:: COBRA POST

Operation Duryodhana
A COBRAPOST-AAJTAK investigation unearths 11 MPs accepting cash to table questions in the Indian Parliament.
By Aniruddha Bahal

The MPs who took money for putting questions in the Indian Parliament are:

Narendra Kushwaha (BSP) Rs 55,000
Anna Saheb M.K. Patil (BJP) Rs 45,000
Dr Chhatrapal Singh Lodha (BJP) Rs 15,000
Y.G. Mahajan (BJP) Rs 35,000
Manoj Kumar (RJD) Rs 110,000
Suresh Chandel (BJP) Rs 30,000
Raja Ram Pal (BSP) Rs 35,000
Lal Chandra Kol (BJP) Rs 35,000
Pradeep Gandhi (BJP) Rs 55,000
Chandra Pratap Singh (BJP) Rs 35,000
Ramsevak Singh (Congress) Rs 50,000


There were seven principal middlemen, namely, Harish Badola, Chandrabhan Gupta, M.K. Tripathi (alias Chotiwala), Mohan Mani, Dinesh Chandra, Ravinder Kumar, Vijay, and some others. While Harish was our conduit to three BJP MPs (Anna Saheb M.K. Patil, Y.G. Mahajan and Chhatrapal Singh Lodha), Gupta introduced us to three MPs (Lal Chandra Kol and Narendra Khushwaha of the BSP and Chandra Pratap Singh of the BJP), Mohan Mani lead us to one (BJP MP Pradeep Gandhi), Vijay took us to two MPs (Ramsevak Singh of the Congress and Suresh Chandel of the BJP), and Ravinder Kumar (BSP’s Raja Ram Pal) and Chotiwala (RJD’s Manoj Kumar) to one MP each. Dinesh was the middleman who sent us across to four other middlemen—Gupta, Vijay, Ravinder and Mohan. And it was Gupta who introduced us to Chotiwala and Harish. A dangerous rivalry broke out between Gupta and Dinesh in May when Dinesh came to know that Gupta was undercutting and double crossing him by introducing us to MPs without his knowledge putting the whole operation in peril. But more of that later.

The question given to Khushwaha in this first meeting, for submitting in the Lok Sabha, is about the working of so-called five star hospitals and their rather exorbitant fee structure.

In the meeting with the NISMA’s director, Kushwaha is a goldmine of information. He tells us that commission for MPs in the MPLAD (Member of Parliament Local Area Development) scheme is around 10 per cent (each MP gets a sum of Rs 2 crore every year to spend in his constituency any which way he deems fit).

Patil, the BJP MP from Maharashtra, was minister of state for rural development in the NDA government. In his words he is a technocrat. An alumnus of IIT Kanpur (“Ist ranked”), he claims to be a sworn critic of political corruption. While initially Patil was given a tsunami related question

Whether the Railway Ministry has placed any order for purchase of the Yossarian Electro Diesel engine from Germany? Is the ministry aware that the Tom Wolfe committee report in Germany has halted its induction into the Euro Rail system?


Whether the Government has given sanction for the seed trial of Salinger Cotton of Monsanto? If so, has a report been prepared on Catch 22 cotton so far?


Has the ministry lifted the 1962 ban it imposed on the book “For whom the Bell Tolls” by Ernest Hemingway and the 1975 ban on Ken Kesey’s book “One Flew Over a Cuckoo’s Nest” and Hunter Thomson’s book “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”? If so, when were the bans removed?


Whether the government is aware that a domestic flying license has been denied to Cobra Cargo for starting operations in India? Since when has Semper Sursum Private Limited, the holding company of Cobra Cargo, applied for the domestic cargo license?

For those of you wondering about the methodology of Operation Duryodhana in reaching out to MPs it will be pertinent to say that the COBRAPOST team essentially went where the middlemen took us. So the particular configuration of MPs that finally emerged had all to do with the particular middlemen that the team came into contact with. If it had been a different set of middlemen, the configuration of MPs would obviously have reflected that.

s it true that while NRI firms such as India Uncut of USA, Sepia Mutiny of Britain and AnarCap Lib of Netherlands have been allowed to invest in Indian SSIs, the reputed German investment firm Desipundit has been denied permission? If so, the reasons thereof? Is the Union Government of India planning to make automatic the long procedure of permission for SSIs to import new technologies such as Trackbacks, Pingbacks, Blogrolls, Splogs and Hitcounters?

While nearly all the questions had a public interest element in them, some, like the one above, were passed on to the MPs with the intention of showing how easy it was for amateur teams to infiltrate the system and get bogus questions submitted in the balloting process. While, in this case, these were harmless, humour inducing efforts, in the hands of powerful lobbies this power acquires a sinister dimension. It is important to note some MPs like Kushwaha, Ram Pal and Gandhi even promised to put in questions “to harass” NISMA’s enemies.

Hidden cameras and politicians are an incompatible, though entertaining, combination. Sucking the air for video, the cameras can acquire evangelical powers. By simply amalgamating sounds and images into facts they can etch the spiritual poverty of Indian politics. They can also furnish the nation with the itinerary of graft: how some Members of Parliament after having come to power use it to convert every due privilege into the all consummate act of making money.



Strikingly, according to an estimate by Transparency International India (TII) in June 2005, ordinary Indians paid Rs 21,068 crore as bribes while availing one or more of 11 public services in a year. These are: police (crime/traffic), judiciary, land administration, municipal services, government-run hospitals, electricity supply, public distribution system, income tax, water supply, schools and rural financial institutions—in that order.

With 14405 respondents this survey by TI India was one of the biggest corruption studies in India. While India ranks 88th on the corruption index listing 158 countries, Jammu and Kashmir and Bihar are the most corrupt states in India and Delhi is ranked higher than Uttar Pradesh when it comes to corruption.



The report relates just to petty corruption and is not about large scale corruption where public funds are siphoned off as NPAs, or where commissions line the pockets of politicians in defence deals. There are also some reports that suggest that eliminating or minimising corruption would boost India’s GDP by 1.5 per cent.


(The writer headed the COBRAPOST investigation called Operation Duryodhana. The story, which broke in AAJ TAK, was co-authored by SUHASINI RAJ. The investigation was also assisted by KUMAR BAADAL.)