RIGHTS-INDIA: Murder Breathes Life into Stalled Whistle-blowers Act

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Dec 10 2003 (IPS) - A whistleblowers’ bill, stalled in the Indian Parliament by waffling politicians for two years, is being dusted out after the gruesome murder of an engineer, who had reported corruption in a two billion U.S. dollar highway project to link up the country’s major metropolises.

Corruption and violent death are the daily fare of India’s newspapers, but the Nov. 27 murder of Satyendra Dubey, a 31-year-old engineer with Prime Minister Atal Bihari’s pet ‘Golden Quadrilateral’ project, has sparked a rare and concerted public outcry.

On Wednesday, the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) stepped in to ask concerned authorities why Dubey was not given sufficient protection after he complained in a letter to Vajpayee’s office that his life was in danger because the secret complaint he made had become public and his identity revealed.

But the commission’s intervention came only after stormy sessions in Parliament this week, in which opposition leaders demanded to know why the ‘Public Interest Disclosure Bill’ had been allowed to lie dormant for so long.

Observed Somanth Chatterjee, a lawyer and India’s longest-serving parliamentarian: ” The government had no hesitation passing the flawed Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA) which was introduced around the same time as the whistleblowers’ bill.”

Chatterjee and several other leading public figures are certain that had the bill been passed, it would have helped put the brakes on rampant corruption and protect citizens concerned by the massive diversion of funds meant for public projects.

”The shocking events concerning the murder of Dubey highlight the need for speedy enactment of a whistleblowers’ law,” said Soli Sorabjee, India’s attorney general who has reputation for fearless honesty.

”We have to give total protection to our whistleblowers. Otherwise there will be more Dubeys,” said K K Venugopal, a Supreme Court lawyer acknowledged as the one of India’s best legal brains.

Concerned expatriates, many of them engineers like Dubey, have been writing in to the Prime Ministers’ Office over the Internet, asking to know how they can help Dubey’s family and protesting the murder.

The overwhelming public reaction elicited a response from Vajpayee, who declared in a statement that investigation of the murder in Gaya town in the eastern state of Bihar would be investigated by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), the country’s main sleuthing agency.

"Like all right-thinking Indians, I am shocked and saddened by the murder of Satyendra Dubey, an upright and dedicated officer working with NHAI (National Highways Authority of India), who was killed recently in Gaya, Bihar," Vajpayee added.

Dubey, a graduate of the Kanpur campus of the prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology, was shot dead allegedly for disclosing the "loot of public money" in the execution of the Golden Quadrilateral project that he was tasked with monitoring.

Vajpayee said the outpouring of sympathy for Dubey showed that Indians had a commitment to honesty and transparency. "The government shares that commitment and appreciates their concern,” he said.

Indian expatriates in affluent countries like the United States and Britain are staunch supporters of the Vajpayee’s right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and make large contributions during the party’s fund-collections drives.

But in his written complaint to Vajpayee’s office a year ago, Dubey had complained that while the project involved international bidding, the actual work was being subcontracted to incompetent and dishonest contractors so that the ”main contractors are working like commission agents”.

Dubey had charged in the letter that that the whole process was ”known to all from top to bottom but everyone is maintaining a studied silence” and that ”all these mouths have been shut by the big contractors”. His efforts are believed to have cost him his life.

In spite of angry reactions from a public fed up with the all-permeating corruption, the government has so far not made any commitment about when the whistleblowers’ bill would be tabled again.

The ‘Indian Express’ newspaper saw apt to quote in an editorial the U.S. legal expert Thomas M Devine, who had said: ” Whistleblowers’ protection is a policy that all government leaders support in public but few tolerate in private.”

”People want to ensure that Dubey’s killers are apprehended, that the concerns he raised about corruption within the National Highway Authority of India are addressed,” said the ‘Indian Express’.

Many feel that handing the case over to the CBI is not satisfactory because the investigating agency is known not to act independently but according to wishes of its political masters.

At the moment, the CBI is investigating audio tapes that allegedly show the former chief minister of eastern Chattisgarh state, Ajit Jogi, trying to entice BJP politicians to defect by offering them cash rewards following his defeat in state assembly elections concluded last week.

While opposition Congress party figure Jogi has been charged, the CBI has chosen to ignore videotapes that have captured Jogi’s rival and BJP leader in Chattisgarh, Dilip Singh Judeo, accepting money in return for promises of mining concessions.

Judeo, who was sacked from Vajpayee’s cabinet following the release of the tapes in the run-up to the elections, had justified collecting the money.