Who keeps Rs 300 crores in cash lying around in one’s house, office or factory? Certainly not a legitimate businessperson. And what about if that person is also a politician? So, what is to be said about the Congress Rajya Sabha MP from Jharkhand, Dhiraj Sahu, who also happens to be a liquor baron? At the very least, it is a case of massive tax evasion. The vast amount accumulated and stored indicates he is a habitual offender. He has operations in Odisha and Jharkhand. If he is merely dodging excise duty, he very probably has a vast network that supplies liquor illicitly to prohibition bound Bihar. Since these earnings would be near impossible to launder, particularly in the present day, the compulsion is to hold it in cash.
This would make him and his cohorts major league criminals. Such networks cannot function without utilising ‘enforcers’ of various kinds, which indicates serious criminality. Investigations, if conducted properly, should uncover the crimes of violence associated with this racket. Even such superficial speculation implies that the indictment sheet would be pretty long, requiring punishment under many sections of the law.
It is not as if he has won an election to the Lok Sabha on the basis of personal clout. He is a Congress nominee to the Rajya Sabha, which is a higher level of political endorsement requiring approval of the High Command. Were his party cohorts unaware of his activities? Or, did he buy his way in by making precious funds available to the party? It would not be the first, nor the last time for this to happen in Indian politics. Remember how a party fighting on the probity platform suddenly pulled out Rajya Sabha candidates never heard of before, while ditching senior leaders who had worked hard to bring it to power? Kumar Vishwas, Yogendra Yadav, etc., can shed further light on that story.
In Sahu’s case, the Congress High Command remains totally unembarrassed about the revelations. There has been no action, thus far, against Sahu probably because alienating him could let a massive cat out of the bag. It also says a lot about India’s political culture that nobody is shocked or surprised. All such incidents trigger off is a lot of whataboutery. The cynical belief is that everybody is involved in such accumulation of funds. It will certainly be some time before black money ceases to be an essential component of political functioning and patronage. Till then, the amounts uncovered will grow even larger and not just to keep up with inflation.
