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Second take on Sharma

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!

EARLIER COLUMN:
Without naming names

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T V R Shenoy