Rafale deal: Arun Jaitley is wrong. The truth does have two versions
BJP leader and finance minister, Arun Jaitley, who is at the forefront of the firefight that was triggered after the Congress raised serious questions over the Rafale deal between India and France, for purchase of 36 fighter jets, has said, "The truth cannot have two versions."
Jaitley made the remark questioning former French President Francois Hollande's 'contradictory remarks' on the deal.
To begin with, there are two versions as to whether Hollande did actually make 'contradictory remarks'.
Hollande raised political temperatures in India while speaking to Mediapart.fr saying that the Indian government had proposed Reliance Defence as the Indian partner of French defence giant Dassault, and that France "did not have a choice" in the matter.
In political slugfests over big corruption cases, the biggest causality has almost always been the 'truth' and the many versions that revolve around it.
While vociferous accusations have been made by all political camps from time to time against each other, promising voters that accountability will be fixed and culprits punished, nobody is ever found guilty.
Take, for instance, the 2G scam which is believed to be one of the precipitating causes that led to the UPA 2 government being voted out of power. The BJP cried corruption, the Congress alleged conspiracy.
Time magazine called it the second biggest instance of the abuse of executive power — just a notch below Richard Nixon's Watergate scandal.
Irregularities in the allocation of Second Generation spectrum licenses for mobile communication and limited data transmission were, however, too complex a subject for public comprehension.
All accused, including A Raja, who was the telecom minister when the alleged scam happened, and DMK MP Kanimozi, were acquitted in the case. So, did the DMK and Congress' version of the truth triumph?
No.
The court, while delivering the verdict, pointed out how the CBI had failed at presenting the relevant evidence before it. This, despite the agency presenting an 80,000-page chargesheet before the trial court.
Those who had always believed in the scam claimed vindication, as did those who claimed "not guilty".
The Bofors scam that hit the Rajiv Gandhi government in the 1980s still has many versions of the 'truth', despite all the investigative journalism and crores spent by India's probing agencies. The 'truth' about the Gandhi family's alleged complicity in the scam is thus strictly about perception.
We Indians pay bribes even to police officers who come to our houses for an address verification and find us there. We pay bribes even to procure a voter ID card to vote in a government that can ensure an India free of corruption.
We are so badly surrounded by corruption that we believe it is graft, of course, at the slightest insinuation. So, if someone says Rafale is a scam, we will believe a scam it is. As we believed 2G was a scam, as we believed the Gandhi family received kickbacks in the Bofors deal.
But, when the mudslinging takes over the due process of investigation, we realise the waters have turned so murky that we are in no position to know what happened.
That is, of course, only if we think objectively.
Lalu Yadav is a convicted criminal, according to some. He is a victim of political vendetta, according to others. Same truth — two versions.
The Opposition is demanding a joint parliamentary committee (JPC) to investigate the Rafale deal. But no JPC is known to have provided a definitive answer as to which version of the truth is the actual truth. If anything, JPCs only cost the exchequer, which is nothing but public money.
Unfortunately, we will never reach the culprits, assuming a scam has indeed happened. Worse, we may never even know for sure whether a scam has indeed occurred.
British playwright Tom Stoppard told us, "The truth is always a compound of two half-truths and you never quite reach it because there is always something more to say."
When it comes to corruption cases in India, the truth indeed is a compound of two half-truths — one from the Congress, the other from the BJP.
The rest is speculation, based purely on perception.