Her son has met with an accident. She must fly to Dubai
immediately but needs a new passport." Who would have
thought that those seemingly innocent words would open
up a new chapter in the ongoing saga of Romesh Sharma?
Investigators found those lines jotted on a file in the
regional passport office in Delhi. There is nothing
wrong, of course, if a bureaucrat chooses to display a
little humanity in the midst of the daily grind. And
nobody would have objected to a desperate mother flying
to her ailing son's bedside even if her passport
application was being attended to at Romesh Sharma's
request.
No, what intrigues investigators is the identity of that
supposedly wounded son -- no less than Dawood Ibrahim
himself. There is, of course, sufficient proof of Romesh
Sharma's involvement with Dawood, so his role in getting
his master's mother out of India came as no surprise.
What makes the case assume new importance is the fact
that the passport became available in as little as 12
hours!
As anyone who has tried to get a passport can testify,
this is unusually good going. Even ministerial
recommendations take a little time to be processed. In
other words, Sharma's links extended deep into the
bowels of the bureaucracy. To return to that passport
application, it seems absolutely no thought was given by
the officer whose notation I quoted at the beginning.
He doesn't seem to have asked the lady who her son was.
He asked for no proof of the supposed injury. He didn't
even take the elementary precaution of checking the
lady's identity as given in her old passport, one made
out in Bombay. If he had bothered to pick up the phone
and speak to someone in Bombay, it would have been
immediately clear that the lady was a vital link to one
of the most wanted men in India.
Who is responsible for this remarkably fast, even more
remarkably shoddy job? Not the old lady herself, nor the
two men, both hale and hearty, who accompanied her. It
isn't even Romesh Sharma; while he could get things
moving, he wouldn't have known precisely which papers
needed to be shuffled.
But it wasn't just the regional passport office which
bent over backwards to accommodate Romesh Sharma. If
getting hold of a new passport wasn't enough, how about
having a helicopter registered in your name in no time?
Well, that's what Sharma managed.
If someone tried to lay his hands on an imported car, it
would take weeks of running around. So how did Sharma do
it in just two days?
Were there orders from higher authorities, perhaps even
the very highest? This happened when H D Deve Gowda was
the prime minister and C M Ibrahim headed civil
aviation. But, as members of the Vajpayee ministry are
learning, there are a hundred tricks the bureaucracy can
employ to divert or delay decisions it doesn't approve
of.
It all comes down to the same thing: no matter how many
politicians were friends/associates/clients of Romesh
Sharma, he couldn't have got away with what he did
unless a large section of the civil service was also in
cahoots with him.
As it happens, proof that civil servants were
hand-in-hand with Romesh Sharma is not hard to find.
Sharma kept the telephone numbers of his contacts very
carefully. Investigators say it reads like a directory
of the government of India -- not just passport
officials, but also policemen and tax authorities!
Frankly, the only question is to what extent officials
helped him on their own and how much aid was given due
to political pressure. Going back to that incredibly
rapid grant of a fresh passport, who precisely gave the
orders?
In 1975, Jayaprakash Narayan said officials shouldn't
blindly obey illegal orders. For his pains, JP was
jailed and Indira Gandhi clamped down the Emergency.
Unfortunately, the Loknayak's message was ignored after
democracy was restored. Now, India has a second chance
to teach bureaucrats to keep their noses clean.
Historical postscript: many years after the Emergency,
the Rajiv Gandhi era Congress came down heavily on the
Sanjay Vichar Manch (named for a 'hero' of that dark
1975-77 period). One of the demolition experts used was
Romesh Sharma. He joined the Congress after dissolving
the Sanjay Vichar Manch -- but not before he had
expelled Maneka Gandhi, widow of the man for whom it was
named!