At the end of the day, Stalin expressing solidarity with an arrested colleague is one thing, especially if he too felt that the minister had been wronged, but for him to retain the person in office sets a bad precedent, which would not go unnoticed by voters, points out N Sathiya Moorthy.
The jail journey of Tamil Nadu's Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam Minister V Senthil Bajali is ironical.
The Enforcement Directorate has arrested him for alleged corruption when he was an All India Anna DMK minister in the state and was originally charged by another AIADMK government.
His present boss and DMK Chief Minister M K Stalin, then Leader of the Opposition, wanted him arrested and penalised -- but is now defending him to the hilt.
Yet, there is no way anyone can do much about it as the ED has drawn its power this time from the Supreme Court -- and lower courts will look askance if they jump the gun without substantive supporting material that may just not be available to them at this stage.
Whatever legal and political issues it may have flagged elsewhere in the country and even in the state's echelons, at the street-level in Tamil Nadu, it is not even about corruption, arrest and hospitalisation as Senthil Balaji pleaded 'chest pain' and was found to be harbouring three blocks in the heart.
It was confirmed by two government(s) medical teams -- one of them supposedly representing the ED -- have confirmed that the minister required coronary bypass surgery.
Instead, the street concern, if any, is about Stalin's 'Mr Clean' image thus far, taking a beating. Despite the Opposition AIADMK-Bharatiya Janata Party's continued attempts to sully his image, Stalin has held his head above water, if not high.
But by visiting a colleague arrested for alleged corruption, even in hospital, and also his implied refusal to drop him until proven guilty by the courts and the overnight withdrawal of 'standing consent' for the Central Bureau of Investigation to investigate cases, on the lines of some of the other Opposition-ruled states, have all caused eyebrows to rise.
Whether it will have consequences for next year's Lok Sabha polls, which is what both sides are playing at, remains to be seen, however.
In connection with the hospitalisation, it is not known how authorities at the Government Hospital in Omandurar, Chennai -- where the ED admitted Senthil Balaji after he complained of chest-pain -- allowed their VIP patient to be disturbed by a drove of visitors, starting with the CM, all at one go.
Yet, in an earlier incident of the kind, when then AIADMK chief minister J Jayalalithaa visited another VIP patient in a private hospital and the super-speciality doctor in the room asked her to leave her footwear outside, as is the norm and routine, the management gave him the boot instead.
At 47, Senthil Balaji is still on record the minister for electricity and excise in the Stalin government. Both ministries are inherently controversial in their own ways, as both are ridden with possibilities for high-end corruption and equal failures in implementation and enforcement. Their work also has grassroots-level reach, hence are ridden with constant operational complaints of every kind.
For this reason alone, they are also the most unlikely of departments to be given to the common care of a single minister, however efficient.
Jaya started with Senthil Balaji in the twin ministries for a time, and Stalin followed up on the same path after the other man had crossed over to the DMK, possibly seeking much-needed 'political cover'.
This is despite the fact that for nine long years, Prime Minister Narendra D Modi has been carrying out similar experiments at the Centre, with mixed results at best. For instance, the gruesome Odisha triple train accident brought out how Minister of State Ashwini Vaishnav was shouldering the ministries of railways, communication and also electronics and information technology -- each one of them a behemoth by itself.
But all parallels should end there.
The ED case against Senthil Balaji should not be confused with the recent IT raids on him and those associated with him. They are separate cases and run on a parallel track -- and possibly owes to BJP state President K Annamalai's charge that government-owned monopoly retail liquor shops under TASMAC, across the state, were collecting Rs 10 per bottle under the table, to be passed on to the higher-ups. The social media presumption was that it went to fund the ruling DMK, too, in some way or the other.
The ED arrest instead flows from an earlier corruption charge when Senthil Balaji (A-1) was transport minister under Jayalalithaa. His secretary Shanmugam (A-4) was alleged to have collected money for the appointment of conductors and mechanics in the state's nine transport corporations, and had allegedly sent out messages, that too from the minister's official e-mail account.
When some of those in Shanmugam's e-mails moved the Madras high court saying they had bribed but were cheated, the court ordered investigations by the state police. In the campaign for the 2016 assembly polls which the AIADMK won before Jaya's death in December that year, Stalin cited the pending case and demanded action against Senthil Balaji.
It is now anybody's guess if Annamalai, while purportedly talking about 'Jayalalithaa's corruption' in a newspaper interview earlier this week also implied such possibilities being exposed if and when the incumbent minister was properly interrogated.
Of course, it would have to be in addition to Senthil Balaji possibly implicating his current boss and his family -- as hoped for by state BJP social media activists in particular.
The legal safety valve, if at all any, for Senthil Balaji may be is if he could prove to the satisfaction of the court that he was not in the habit of using or watching his e-mail account, and his secretary had misused and abused it.
Can he then escape vicarious liability postulated under section 13 (b), or any other provision of the Prevention of Corruption Act, is the question then for the courts to answer.
The hollowness of their legal counsel showed when Shanmugam struck a deal with some of those who had moved the high court, and together they filed a 'quash petition', declaring that the bribe money was returned and there was no further complaint.
That was only months after the Stalin government came to power in May 2021. The state police did not contest the 'deal' and the high court disposed off the case, quashing the pending proceedings.
It was then that another aggrieved party moved the Supreme Court, challenging the high court's quash order. In September last, the apex court quashed the high court's quash order, restored the investigation by the state police under the Prevention of Corruption Act and asked it to report progress.
It also ordered the ED to revive the investigations based on a reference to money-laundering made in the original charge-sheet of the state police -- but otherwise stalled by the high court.
As may be recalled, the ED started the probe, but the state police stalled. In the course of further hearing in the matter, the Supreme Court ticked off the police and said it would not hesitate to appoint a supervisory group to follow up on the investigations.
In all this, the Supreme Court found prima facie evidence in the form of admission of guilt by A-4 Shanmugam in his joint quash petition before the high court. The Supreme Court also pointed out that the Prevention of Corruption Act did not condone such deals for courts to quash investigations under the Act.
So, what is the charge of 'political vendetta' being hurled at the BJP's Modi-Shah duo at the Centre, by the DMK and its allies and other friendly parties at the national level?
One, the political atmosphere has been so vitiated by endless inquiries and arrests of the kind over the past nine years of the Modi government that the charge sticks very easily.
It sticks even more when the ED, IT or the CBI do not see through those cases in the courts, to arrive at a reasonable conclusion, particularly conviction.
The possible reason (mostly administrative) is that the central agencies are fixing who all they can in the first round. They can leisurely move on to the trial stage when they have time on their hand.
As events turn out, as long as the accused get bail, however interim from a court of law, he too is not too worried for or is interested in an early trial. Some of them may even be happy for the trial never to be taken up in their lifetime, and for obvious reasons.
If someone says that 'arrest-and-forget' is the political strategy that the BJP Centre has been employing to embarrass Opposition parties and harass those thus personally affected -- including families and friends -- they may not be entirely wrong.
It also gets the party brownie points in politico-electoral terms, especially in matters of fighting corruption, its major agenda-point for the victorious elections way back in 2014.
Clearly, the BJP and the DMK have pulled off their gloves for the first time since Stalin came to power and drew a distinctive line between Centre-state administrative cooperation on the one hand, and political rivalry, deriving from inherent ideological differences, on the other.
This also owes to the BJP's overwhelming desire, both by the state and central leaderships, to assert itself and its Hindutva agenda in the Dravidian electoral bastion, the only socio-political space that they have not been able to bust even remotely across the country.
If they cannot do it now, when the charismatic Jaya and wily Karunanidhi are dead and gone, and the likes of Stalin and the AIADMK's EPS are seen only as one-election wonders by the BJP especially, the ruling party at the Centre may not have another chance on hand.
Or, so goes their perceptions, plans and plots. 'Muddying the good name' of leaders, whether friend or foe, whether Jayalalithaa or Senthil Balaji, helps. Or, so goes the argument.
Why then Senthil Balaji?
As may be recalled, after Annamalai charged the minister with large-scale corruption last year (as different from his 'DMK files' recently), Balaji did not lose time when the controversy over the former's high-end Rafale wrist-watch became the talking point some months ago. Some BJP leaders too believe that Balaji was the source of those watch-rumours' (possibly backed by facts) as the Rafale cost was/is put at between Rs 3.5 lakh and Rs 5 lakh (Rs 350,000 to Rs 500,000).
Truth be acknowledged, Annamalai's much-delayed and equally promised explanation about the source of funding, etc, for purchasing the Rafale watch, did not convince many. It raised more questions -- all of them uncomfortable.
Some DMK sources want to know if the raid was also an attempt to teach other DMK critics of the BJP a lesson and push them into a silent mode in the year-long run-up to the Lok Sabha polls. Or, if someone expected details of the Rafale watch deal too in Balaji's personal files?
In the coming days, too, the DMK, through the habeas corpus petition filed by Balaji's wife Megala, would continue to seek expanding the scope of the Enforcement Directorate investigations and court cases, by questioning the procedure adopted during their raids and arrest.
Before a high court bench hearing the petition, Balaji's lawyers have argued that neither the family, nor the assembly speaker, was informed of the arrest in time and in the format prescribed under the law.
The ED has contested it, but it seems as unconvincing as Balaji's defence otherwise.
Incidentally, this is the first time in such cases involving Opposition leaders across the country that any petitioner has sought to shift the blame from the political leadership to (individual) central officials, these from the ED, for now.
The message may sound one of intimidation, but it is also one of caution: 'Play (only) by the rule-book or you may have to pay, another way, another time, also under the law.'
About the accompanying question as to the propriety of the ED violating the state government secretariat's precinct and raiding the minister's office inside without prior intimation and permission, at least a part of the blame, if any, should lie with state government officials.
As is known, at no point during the secretariat raid did anyone in his official capacity (or, even otherwise) protest and challenge the ED officials nor were they shown the door to come back after obtaining the required permission letter.
Yet, another question, which could be basic, is about the ED getting into investigating the 'corruption case' against Balaji and others, without talking anymore about the money-laundering charge against him. Even the arrests seem to have been effected not under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA), but under the Prevention of Corruption Act.
The question is if the PMLA provides for the same. If so, what does the Supreme Court want the state police to do in relation to the corruption part of the 2014 case, especially if the ED is already seized of the matter.
It could well mean that even the involvement of the CBI, if directed to take over the corruption case, may become superfluous as they may only be duplicating the ED's work.
For now, the ED had summoned a sessions judge to the hospital, and he had ordered a 15-day judicial custody for Balaji, implying that he would be out of reach for the investigators.
Officials of the state government's Puzhal prison, off Chennai, took control of the minister's hospital ward. The ED has since moved the court seeking his custody for them for interrogation, especially in reference to statement already made by other accused and witnesses.
Compared to all these, the state government and the DMK too should ask themselves if their sudden bar on the CBI to investigate cases without specific permission -- something that Jaya too had done in her time as CM -- would and could apply to those ordered by the Supreme Court, or the high court, if it came to that.
At the end of the day, Stalin expressing solidarity with an arrested colleague is one thing, especially if he too felt that the minister had been wronged, but for him to retain the person in office sets a bad precedent, which would not go unnoticed by voters even in the last hamlet in the state.
<p=>Likewise, the decision to withdraw general consent for the CBI too has sent out a message that the ruling party may have something to hide. It is so even if it would have otherwise meant that the BJP-ruled Centre might be using its investigating agencies, here too, to harass individual leaders and embarrass the ruling party and its allies too, possibly, that too in an election year.
But will it have enough meat in it to offset the BJP's Hindutva image in the Dravidian heartland is what might end up deciding the 2014 elections in Tamil Nadu with its 39 seats and Puducherry as its loner.
N Sathiya Moorthy, veteran journalist and author, is a Chennai-based policy analyst and political commentator.
