The Election Commission is only partially engaging with the serious charges levelled by opposition parties.

In a preceding article I had highlighted an anomaly in the results of the last three Lok Sabha and assembly elections in Delhi, that had never been seen in previous elections to the Lok Sabha and the assemblies, in the ten sets of general elections held from 1971-72 onwards after former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had separated the Lok Sabha from the state elections.

This was that the drop of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP)’s vote between two consecutive assembly and Lok Sabha elections had been 66% and 55% as against smaller changes for other parties between consecutive assembly and Lok Sabha elections.

This was that against a maximum change of vote downwards or upwards for any party between consecutive assembly and Lok Sabha elections, of 17%, in the case of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) in Delhi, the drop of its vote between two consecutive assembly and Lok Sabha elections had been 66% and 55%.

A substantial part of this drop can be explained by the AAP’s having fought in only four out of Delhi’s seven parliamentary seats in 2024. But even if it had not left the remaining three seats to the Congress and been able to retain a similar share of the vote in them, its share would at most have been 42% in 2024.

That would still have left an almost 12 percentage point drop between the AAP’s vote share in the 2020 assembly election and in the 2024 Lok Sabha election unexplained, which while still surprising, would not have lifted too many eyebrows.

The 12 percentage point drop would still have been suspicious, but it could have been attributed to the sustained three-year campaign by the BJP to discredit the AAP’s moral credentials by accusing its leaders of the so-called “liquor scam” and then imprisoning its principal leaders including Arvind Kejriwal himself without bail for periods of up to two years.

But the BJP’s propaganda machine understood the Indian electorate only too well and knew that the mere incarceration would do its intended damage, for it would tap into the instinctive belief instilled by the ruling classes in average human beings since the dawn of time, that where there is smoke, there has to be a fire. So the AAP had to be as dishonest as any other party in the country.

Not entirely surprisingly, none of this ruthlessly planned smear campaign was questioned by the mainstream media. But what is surprising is that the significance of this anomaly did not dawn upon our most respected political analysts either, even after it happened twice in a row.

This was the main reason why nearly all placed the blame for AAP’s defeat this year on the moral decline of the party in the 14 years since it was born. So none of them even raised the possibility that the elections might have been stolen.

They did this in spite of the mounting evidence that was already coming in from the Maharashtra assembly elections that these had been gerrymandered to ensure the BJP’s victory, most probably through the misuse of Form 7 of the Election Commission (EC) – a seemingly innocuous form that simply allows residents of a constituency to inform the EC of deaths and changes of residence within their localities since the previous election.

A damning allegation of this had been provided by Rahul Gandhi in a press conference in mid-February, that Maharashtra had managed to have 1.16 lakh more adults on its voter’s list than the entire adult population of the state, and that while the electorate grew by 32 lakh persons between 2019 and 2014, it had increased by 39 lakh in five months between the Lok Sabha and assembly elections in 2024.

This was not the first accusation of a misuse of Form 7 to reach the EC. The first had come as long ago as on March 8, 2019 and had been filed by no less a significant person than G.K. Dwiwedi, who was chief electoral officer for Andhra Pradesh, ahead of elections in that state.

This was not an unofficial but an official complaint to the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing, which operates under the Union government’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology.

In October 2024, Kejriwal had also accused the BJP of falsely reporting thousands of voters as having either relocated or died. Citing the Shahdara constituency as a specific example, he claimed that BJP workers including Vishal Bhardwaj, had signed 11,018 Form 7 applications to delete voters’ names in this constituency.

Kejriwal claimed that an examination of 500 randomly selected deletions had shown that around 70% of the deleted voters were alive and resident in Shahdara, and were therefore eligible to vote.

But this was a single accusation, and by then the world had forgotten about it, so neither the EC nor the BJP responded to his accusation. Instead, the district magistrate of Shahdara was made to deny the report. Since he belonged to an all-India service he could hardly have done anything else.

Whether this indeed happened then or not, there can be little doubt that by the 2024 Lok Sabha and 2025 assembly elections, the alleged overzealousness of BJP workers in applying to have voter names deleted suggests that Form 7 had become a major weapon in the BJP’s armoury of tactics for winning elections.

Coming after the two questions that Gandhi asked the EC and received no answer, someone should have raised the obviously quixotic results of the Maharashtra election, that he had highlighted in parliament and his press conferences, in the mainstream media.

But no one did. After the Delhi results were announced, no one even asked the obvious question that if the AAP lost around 10% of the total vote, amounting to a fifth of its entire support base, how did all of it go only to the BJP? The EC has been silent. Why did it not go to the Congress? After all it was Sheila Dikshit who had given the state 15 years of good governance.

By February 8, Kejriwal’s October 2024 analysis of the alterations in Shahdara voting list had been forgotten, but an exhaustive and perhaps still incomplete post-poll analysis of voters’ lists by the AAP is showing just how far, and with what utter contempt for the political opposition, the BJP has taken the misuse of Form 7.

Sanjay Singh, one of the AAP’s main party organisers, disclosed a small part of its findings on Kapil Sibal’s TV programme, Central Hall. Singh, who had spent four months in jail on PMLA charges before the Supreme Court ordered his release, gave a detailed account of the number of applications for voter deletions that were filed purportedly by BJP workers or supporters in six constituencies.

In Shahdara, Singh confirmed that a single BJP karyakarta (party worker), possibly the same Vishal Bhardwaj, had asked for 11,008 deletions.

In Janakpuri, 24 karyakartas had applied for a total of 4,874 deletions.

At Tughlaqabad, 15 party workers had applied for a total of 2,435 deletions. At booth number 117 in this same constituency, which had a voter list of 1,337 persons, two BJP party workers had applied for a total of 554 deletions!

At Palam, the site of the Delhi airport, nine BJP karyakartas had applied for a total of 1,641 deletions.

At Rajouri Garden, a middle-class neighbourhood in Delhi, six BJP workers had applied for 571 deletions.

At Hari Nagar, four party workers had applied for the deletion of 637 voters from the electoral rolls.

These add up to 21,166 voter deletion applications. If similar applications had taken place in all constituencies, it would mean that almost 2.47 lakh voters may have been at risk of being disfranchised. That amounts to 2.6% of all the votes cast in the election.

So far neither the chief election commissioner nor his deputies have made even a token attempt to explain these glaring discrepancies. In a farewell televised statement, Rajiv Kumar, the outgoing chief election commissioner, gave a detailed description of the balloting process:

“There are 1.05 million [10.5 lakh] polling booths in the country. Each has to be manned by four or five officials. In all, therefore, between four and five million persons are needed [for a nationwide election]. These are provided by the state governments … A few days before the elections, they are randomised in front of the candidates and teams are formed…”

These, he implied, are promptly implemented. In every state the officials manage the election process are supplied by the state government and they work in their home states.

He also sought to allay the doubts being expressed with increasing frequency about the sanctity of the electronic voting machines. But what he did not say a word upon was how the EC had dealt with the deluge of Forms 6 and 7 demanding additions to, and deletions from, the voters’ lists.

Nor did Kumar respond to the demands of the opposition that they be allowed to examine the additions and deletions made to the voters’ lists.

So, as the months go by, the suspicion among the poor that their democratic rights have been stolen from them will continue to grow.

Seen in hindsight, it is apparent that the Modi government had begun to look for ways to “influence” the results of Lok Sabha and assembly elections at least as far back as in 2020.

It is now becoming increasingly evident that the Modi government is doing this through a wholesale misuse of the EC’s Form 7.

There is good reason to believe that the BJP has made a wholesale abuse of this privilege granted to voters, to, in essence, steal the elections.

At any rate, till the date of writing, Gandhi has received no explanation for the two questions he raised during his February 7 press conference – a day before results for the Delhi assembly election were announced – and which have been presented above.

None of this could have happened had there been a truly independent EC. Messrs Modi and Shah knew this, so this was where they set their sights first.

The first signal came in 2020 when Ashok Lavasa, an election commissioner since 2018 who had been tipped to become the next chief election commissioner in April 2021, only a year later, suddenly resigned from the EC and took up a job with the Asian Development Bank.

Arun Goel, the second election commissioner, lasted longer, but also resigned equally suddenly in March 2024, reportedly due to irreconcilable differences with the CEC, who by then was none other than Rajiv Kumar.

Modi was able to do this because by then he had found the loophole in the law through which to take over the election system, and thus complete his conversion of a democratic nation into a one-party state.

This was to comply with the Supreme Court’s Baranwal directive to pass a law sanctifying the existing method of choosing the chief justice of India, but with only one small change that the opposition was too weak to prevent. This was the replacement of the chief justice with a minister of the prime minister’s choosing. That gave the government of the day a permanent majority in the choice of the chief election commissioner, and his two deputies.

The EC has tangentially engaged with the charges of the INDIA alliance. Today the distrust this has created can only be allayed by abolishing Form 7 and the recently amended form 7a altogether.

Anyone with an Aadhaar card must have the right to vote wherever he or she is, and whenever he or she wishes to within the specified time period on election day.

What is more, election day should be declared a state or national holiday. It should be left to the voter to decide whether he or she decides to vote or not. Abstention too, it must be remembered, is a form of negative vote that carries a powerful message to political parties and governments.

Prem Shankar Jha is a veteran journalist.

This article was edited to correct the number of deletion applications allegedly made by BJP workers or supporters as well as former chief election commissioner Rajiv Kumar’s quote.

After AAP’s Delhi Defeat: Kicking a Horse When it is Down

The reaction of the Indian intelligentsia to the AAP’s defeat has highlighted one of the least attractive features of the Indian political class.

The reaction of the Indian intelligentsia to the Aam Aadmi Party’s defeat in the Vidhan Sabha elections has highlighted one of the least attractive features of the Indian political class. This is its willingness to look for explanations for political setbacks that do not disturb its peace of mind by forcing it to confront harsh truths.

This tendency was highlighted by the remarks of three former supporters and close advisers of Kejriwal, whose personal morality and political sagacity is beyond reproach. These are Yogendra Yadav, the founder of Lokniti, the most irreproachable polling agency in the country; Ashutosh, the celebrated anchor of Satya Hindi Television’s most watched news analysis programs, who was Kejriwal’s right hand man during the formation of AAP, and Prashant Bhushan, who is India’s leading human rights lawyer.

Former supporters blame Kejriwal

All three blamed not just the (AAP), but Arvind Kejriwal personally, for the party’s defeat. Yadav’s criticism was perhaps the mildest of the trio: He claimed that the AAP had lost its “Moral Sheen” because it had begun to tolerate corruption and high-handedness within the party.

Ashutosh also ascribed the defeat to the Aam Admi party having lost sight of the ideals with which it was created, particularly its drive against corruption and determination to change the life of the common man, but had lost its way somewhere and become just another political party.

Prashant Bhushan, arguably the bravest human rights lawyer in India, also held Kejriwal responsible for the Delhi poll debacle. In a post on X, he accused Kejriwal of changing the nature of AAP after it was founded as a transparent platform for alternative politics, beginning to travel in luxury cars (and) binning 33 detailed policy reports of expert committees set up by AAP, saying that the party would adopt expedient policies “when the time comes.”

Finally, none of the three challenged the BJP’s assertion that Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal had sanctioned the expenditure of Rs 63 crores for building a new ‘house’ for him and his family to live in, at 6 Flagstaff Road in Old Delhi out of a growing hubris and disregard for the opinions of others in his party.

BJP’s propaganda machine remained unchallenged

They did not therefore challenge the BJP’s propaganda machine when it promptly dubbed the new house as Kejriwal’s “Sheesh Mahal”. Several other commentators therefore adopted the term uncritically, as shorthand for describing Kejriwal’s double standards.

Not one of them commented on the most glaring anomaly in these results: that if a large proportion of the AAP’s former supporters were disappointed by its performance, or disillusioned with Kejriwal, why did they not give their vote to the Congress?

Why did all of them give their vote instead to a party that has done nothing except make empty promises to the nation on incomes and employment, and has not governed Delhi in 27 years?

Nor did any of them voice a single doubt, or suspicion, that BJP karyakartas in Delhi may have used the same tactics, which the saffron party has been accused of using in Maharashtra – deleting names of thousands of genuine voters from each constituency.

Had any journalist taken the trouble to investigate the Sheesh Mahal allegation thoroughly, he or she would have had a very different story to tell. First, the decision to replace the existing Bungalow at 6 Flagstaff Road was taken more than 6 years after Kejriwal had moved into it. This had to be done because the existing Bungalow was falling to pieces. It had been built 80 years earlier in 1942 and, even then, had never been intended to be anything other than a private residence.

It was a small single floor house with a central living-cum-dining room and three bedrooms, of a design that the British had used for the houses allotted to deputy secretary level officers in their government. Its only outhouses, therefore, were the six or so servants’ quarters that used to accompany houses of this class in British India.

In 2015 it was lying vacant – itself an anomaly that no journalist questioned the reason for – but its previous occupant had been the Deputy speaker of the Delhi Vidhan Sabha, so Kejriwal felt no hesitation in choosing it. The only change he made to it was to turn the small front lobby of the house into an informal living room in which he could meet his visitors, and senior members of his party.

Kejriwal had done so because he did not wish to live at 3 Motilal Nehru Marg, in the heart of British New Delhi, a road on which ex-prime ministers, judges of the Supreme court, and secretaries of central government departments lived, and where Shiela Dixit, his predecessor had lived during her chief ministership.

6 Flagstaff Road house was already in a dilapidated state

When Kejriwal moved into the house, it was already in a dilapidated state, but he did nothing to improve its condition till 2020 when heavy rains made the ceiling cave in. Kejriwal had ignored three previous smaller cave-ins in different parts of the house, one of which had occurred in his parents’ bedroom, endangering their lives. But the 2020 roof collapse triggered a safety audit by the PWD, which insisted that the house had to be completely rebuilt.

The first order for rebuilding and furbishing 6 Flagstaff Road was therefore issued on September 09, 2020 and was for Rs 7.09 crores. But that estimate had not taken into account the need for the CM’s official residence to have a permanent Home office and residential quarters for his security detail. Kejriwal had realised, within days of moving into Flagstaff Road that a chief minister’s home cannot be truly private, but must contain accommodation for a full-fledged mini-secretariat, and a security detail.

But he had insisted on constructing only temporary clapboard shacks to meet the two needs till the COVID pandemic closed the Delhi Secretariat and forced him to work entirely from home. That was almost certainly the reason why his government decided to kill two birds with one stone and make 6 Flagstaff Road the permanent Chief Minister’s residence in Delhi.

The need to build additional pukka buldings, in addition to a permanent house for the chief Minister of a State, pushed up the total cost to Rs. 44 crores. Of this, Rs. 19.22 crores was accounted for by the home office (also called a camp office) where the chief Minister could work and meet guests.

Apart from this. Rs. 19 crores of the BJP’s Rs 63 crore estimate was the notional cost of the additional land that had to be acquired to house the work and security related staff and facilities. Acquiring this did not involve any cash transaction because the land already belonged to the central government. But the BJP did not mention this and no journalist bothered (or dared) to ask.

The cost of the remainder of the complex was therefore just over Rs 24 crores. This was for a spacious, two-storey permanent government house, similar in size to the homes the British had built for their seniormost officials on what is now Rajaji Marg in New Delhi.

Renovation cost of Modi’s residential house and office much higher

Compared to this, the “renovation” cost of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s residential house and office at 5 and 7 Race course road when he moved in had begun at Rs 27 crores and ended at Rs 89 crores!

The disparity becomes even more striking when we remember that the Flagstaff Road house was utterly dilapidated and close to the end of its natural life when it began to be renovated, but 5 and 7 Race Course road, the residence and home office of the prime minster were already in perfect condition because they had housed five prime ministers over the previous 30 years.

But even this huge difference does not measure the gap in size between the egos of Modi and Kejriwal. The real yardstick is the disparity between the Rs. 44 crore cost of the permanent residence of the Chief Minister of Delhi, and the Rs. 467 crores that the Modi government is spending on a new residence for the Prime Minister in the Central Vista complex. This residence was initially expected to cost ₹360 crores and would take 21 months to build.

But within months that estimate ballooned further to Rs 467 crores because PM Modi wanted underground tunnels leading from it to the new Parliament House and the Prime Minister’s Office in South block to be added to the project.

It is a grim reminder of how far our democracy has slipped towards authoritarianism, that no English or Hindi newspaper or TV anchor who has repeatedly referred to Kejriwal’s Sheesh Mahal, has dared to call the new PM’s house that is nearing completion a “Heera Mahal”.

Modi’s single and consistent response to any political setback throughout these years has been rage. But the fact is that, the excise policy ‘case’ does not hold up to basic questioning.

Manish Sisodia, Arvind Kejriwal, Sanjay Singh and Satyendar Jain. The latter, arrested by the ED like the others, is jailed in a different case. In the foreground is Narendra Modi.

Prime Minister Modi’s empty boast “abki baar 400 paar (this time, beyond 400 seats)” is now one that the Bharatiya Janata Party would dearly like to forget, for the party’s strength has been reduced from 303 seats in 2019 to 240 this year, making it wholly dependent now upon the continued support of two major regional parties that neither share his totalitarian goals, nor his Messianic image of himself.

This is the first time in 22 years as chief minister of Gujarat and then as prime minister of India, that Modi has found himself not in a position of untrammelled power. The question that lurks in every mind today is, will he be able to adjust his so far tyrannical style of governance to a situation he has never been in before? 

Nothing he has ever said or done, either as the chief minister of Gujarat or prime minister of India, suggests that he will be able to do so. 

This is because his single, consistent response to any political setback throughout these years has been rage. 

Over the past 22 years he has turned this rage upon all those who have tried to thwart his ambitions. Beginning with former Gujarat home minister Haren Pandya in 2001, and ending most recently with Congress MP Rahul Gandhi, Trinamool Congress MP Mahua Moitra, human rights lawyer Teesta Setalvad and former Gujarat Intelligence chief R.B. Sreekumar, Modi has used one or other of the government’s law enforcement agencies to terrorise his political opponents. Today, Modi is venting his rage upon the Aam Aadmi party, and most viciously upon its founder, Arvind Kejriwal. 

Modi’s rage against Kejriwal in particular, arises from the BJP’s rout in the 2015 Delhi state elections, barely a year after it had won all the seven Lok Sabha seats in Delhi, in 2014. Despite the BJP’s having repeated this success both in 2019 and 2024, Modi’s rage against AAP, and against Kejriwal in particular, remains unabated. In the nine years that have elapsed since then, Modi has stopped at nothing in his bid to discredit the Delhi state government and force it out of power in the national capital. When the Kejriwal government changed the state’s liquor licensing policy in 2021, he got the opportunity that he had been looking for. 

The birth of a case

Taxes on liquor contribute between 15% and 30% of the annual revenues of state governments and are the second largest source of revenue (after the Goods and Services Tax) for all of them. But the consumption of liquor is frowned upon by the vast majority of poorer families in the country. In Delhi state, where the sale of liquor had remained a monopoly of the state since the late 1970s, it was also one of the principal sources of bribes and kickbacks to the lawmakers and administrators in the concerned departments. Therefore, when the AAP government decided to end the state’s monopoly and conduct the entire liquor trade via public auction it kicked over a hornet’s nest that the Modi government lost no time in taking advantage of to discredit the party in the eyes of the people of the city. 

The first salvo on Modi’s behalf was fired by the chief secretary of Delhi, Naresh Kumar, who wrote, in a letter addressed to V.K. Saxena the then (and now) Lieutenant Governor of Delhi, at some point in the earlier half of 2022. In it he stated that “arbitrary and unilateral decisions” taken by Sisodia in his capacity as excise minister had resulted in “financial losses to the exchequer” estimated at more than Rs 580 crore… and “kickbacks…received by the AAP Delhi government and AAP leaders” from owners and operators of alcohol businesses for preferential treatment such as discounts and extensions in licence fee, waiver on penalties and relief due to disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, etc. were used to “influence” the assembly elections held in Punjab and Goa in early 2022.

This letter is the bedrock upon which the Modi government has created the entire edifice of public disgrace and imprisonment without bail, of an elected chief minister, an elected deputy chief minister, and a Rajya Sabha MP who was a key organiser of the AAP in Himachal Pradesh, for periods ranging from three months to two years. The former Delhi health minister was also arrested and remains in jail to this day, but in a different case.

During this period, the Enforcement Directorate has turned the homes, offices and other premises controlled by the indicted persons upside down, but has failed to find, as the Supreme Court said while summing up the bail hearing of Sanjay Singh, “even a shred of evidence” against any of them. 

In normal times any government agency would have closed the cases against the AAP leaders long ago. But Modi had taught the Enforcement Directorate the consequences of failure to do his bidding as far back as in 2016, in the National Herald case. On that occasio , when Rajan Katoch, the then director of the ED closed the case lodged against the Congress party by Subramaniam Swamy for lack of evidence, after investigating it for a full year, Modi removed him from his post immediately. 

Since then, every head of the ED has been aware of the cost of failing to do Modi’s bidding. But others too have learned the lesson. That is the only explanation for the Delhi high court’s hasty overturning of the Rouse Avenue court’s decision to grant bail to Kejriwal. As has been pointed out in the media, the ED rushed to the Delhi high court, and the judge, Sudhir Kumar Jain, purportedly complied, even before he had received, let alone read, the Rouse Avenue court’s judgement. 

Not surprisingly, therefore, when the ED could find no material evidence of the barrel loads of cash that the AAP had reportedly accepted from the liquor wholesalers, it resorted to presenting statements by various people who claimed that they had been the intermediaries between a ‘South Group’ of liquor manufacturers and bottlers and the Kejriwal government, and had arranged the vast transfers of cash that the Group made to the party. 

Fearful of the Supreme Court granting Kejriwal bail, the government has now got the Central Bureau of Investigation to arrest the Delhi chief minister for essentially the same ‘crime’ that the ED has failed to make any headway proving.

So overwhelming has been the BJP’s propaganda blitz against the AAP, that no one bothered to remember that by 2022, the electoral bonds scheme had been in operation for more than four years and that AAP had received somewhere between Rs 52 and 65 crores by way of donations. This was far more than the Rs 22 crores it was accused of having transferred to Goa to fight the 2022 elections there. 

Finally, the ED’s two principal “informers” are Raghav Magunta Reddy, son of one Magunta Sreenivasulu Reddy, a YSR Congress MP from Andhra Pradesh, and a Delhi businessman Dinesh Arora – who was himself under arrest at the time when Sisodia was arrested, and had turned an ‘approver’ for the ED, after being guaranteed a pardon for the transgressions he was accused of having committed. Readers of this article can decide for themselves how reliable, let alone truthful, their depositions were, from the fact that both the Reddys, father and son, had initially been indicted by the ED, and that while Raghav Reddy, along with Dinesh Arora were pardoned at the Rouse Avenue court in Delhi on October 4, 2023, Magunta Srinivasulu Reddy is now a Telugu Desam Party MP from Andhra, and was photographed recently with Modi, during the announcement of the TDP’s continuing partnership with the BJP. 

However the strangest feature of the ED’s case against Kejriwal and other AAP leaders is that at every hearing before – no matter which court – the ED has strenuously opposed bail for the four leaders of the AAP, on the grounds that it is still gathering evidence against them, and releasing them will make this exceedingly difficult, if not impossible. But if that is truly the case, then how was chief secretary Naresh Kumar able to write a letter to Lt Governor Saxena giving precise details of the amount of excise revenues lost by the government from the new liquor policy, the kickbacks obtained by AAP from liquor vendors, and the amounts of money that it had transferred to Goa to fight the assembly elections in 2022? 

A plausible explanation

There are only two possible answers – either Naresh Kumar’s letter was a fabrication dictated by the Modi government, or the ED felt that the information it contained was insufficient and imprecise, and needed to be reinforced with more direct evidence. 

Of these, the first is by far the more plausible explanation. This is for the simple reason that the new liquor policy not only did not cause a loss of excise duty revenues, but actually doubled them. 

I have explained this point in an earlier article but the details are worth repeating.

Under the earlier policy, the Delhi government was both the wholesaler and the retailer of alcohol in the city. The government paid the manufacturer their ex-factory price plus 5%, took control of the liquor and bore the cost of transportation and storage till it was supplied to the retail outlets. The retail outlets were also all controlled by the government, but licensed from the premise owners. 

This bureaucratic monopoly had a number of shortcomings: first, the number of brands of any particular spirit stocked by the government liquor shops was limited and not responsive to changes in public tastes and incomes; and second, the retail liquor shops were concentrated mainly in the high income neighbourhoods of Delhi. There were very few in the poorer areas of the city. 

Over the years this policy had led to a serious loss of revenue to the government. High income earners began buying their liquor in Haryana. Because of the lack of shops near them, the poor were buying country liquor. AAP’s new policy corrected these distortions while simultaneously taking the government out of the liquor business altogether. The wholesalers paid a one-time tax of 14% on their sales in Delhi. The retail outlets were reorganised to ensure that there was an even distribution of these throughout the city. The government had divided the city into 32 zones, of which 20 were classified as affluent, and the remaining 12 as relatively poor. Each zone was divided into a number of principalities, each to be served by up to three retail locations. The retail locations were evenly spaced to ensure that every mohalla, and every section of the population, had equal access to a liquor shop. It then auctioned the liquor shop locations. These were then put up for auction.  

In the first auction, the government garnered Rs 5,300 crore from the auction of locations in the more affluent 20 zones, and Rs 3,180 crore from the auctions in the remaining 12 zones. The lower paying capacity of the poorer areas was automatically reflected in the lower bids for these locations. An important side benefit of the new policy was that by giving easier access to licensed liquor in poor areas, it reduced the sale of illicit liquor within those areas.

Two months after the new policy came into operation, a civil servant, who withheld his name while sharing the above figures to Hindustan Times, told its correspondent that along with new brand licensing and some other minor taxes, the government expected to garner over Rs 10,000 crore a year from the sale of liquor in the capital. This was almost double the average of Rs 5,500-crore recorded in the previous three years, and the Rs 5,272 crore (excluding VAT) that was garnered between September 1, 2022 and August 31, 2023 after the return to the old policy.

Finally, in all the time that the ED has spent gathering evidence against AAP no one in the media has asked the most important question of all: if both the choice of wholesalers and retailers is made through public auctions, then where is there any space left for graft and favouritism? To the eternal shame of the Indian media, in the months since AAP leaders were imprisoned, no newspaper or television commentator has asked this question.

The answer almost certainly lies buried in the ongoing rapid privatisation of port and LNG terminal development that has taken place during Modi’s prime ministership.

Mahua Moitra. Photo: X/@MahuaMoitra

In the ten years since Narendra Modi came to power in Delhi, his political party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, has dragged India down from a pinnacle of moral esteem in the world, into the gutter of hate, murder and state planned assassination. The US Department of State’s country report on human rights violations in India summarises India’s descent into the lower circles of Hell as follows:

“Significant human rights issues included credible reports of: unlawful and arbitrary killings, including extrajudicial killings by the government or its agents; torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment by police and prison officials; harsh and life-threatening prison conditions; arbitrary arrest and detention; political prisoners or detainees; arbitrary or unlawful interference with privacy; restrictions on freedom of expression and media, including violence or threats of violence, unjustified arrests or prosecutions of journalists, and enforcement of or threat to enforce criminal libel laws to limit expression; restrictions on internet freedom; interference with the freedom of peaceful assembly and freedom of association; restrictions on freedom of movement and on the right to leave the country; refoulement of refugees; serious government corruption; harassment of domestic and international human rights organizations”;  (and) “crimes involving violence or threats of violence targeting members of national/racial/ethnic and minority groups based on religious affiliation, social status or sexual orientation…A lack of accountability for official misconduct persisted at all levels of government, contributing to widespread impunity. …Lax enforcement, a shortage of trained police officers, and an overburdened and under resourced court system contributed to a low number of convictions.”

This was where the BJP had already taken India in the esteem of the world, before the government’s alleged plans to assassinate prominent Khalistanis in the US and Canada were exposed by the West’s ‘Five Eyes’ intelligence consortium. But the expulsion of Mahua Moitra from Parliament, on the basis of a report by an Ethics Committee from which the entire opposition had walked out in protest against the demeaning, sexual innuendo-loaded questions that its chairman, Vinod Kumar Sonkar ,was asking, reeks of a sexual misogyny that has brought shame upon our parliament and country across the entire world.

The BJP has accused Moitra of almost everything it could  think of. Chief among the grounds given for her expulsion is her alleged “highly objectionable, unethical, heinous and criminal conduct” before the committee. But  even a cursory examination of the record of its meetings shows that Moitra treated the committee with respect,  and answered every question relating to the allegations made by her detractors fully. In her replies, which occupy 16 long paragraphs spread over pages 32 till 40, she remained deferential and gave detailed explanations of her actions throughout.

The kernel of the charge Moitra faced was that she had given her login and password to an unauthorised person, Darshan Hiranandani, and allowed him to send in questions in her name that were designed to damage the reputation of Narendra Modi and his government. By doing this she had breached confidentiality and endangered national security. What the committee did not explain was how anyone could have uploaded a question in her name without sending an OTP, as is required in India by all online business transactions, and is mandatory for MPs filing questions in Parliament.

That OTP had to come from Moitra’s phone, and so any verification would necessitate Moitra’s involement. So no matter who had given Moitra the information upon which she based a question in parliament, and who typed and mailed it for her, once she had sent the OTP, it became her question. If she sent the question to Hiranandani, which the records show she undoubtedly did, it would not only have been to get it typed, which is admittedly a not very credible reason, but for verification of the facts that she was citing. That is something every responsible journalist  does, so why should a member of parliament not do so in  matters of infinitely greater importance?

In fact even her explanation that she had sent her parliamentary questions to Hiranandani’s office only for typing and uploading on the net because these can no longer be submitted in handwritten form, was not a subterfuge. For the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology had confirmed to the committee that all of her 61 questions, of which 90% had little or nothing to do with the Hiranandani enterprises, had also been posted from his Dubai IP address.

It was only when the committee chairman, Sonkar asked her five questions that, taken together, insinuated that she was loose woman having an affair with Hiranandani, and was giving him sexual favours for information with which to attack the Modi government, that she stormed out. The questions were: i) What is your relationship with Darshan Hiranandani? ii) How many times did you visit Dubai? (iii) Where did you stay iv) in which hotel; v) Did you meet Darshan Hiranandani there? It was the fifth question that made her lose her temper and storm out. Every self-respecting woman, whether an MP or not, would have done the same.

When Sonkar asked these questions, the committee had already been  informed that Moitra had visited Dubai only four times in nearly five years – hardly often enough to sustain a clandestine affair – and that the timing of her visits was not even remotely connected with the timing of the questions she had posed to the petroleum and natural gas ministry. Moitra did not know this, so she had responded to the accusation, indirectly supported by Hiranandani’s affidavit, that the idea of her being able to force a dollar trillionaire with a vast international construction company – a Unicorn – to do anything illegal was ludicrous.

But Sonkar ignored all this and deliberately asked her questions that invaded her privacy, and would have been resented by any self-respecting woman, and drove her into losing her temper and storming out. Sonkar succeeded, knowing that this would make any further inquiry into her actions before recommending her expulsion superfluous. He will no doubt be rewarded in due course as Anurag Thakur and Kapil Mishra were rewarded after the police firing upon Shaheen Bagh protestors and the North-East Delhi communal violence in 2020.

The question no one has asked

The  question no one has asked is, what was the Modi government’s tearing need for hurry that made the government target and destroy Mahua Moitra now? So great was the BJP’s hurry that it could not give the members of the Ethics Committee even a day to read its 495 page report, took less than 30 minutes after Moitra stormed out of the final hearing to recommend her expulsion from the Lok Sabha, and carried this out the very next day?

The answer almost certainly lies buried in the ongoing rapid privatisation of port and LNG terminal development that has taken place during Modi’s prime ministership. This began in 2018, and has gathered momentum rapidly since then. The principal, but not only,  beneficiary of this shift from reliance on the public sector has been the Adani group of enterprises. A second major player has been H-Energy, an increasingly important part of the Hiranandani group. In Bengal, the competition between these groups was won by the Hiranandani group. In Odisha, Andhra Pradesh and elsewhere, it is being won mostly by the Adani group.

On January 9, 2019, H-Energy, the energy arm of the Hiranandani group, entered into negotiations with  the Calcutta Port Trust to set up an initially three, and eventually five, million tonnes a year Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) terminal at Kukrahati, near Haldia port. These negotiations were completed in February 2021, when the Kolkata Port Trust signed an agreement with it for a project involving an investment of Rs 3,900 core, which would yield gross revenues of around Rs 6,000 crore. The construction of the terminal has been delayed because the group proposes to use Kukrahati for supplying LNG to Bangladesh as well, and is building a 150 km pipeline for this. It is now expected to be completed by the middle of this year.

This is only one of several port and gas terminal projects being planned and executed along the east and west coasts. H-Energy, for example, is partnering with Jindal Steel Works to build an LNG terminal at Jaygarh, in Maharashtra. Essar has won a contract to build a one million tonnes per year LNG facility at Haldia port. But the biggest player in this is the Adani Group, which is building a giant facility at Dhamra port in Odisha, and actively bidding for more contracts in Andhra Pradesh, Bengal and on the west coast.

Absent from this hectic activity is Petronet, the public sector consortium consisting of the Gas Authority of India Ltd (GAIL), Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC), Indian Oil Corporation (IOCL) and Bharat Petroleum (BPCL), that set up the country’s giant LNG receiving and regasification terminal at Dahej, Gujarat, with  a nominal capacity of 17.5 MMTPA (million metric tonnes per annum), and another terminal at Kochi, Kerala with a capacity of five MMTPA. Petronet’s terminals account for around 40% gas supplies in the country and handle around two-thirds of its LNG imports. But today it is nowhere in the scene, and is at most a minor shareholder in a few of the projects that are coming up.

This shift of emphasis has taken pace entirely during the Modi era. So it is not surprising that five out of Moitra’s 91 questions have asked for details concerning the way it has been made. In these she has questioned, among other things, how the Dhamra port LNG terminal project, which began as a proposal by GAIL and ONGC, became a wholly owned Adani enterprise. These questions were posed on July 8, 2019, November 18, 2019 and December 9, 2019. Then, after a 3.5 year gap on March 16, 2023, and then only a week later on March 23, 2023. All of them centred around the way in which the public sector oil and gas companies were being pushed, or shut, out of existing and proposed projects for the construction of LNG terminals and other facilities at the ports being developed on the east and west coasts.

Most of these contracts were ending up with the Adani group. Moitra wanted to know why. To get an answer from the government, she focused on the route by which the group gained full ownership of the LNG terminal planned for Dhamra port in Odisha. Her interest had been sparked by the fact that in 2013, i.e. during the UPA’s rule, GAIL had entered into a contract with the government of Odisha to build a floating LNG terminal at the port of Paradip at a cost of Rs 2,485 crore. But in 2015, a year after the BJP came to power, it withdrew from the Paradip project and took an 11% share in a similar project at Dhamra port, also in Odisha. IOCL, another member of Petronet,  took 38%. The other 51% was to be taken by ‘an unspecified partner’. That partner turned out to be the Adani group.

That was only the beginning of the shift. Another two years later, GAIL and IOCL both withdrew from the project, leaving the Adani group the sole owner. This company then signed a 20-year contract to supply three million tonnes a year of LNG to GAIL and IOCL at Rs 60.18 per MMBtu, with an escalation clause of 5% a year. This was a ‘use or pay’ contract, in which the buyers had to pay for all of the contracted amount even if they did not lift it. Moitra claimed that with this assured return, Adani had no difficulty in roping in the French oil and gas giant, Total, as a partner. From the country’s point of view, it was a good deal. But the way in which it was engineered was all wrong.

This was admitted, perhaps unwittingly, by advocate Jai Dehadrai (Moitra’s former lover) himself in the  ‘Remarks’ column that he had added to the list that he submitted to the Ethics Committee of the questions that  Moitra had posed in Parliament. In these he accused Moitra of targeting the prime minister by asking questions that were designed to show how his government was helping the Adani group to evade the tendering process and  violate the guidelines set by the Central Vigilance Commission to acquire the Dhamra LNG project. This was being done by first getting state-owned oil and gas companies to tender for a project, and then making them withdraw in favour of Adani. This, she claimed, was a more sophisticated way of doing what his government had done earlier, to eject  GVK from the Mumbai Airport modernisation project and hand it over to the Adani group.

In his determination to punish his ex, Dehedrai went a step further and accused Moitra of repeating these allegations in her March 16 unstarred question this year in the Lok Sabha, solely in order to add to the discomfiture caused to the government by the Adani-Hindenburg exposures. In doing this he unwittingly gave the game away.

On March 16 this year, Moitra had posed the following seven-part question:

“Will the Minister of Petroleum and Natural Gas be pleased to state (a) the details  of  Indian  Oil Corporation Ltd. (IOCL) Memorandum of Undcrstanding (MoU) signed with Adani Ports and Special Economic Zone Limited at Gangavaram Port , duration  of contract, take or pay commitments along with price and volume per annum and escalations in the contract;

(b) whether this MoU bas been approved by the Board of IOCL and if so. the details there of  (c) whether there is any Government nominee on the Board of IOCL and if so, the details thereof,

(d)whether there is any transaction and if so, the Government’s approval has been taken for such transaction;

(e)whether it is true that IOCL would move its business from Vizag Port to Gangavaram Port and if so, the reasons thereof along with the charges paid to Vizag Port;

(f) whether there are any payment-related commitments at Vizag Port and if so, the details thereof; and

(g) the details of the annual payments and quantities imported by IOCL to Vizag.”

This mammoth query sealed her fate. For if the government answered it, the entire country would see that it was a repeat of what had happened at Dhamra. This would give the still-to-be-born INDIA alliance a golden opportunity to show the country how the Modi government was quietly breaking every rule and convention in order to find ways of handing over their future to a single, highly favoured industrial group, and to start asking what was the quid pro quo.

Moitra had therefore to be to be stopped from demanding an answer in parliament, which is now a televised forum that the whole country watches. The one way to do this was to find a way to expel her from the Lok Sabha. It did this by exploiting a path that she herself had opened, by her behaviour as a single, highly educated and self-confident woman who could choose her friends and lovers – everything that “traditional” Indian women have been trained, or forced, to suppress.