Mining scams come back to haunt ex-Karnataka CMs Dharam Singh & Kumaraswamy

Challenge for Siddaramaiah

Faced with desertions from his party, including that of Krishna, who recently joined the BJP after being with the Congress for 46 years, the constitution of the SIT will be an interesting challenge for Chief Minister Siddaramaiah.

He would probably have loved to have seen Krishna's name also being included in the probe. While Kumaraswamy is a political rival but a potential ally, should the election throw up a hung Assembly, octogenarian Dharam Singh is veteran party MP from Bidar Lok Sabha constituency.

Joseph and Hegde's charges

Joseph, who has been pursuing the cases relentlessly, had earlier obtained an order from a lower court for the registration of FIRs against all three – Krishna, Dharam Singh and Kumaraswamy. This order was unsuccessfully challenged in the High Court, but the accused approached the Supreme Court to get it stayed.

In Joseph's complaint, Krishna, who was Chief Minister between 1999 and 2004, is accused No.1. While Justice Santosh Hegde, the then-Lokayukta whose voluminous report on the mining scam in Karnataka opened the Pandora's Box, had not named Krishna, the other two former CMs had been named.

Hegde had later clarified that though vast tracts of forest lands had been leased out during Krishna's term, he had no conclusive proof against the former CM as the mines and geology department had refused to part with the relevant files.

The Supreme Court Bench had also relied on one 'Gaikwad report', which said though Krishna was in office between 1999 and 2004 when several thousand acres of forest land was denotified, “he was hoodwinked by the bureaucrats”. It led to the court to conclude that “the veracity of the allegations against accused No.1 is not sustained”.

Joseph, who compiled information from a series of RTI applications, however, contends that the three former CMs “connived with several bureaucrats and others in the deregulation of 11,797 sq km of forests” in Bellary district, and permitted illegal mining of iron ore and bauxite.

Senior IAS officers, some of whom have now retired, named by the Lokayukta and Joseph's complaint as accused are: Gangaram Baderia, Basappa Reddy, IR Perumal, Jija Harisingh, Mahendra Jain, KS Manjunath, Ramappa, Shankarlingiah and V Umesh.

Justice Hegde had calculated that illegal mining in the state had caused a loss of Rs 12,200 crore to the exchequer, and had recommended that the prosecution should press for recovery of four times the amount from the accused.

But, the progress of investigation and prosecution of the accused in the mining scam so far does not give too much hope that the guilty will be punished and the loot recovered from them.

BJP not blemish-free either

The illegal mining saga reached its peak during BS Yeddyurappa-led BJP regime from 2008 to 2011, with his rapacious ministerial colleague, N Janardhana Reddy, turning kingpin.

Reddy's companies mined millions of tonnes of ore and allegedly illegally exported it to China, as the official machinery turned a blind eye.

Yeddyurappa resigned as CM after the Lokayukta indicted his government, and after the CBI took up investigation at the behest of the Supreme Court. Janaradhana Reddy was put behind bars for four years, getting bail only in 2016.

While some cases are still proceeding at a snail's pace, Reddy got major relief from the Karnataka High Court just a fortnight ago on 14 March, when the court set aside the proceedings initiated by the Enforcement Directorate.

The division bench, headed by Chief Justice Kamal Mukherjee, who raised eyebrows a couple of months ago by informing the open court that someone had tried to bribe him, quashed the proceedings against Reddy, his wife, Lakshmi Aruna, and their two mining companies, Obulapuram Mining and Brahmini Industries.

Crucially, the court also ordered the ED to release their attached properties and assets worth Rs 900 crore on technical grounds. The court held that the attachment of properties under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) under 'scheduled offences' was permitted from 2009 onwards, while the alleged offence took place in 2007.

The ED's plea that the process of attachment was a civil action and hence the PMLA could be invoked retrospectively was rejected by the court.

On the other hand, Yeddyurappa, who spent 21 days in jail initially, also got major relief last October in the Rs 40 crore illegal gratification case, allegedly received from a mining company, as the CBI Special Court acquitted him, his two sons and son-in-law, citing 'lack of sufficient evidence'.

In taking up the cases against Kumaraswamy and Dharam Singh now, it remains to be seen whether the Supreme Court will reverse this trend.