Khursheed Points Out The Greyness Of Graft

No political party could possibly keep accounts of all the sources of its funds - for the simple reason that, half the time, parties like the Congress did not know who was in the party and who was not, he said.

People don't hand over party offices when they leave the party, why would they hand over account books, he asked, amid peals of laughter at one of the sessions of the Euromoney-sponsored conference yesterday.

In a disarmingly frank interjection during the round table on Indian political trends, Khursheed reported that he and 200,000 others had witnessed Mayawati, the Congress's chief ministerial candidate in UP, receiving Rs 12 lakh in cash at a rally the previous day, and added that income tax laws did not permit one to handle more than Rs 10,000 at one time.

 

In this strange world of contradictions, he said, you find money at one place, you prosecute, you find it in another, you don't. A Lok Pal would do no more good, he predicted, than the Lok Ayuktas in states had.

Asked how long he thought PV Narasimha Rao would remain his party's leader, Khursheed said the CPP had consistently supported Rao and that an AICC in the next few months would support him in overwhelming numbers.

The problem with those who were challenging him was that none of them was addressing the issues of governance, he said. He reminded his audience that a leader as powerful as Indira Gandhi had twice been expelled from the party.

Khursheed spoke of the danger of Muslims, particularly in UP, being used to prop up most unwholesome groups and forces, adding that if one killed 14 Thakurs in Behmai, one became an MP, but one went to jail if one killed one person in Vasant Kunj.

You don't vote, Khursheed complained to the chief executives and other corporate figures there, and those who did vote thought we are backwards, we are forwards, we are sideways, and so on.

Asian Age Editor MJ Akbar said the Congress had lost ground because it had stopped standing for the consensus on India's social and cultural ethos by failing to defend one mosque.