Congress in belligerent mood

For the Congress, it is raining scams again — except that it is now on the offensive, as it targets four of the eight BJP Chief Ministers all embroiled in financial scandals.

For the BJP that has a slew of key laws it wishes to clear in the Monsoon Session of Parliament a fortnight away, the news is only getting worse.

Of these four Chief Ministers, three are under the scanner themselves — Rajasthan’s Vasundhara Raje in the Lalit Modi controversy, Madhya Pradesh’s Shivraj Singh Chouhan in the Vyapam scandal that has seen the accused and witnesses in the case dying under mysterious circumstances and Chattisgarh’s Raman Singh in the PDS scam.

The fourth, Maharashtra’s Devendra Fadnavis, finds himself in the unhappy position of defending two ministerial colleagues, Pankaja Munde and Vinod Tawde, who have been accused of corruption.

If in Ms. Raje’s case, the affidavit that she sent to the British authorities in support of scam-tainted former IPL commissioner Lalit Modi referred to a period when she was not in power, Mr. Chavan and Mr. Singh do not have similar excuses.

Indeed, the irregularities that have surfaced in the Madhya Pradesh Professional Examination Board and that in the PDS in Chattisgarh both belie the BJP’s poll promise of providing transparent governance.

This has provided the Congress with a golden opportunity and the party has seized it, as it holds daily briefings to drive the message home.

Success at last

For the MP contingent in the Congress, it is success at last. The Vyapam scam came to light in 2008, and the Congress has been raising it at press conferences since 2009 but with little impact — till recently, when the issue finally caught fire after a series of mysterious deaths surfaced.

The Congress now has been also able to point out that the suspicious deaths are neither the subject matter of ongoing Vyapam inquiry nor part of any judicial order “contrary to what has been wrongly projected by Mr. Chouhan”.

Will Congress keep the momentum?

It is this that has emboldened the Congress to take up the PDS scam at a press conference last week. It is especially damaging for Mr. Raman Singh whose image as “Chawal Baba” has seen him sail through several elections. The challenge for the Congress, of course, is to keep the heat on the BJP without inviting criticism for the many scandals that rocked the UPA government it led between 2004 and 2014.