Prosecute the vadras and clear the air

Prosecute the vadras and clear the air

That is how to establish guilt or innocence.
By now, it is part of the political common sense that committees or commissions of inquiry are instituted when the authorities want to take no immediate action and seek to diffuse the public pressure to act. But committees and commissions also serve another purpose: to keep an issue alive, without resolving it either way. This serves no public good. Alleged acts of political crime deserve to be investigated with dispatch and the guilty punished with exemplary severity, and the innocent spared the calumny of undeserved suspicion. This principle must apply in the case against Robert Vadra, husband of Priyanka Gandhi, with regard to land deals in Haryana when the UPA led the government at the Centre.
Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad is reported to have said that the UPA government knew about many misdeeds of BJP leaders but refrained from taking action against them. If he thought he was taking credit for political magnanimity, he made a mistake. If what he said is right, the UPA government was negligent and patronised the Opposition. Honour among thieves is not what the people want in democracy. Thieves must be punished.If Robert Vadra's purchase and sale of land parcels had anything illegal about them, he and those in the administrative apparatus and the political leadership that supervised the administrative apparatus must be punished. If there was nothing illegal about those transactions, that must be established. To conclusively prove either, the government of Haryana must prosecute Robert Vadra for his alleged crimes immediately. If his wife and daughter of Congress president Sonia Gandhi, Priyanka, was a partner in crime, she too must be penalised. But if either of them is innocent, it would be gross violation of their rights if they are denied a chance to establish their lack of guilt.
The straightforward solution is to frame charges against the Vadras and prosecute them and allow the due process of the law to establish their culpability or the lack of it. What India does not require is the politics of innuendo and lingering suspicion.