts to expose ”entrenched corruption in the defence and political establishment” that both Laxman and Jaitly were compelled to resign. Several top army officers, including a major general, were court-martialled.

The latest scam is expected to boost the chances of the Congress party returning to power in all the states that are going to polls, but most especially in Chattisgarh. There, the stakes are high because its mineral wealth has been opened to prospecting and exploitation by foreign mining companies as a result of the economic liberalisation policies the country embarked on 10 years ago.

”This is not a Chattisgarh issue – it concerns the Vajpayee government. How many times should the people of this country be subjected to the spectacle of NDA leaders and ministers taking bribes on their TV sets?” Soni said at a press conference convened by the Congress party on Sunday.

But the Congress party cannot claim to be completely clean either. Its government in western Maharashtra state went under a cloud this month after top police officials were arrested for alleged involvement in a billion-dollar racket in the printing and sale of fake stamp paper.

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