Chuck de Chatwal!

Aditya Sinha
First Published : 30 Jan 2010 10:58:00 PM IST
Last Updated : 29 Jan 2010 11:55:25 PM IST

On Republic Day, our government gave a Padma Bhushan to Sant Singh Chatwal, whom the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) once arrested and charged with defrauding the Bank of Baroda and the Bank of India for $9 million. Chatwal’s exploits have not been restricted to India. He was in the 1980s accused by the USA’s Securities and Exchange Commission for false filings in connection with his chain of restaurants (he settled and is forever prohibited from being an officer or a director in a public company). In 2001, a bankruptcy court in New York discharged him as bankrupt as he was involved in debts of more than $100 million (including $30 million to the internal revenue service, which was in pursuit of him). In short, he is an unsavoury fellow. Naturally, many have cried foul.

Outcries against the Padma awards are nothing new; there seems to be a controversy over the awardees every so often. One joke is that the doctor to the prime minister always gets the award (and true enough, one Padma Bhushan this year went to cardiac surgeon Ramakant Panda, who operated on Prime Minister Manmohan Singh last year). Nominating eminent persons to the awards committee is apparently no guarantee against embarrassments: this year the ex-officio members were the cabinet secretary, the home secretary, the principal secretary to the prime minister, and the culture secretary; while the “outside” members were former industry body chief Tarun Das, former nuclear chief R Chidambaram, art historian Kapila Vatsyayan and theatre giant Girish Karnad.

The government has tried to justify Chatwal’s award by saying he was a “tireless advocate” of India’s interests in the USA, and that he was “an active member of the NRI community in securing support for the nuclear deal” among members of the US Congress. This is rich. Former officials snort at the suggestion that Chatwal had anything to do with President Bill Clinton’s visit to India in 2000; Chatwal is a hanger-on of Hilary Clinton’s, and Bill was said to have kept him at arm’s length. The US’ strategic shift was the outcome of careful internal deliberation by various arms government. The suggestion that Chatwal had anything to do with the nuclear deal is even more laughable, considering the highly publicised and time-consuming efforts put in by diplomats, scientists, industrialists and politicians from both countries, not to mention the personal interest of President George W Bush himself.

Perhaps the credit for the nuclear deal is meant to distract from Chatwal’s dubious background. The indignation forced the home ministry to declare that the five CBI cases against Chatwal were closed: three by the agency itself, and two in court. That of course means little. The CBI has never exactly covered itself in glory, as in September 2009 when it stopped prosecution against Ottavio Quattrocchi in the 1980s Bofors case. The CBI closes cases for various reasons, but when it has taken the trouble of a charge-sheet and a high-profile arrest, then you would not be blamed for thinking the case was closed for political reasons. This suspicion is strengthened by the fact that Chatwal managed an acquittal in just one case, and in 2008 the CBI refused to appeal. Fortunately, the CBI has no fig-leaf to hide behind: though its officers are deputed through the home ministry, it is directly under the control of the prime minister’s office (PMO).

Incidentally, the home ministry has publicly stated that Chatwal’s nomination for the Padma awards came not from them, but from the PMO.

Furthermore, columnist Vir Sanghvi on Thursday disclosed on the micro-blogging site twitter that Chatwal’s name was not on the original list of awardees; he wondered who put it there. Vir has promised to file a Right to Information (RTI) application to find out how Chatwal was given the Padma Bhushan, though frankly one has to be sceptical about an RTI as the award deliberations are said to be casual.

Then on Friday, we were e-mailed a photo showing the PM’s principal secretary, T K A Nair, a member of the Padma awards committee, merrily standing next to Chatwal. The occasion is the April 2009 opening of Chatwal’s son Vikram’s five-star hotel in Kochi, the Dream Cochin (the third of Dream properties after New York and Bangkok). In the photo T K A Nair is seen in tight clasp with Vikram’s assistant Ursa Philbin, a former Slovenian model. (NY-based Vikram had a high-profile wedding five years ago to model Priya Sachdev, and they have a daughter. The marriage has been undergoing turbulence for some time now, and Priya and her daughter live in Delhi. Priya and her equally attractive sister Charu are said to be friends with the most eligible bachelor in town).

Nair retired as an IAS officer from the Punjab cadre, and was chosen by Manmohan Singh to be his principal secretary when the UPA came to power (he was also a secretary in the PMO under I K Gujral). Though his expertise is said to be development, he’s not a particularly impressive officer; but then he’s the only top bureaucrat whose appointment did not have the imprimatur of Congress president Sonia Gandhi.

I mention this for two reasons. Vir, who is drafting the RTI application with Pritish Nandy (who was in 1998 sent to the Rajya Sabha by the Shiv Sena), has conducted several interviews with Sonia Gandhi, otherwise an elusive politician for one-on-one interactions; thus he is perceived to have special access to her. The non-sourced photo of T K A Nair with Chatwal came from a journalist whose biography of Sonia Gandhi was published by Penguin in 2003 (with a revised edition last year). Though the book contains no interviews, it is not disclaimed as an unauthorised biography; so the biographer has access to her circle at the very least. Going by these journalists’ antipathy to Nair, the inference to be drawn is that Sonia Gandhi is less than happy with Chatwal being awarded a Padma Bhushan.

It could be that Sonia does not approve of state honours to a character with a dubious past like Chatwal. At the moment, however, the award cannot be undone, and a climber like Chatwal will never voluntarily decline the Padma Bhushan. It is also unlikely that Sonia Gandhi will ask the PM to sack T K A Nair for his indiscretion; after M K Narayanan’s move from the PMO to West Bengal’s Raj Bhawan, neither of them will have the appetite for another upheaval.

But this deep unhappiness has to mean something, and it has to find closure somewhere. And while only a fool would speculate on how this Padma award episode will eventually end, most rational persons would have to wonder whether it is a sign that 2010 will be the final year that Manmohan Singh spends in office.

editorchief@expressbuzz.com

About The Author;

Aditya Sinha is the Editor-in-Chief of The New Indian Express and is based in Chennai