The power of one

HE WAS THE original hothead. Diminutive and stocky, Satyendra Kumar Jain, who passed away on July 19, 2008, at a ripe old age of 84 years, was an angry old man. A businessman till he chucked everything to fight the system that in his reckoning was a captive of the criminal economic mafia, Jain had little patience for those who did not share his worldview. Tenacious with great self-belief, he got down to shaking up the polity almost single-handedly. This is a story not known to many and it is in order that Jain's contribution be put into perspective after his death.
I was one of Jain's skeptics the day he came to my office in August 1991- in those days I was bureau chief of Blitz newsmagazine. He sought me after I did a front- page scoop on "multi-crore hawala scandals" that detailed pay-offs to politicians, bureaucrats and public sector managers. In my book that I later wrote on the scandal Bad Money Bad Politics- The Untold Hawala Story, I recounted the first impressions of Jain when he gingerly came to my office: "My visitor asked me whether it was safe for him to talk with me in the office. He asked me individually about my teleprinter operator, my peons and all those people whom I could trust with my life. It was only later that I discovered that this was a carefully cultivated devise to make me curious about what was to follow, and also to make me an unwilling accomplice to what many would think subversive thinking." Carrying my article like a medieval scroll, he said: "You do not know what you have done." Then he began to sketch out the implications of the scam that I had exposed. To say the least, his understanding of the scandal that I had scooped far exceeded that of mine. I wrote in my book, "Either this man with small slits as eyes was pulling a fast one on me or, if what he was saying was true, then the country was being ruled by khadi clad marionettes who did not know who was pulling the strings."
Jain then slowly began to draw the capillaries that had drained the Indian State. Every name that he mentioned of people who comprised the economic mafia of this country were icons of new India. They were businessmen who had prospered in the licence permit raj and prospered at the expense of India's public sector. Later, they took advantage of the country's economic liberalisation policies and became humongous. He claimed that his allegations were based on his first- hand experience as a businessman who had to deal with politicians, bureaucrats and big corporate houses. He also claimed that Indian capital was still tied with the British after all these years of independence and they manipulated the country's economic and foreign policies. He was of the view that the economic mafia's main purpose was to prevent political stability and create an environment in which only coalition governments could come to power and have to lean heavily on the economic mafia. In his reckoning, the mafia felt cramped when Rajiv Gandhi got a big majority in Parliament. The corruption scandals that were slapped on him and subsequently his assassination, in his reckoning, were the handiwork of the mafia.
Jain decided to take the hawala scandal exposed by me to its logical conclusion. Every morning he would get out in his beat up blue Maruti car and obsessively garner support for his cause. He got people like socialist leader Madhu Limaye to follow up on my article on the scam. Jain also got a video magazine owner to collect evidence against those who had taken bribes from a businessman and then took the matter to the Supreme Court. His exertions with the help of columnist Rajinder Puri and journalist Vineet Narain later enjoyed the court's backing resulting in the resignation of many ministers in the PV Narasimha Rao government and changed the contours of Indian politics in 1996. Satyendra Kumar Jain proved that there was indeed substance in the power of one if an individual was fearless and had the strength of conviction.