Editor's note: While the Congress is making an issue of corruption in Karnataka under the BJP ahead of the assembly elections on May 5, with Rahul Gandhi specifically alleging that the saffron party won the polls in 2008 with help of the Bellary brothers, we take a look back at how brothers' 'rule'  was broken. This story appeared in the February 16-28 issue of Governance Now magazine.

It may appear rather simplistic to say that all it required was a lathi to bring a “republic” back under the Indian Constitution. But it is true to a large extent. After close to two years, it can now be safely said that the “Republic of the Reddys” is today fully under the control of the Republic of India.

For those who may have forgotten in the maze of scams that has surfaced over the last couple of years, the Republic of the Reddys covered the iron ore-rich districts of Bellary and Hospet in Karnataka. It was initially called the “Republic of Bellary” by justice Santosh Hegde, Karnataka’s lokayukta, who soon corrected himself to replace Bellary with the Reddys.

And the lathi was used by no less a person than the district’s top official, the deputy commissioner, to take control of a law and order situation.
Bellary was a district where rule of law was replaced by “rule is law”. The reference is clearly to the rules that mining czar and former Karnataka BJP minister Gali Janardhan Reddy implemented through his mafia operation. The rule led to unprecedented illegal mining, resulting in a revenue loss of '3,414.45 crore to Karnataka and heavily affecting the GDP in a critical slowdown year.

It is not as if the lathi, snatched from the hands of a constable by deputy commissioner Amlan Biswas on September 15, 2011, was never used in Bellary from 2006 till then; or from the time the Reddy mafia took charge of the district. But the fear of the unknown always existed during Reddys’ reign. This fear enveloped not just officials but also the people, mute witnesses to the rape of their district, as hundreds of trucks transported illegally-mined iron ore to ports within Karnataka and to the neighbouring states of Goa and Andhra Pradesh. The demand from a mineral-hungry China was that huge.

So when Amlan Biswas used the lathi on Reddys’ man and local corporator Diwakar, who led a mob to ransack the deputy commissioner’s office the day Janardhan Reddy was arrested, the message went across the district faster than electricity. Biswas had found four computers in the district headquarters smashed by Reddys’ supporters as the police stood watching. In his anger, he snatched a lathi from one of the constables present and chased away Reddy’s supporters from the complex.

He was walking, armed with the lathi, in the corridors of the building, housing the office of the assistant commissioner, when 30-40 motorbike-borne men entered the corridor. At the head of this gang was Diwakar, who drove his bike right between the legs of the deputy commissioner. Biswas had to hold the handle bar of the bike to stop it. That is when the JNU-educated bureaucrat decided to do something that any film director would love his hero to do.
He got hold of Diwakar by his collar and raised the lathi to bring down the arrogance of power and money. It was clearly an action in self-defence. But its ramifications were larger — the rule of law was being enforced by the district authority. The shocked expression on the faces of others on the accompanying motorbikes, and their resultant stupor, was an opportune moment for the police to arrest the troublemakers.
Biswas’s action sent several clear-cut messages.

The first was to the motorbike gangs of the Reddys, whose job was to track every vehicle moving anywhere near the mining pits from where iron ore was being illegally transported, either with fake transport permits or without permits. The second was to the people of the district, who now feared the might of the deputy commissioner more than that of the mining mafia.

Clearly, a deputy commissioner leading from the front earned the officer a lot of respect — it encouraged common people to blow the whistle on the mining mafia. Soon, there was a deluge of information on the illegal activities.

The third message was to the bureaucracy, which crawled when asked to bend. As we write, officials at lower levels are taking initiative to follow the rulebook. The risks of defying the mining mafia were clearly over-estimated by the lower rungs of bureaucracy, who typically followed orders from officials who were at the beck and call of the mafia dons-cum-political masters in the district

“We never imagined Amlan to be an official who could wield the lathi, and so effectively,” says a senior IAS officer who had worked with Biswas when he was deputy secretary in the finance department. That was only his second posting after being baptized in Bellary district as assistant commissioner, a week before Sonia Gandhi decided to contest in 1999.

As a greenhorn in administration, Biswas was witness to Janardhan Reddy leading a motorbike rally on an old Lambretta scooter as Sushma Swaraj, the BJP candidate challenging Sonia Gandhi, launched her pre-election campaign. Reddy and his friend B Sreeramulu (considered the ‘fourth brother’ of the Reddys though he belongs to a different community) were in the forefront of that campaign. Perhaps, Amlan Biswas did not imagine then that he would have to report to Janardhan Reddy some day.

Reddy, son of a police constable, used political clout to initially run a chit fund before shifting focus to mining. He got the first mining lease in Andhra Pradesh during Chandrababu Naidu’s regime but soon took over the Obalapuram Mining Company (OMC) with the help of the late YS Rajasekhara Reddy, former chief minister of Andhra Pradesh.

As the Reddys grew from one mine to control scores of them by bulldozing other miners, Amlan Biswas was moved from the finance department as CEO, zilla panchayat, Raichur, to Haveri district as deputy commissioner. When he was deputy commissioner of Chitradurga, chief minister Yeddyurappa asked him to go to Bellary. The deputy commissioner was known as a no-nonsense officer but not a lathi-wielding one — at least not until then.

Perhaps even Biswas did not gauge the impact of his action when he raised the lathi on Diwakar on September 15, 2011. Maybe, it dawned on him much later that the lathi had packed in the might of the supreme court, the CBI, justice Santosh Hegde and his team of officials led by Dr UV Singh, who investigated the illegal mining scam, and a political leadership which changed tack and showed the will to fight the Reddys — obviously to settle scores. The lathi represented the will of the state to restore order and return Bellary to the rule of law and, in a way, to the Republic of India.

A PREMIUM ON GOVERNANCE
The seeds for the struggle to gain administrative control over the district were laid much before all this. However, it was dependent on the high-power games politicians played. The stakes were rather high. It was about the survival of a chief minister (BS Yeddyurappa) who had got the BJP the status of the single largest party in the 2008 assembly elections. To rule the state, he had to necessarily depend on the cash-rich and powerful mining lobby, a euphemism for Janardhan Reddy. Yeddyurappa’s honeymoon with power ended the day the Reddys sought their pound of flesh by organising the first revolt.

But as soon as the centrally empowered committee (CEC) of the supreme court indicated that there were clear links between the illegal mining scam of Andhra Pradesh’s Obalapuram Mining Company (OMC) and Karnataka, Yeddyurappa smelt opportunity. In less than a month (October 2010), he transferred Amlan Biswas to Bellary as deputy commissioner (DC). But as the Bellary district in-charge minister, Reddy blocked it.

The transfer was finally effected in February 2011, a month after the supreme court asked the CEC to visit Karnataka. It is still not clear, though, how and why Reddy fell in line.

The first confrontation between Reddy as the district in-charge minister and DC Amlan Biswas was over an election to the agricultural produce marketing committee, normally handled by a tehsildar. Biswas found that the polling booth was under a shamiana where food was also being served to all and sundry. Surprisingly, the constabulary were also a part of the luncheon party. When the deputy commissioner called for order, he was told by Janardhan Reddy’s brother Somsekhara Reddy not to disturb them during a meal! It was soon followed up by a corporator’s car revving up close to the spot where Biswas was standing.  

The next was the issuance of notices to 14 companies — Ramarao Pole, Sparkline and AMC among others — which had started mining in high-quality ore-filled Ramgarh area. The forest department had asked the district administration to cancel the no-objection certificates (NoCs) for mining on revenue land as it did not have its clearance. The DC issued notices and withdrew the NoC. Reddy called the DC and politely asked him to restore the NoC. As Biswas flatly refused,  he was told in no uncertain terms that it would be difficult for him to continue as DC in that case. But before anything drastic could happen, the CEC arrived in the following two weeks.

This was soon followed by Somsekhara Reddy seeking an endorsement of the DC for allotment of Ashraya sites to 11,000-odd beneficiaries in Bellary. The DC refused on the ground that the verification had been done by a Bangalore-based private agency and not by government officials. His apprehension was proved correct, as a majority of beneficiaries had a common address: the railway quarters. It gave room for suspicion that the prospective beneficiaries could even be from Andhra Pradesh, a largesse to create a political base there. But the issue on hand was much more than the circumvention of important procedures.

The land on which these beneficiaries were to be located was not even government land. The land belonged to the NMDC, which was forced to donate it to the district administration, allegedly for the formation of a layout. The public sector company had, obviously, been coerced to hand over not a couple of acres but 296 acres of its land!

The challenge to the writ of the Reddys was still not visible to the outside world until regional television channels broke the news with visuals of a verbal exchange between the Raichur MP, Fakkirappa, and Amlan Biswas. The arch of the Bellary fort had fallen. Worse was that the stone beams were being ordered to be removed by the Reddy gang. The shocker came from the DC who was in a green and white T-shirt. “You are an MP from Raichur. Please take care of your district. I will take care of the problems here. I am the DC here. Please leave this place now,” Amlan Biswas was heard telling Fakkirappa.
The heated exchange sent shock waves across the district and the political class in the state. The message went through straight. There was somebody to shout down Fakkirappa of the Reddy gang. Fakkirappa is the brother-in-law of B Sreeramulu, who forms the quartet of the “Reddy brothers” — Karunakar, Janardhan and Somasekhara, though he is not related by blood. Even recently, people at the district office in Bellary told you how they realised that the times had changed for Bellary when they saw this incident on television channels.

Clearly, there was a premium on governance. The DC enjoyed enormous statutory powers but everything had to be cleared by the district in-charge minister. The situation would not have come to such a pass if only the officials who had been posted earlier had followed rules and regulations. But, then, all of them, particularly the critical ones from the DC to the deputy director (mines) to the assistant commissioner to the superintendent of police to deputy superintendent of police to the sub-inspector, were handpicked for the job to abdicate their powers to the political master who implemented his rule as law.
“The system was crying for change. Amlan Biswas was posted there when the writing was on the wall,” says a top Karnataka government official. Not many disagree with this view.
 
CITIZEN SINGH
A few critical developments, some running parallel, made the graffiti. First was the emergence of an NGO called Samaj Parivarthan Samudaya, represented by SR Hiremath, which took the issue of illegal mining to the supreme court with the help of well-known advocate Prashant Bhushan. The second was the reference of a complaint of illegal mining to the lokayukta, first by the HD Kumaraswamy ministry and later by the Yeddyurappa ministry, which resulted in the two reports. Justice Hegde got in four officers of the Indian Forest Service (IFS) and an IPS officer to investigate. These included Dr U V Singh, chief conservator of forests, Bishwajit Mishra, Vipin Singh and K Uday Kumar, all deputy conservators of forests, and Madhukar Shetty, an IPS officer.

Just as Amlan Biswas curbed illegal mining in Chitradurga district and was transferred to Bellary district, Dr UV Singh also had the experience of investigating illegal quarrying around Bangalore. Ditto for Bishwajit Mishra, who served a short stint at Bellary. But he was posted out within a few months after he had recovered '20 crore from miners who were indulging in illegal mining.

The Hegde team got its first concrete boost when N Gokul, a deputy conservator of forests, seized iron ore from the Belekere port that had been illegally mined, illegally transported and ready to be exported illegally. Despite a high court order against its export, the shocker came when nearly 8 lakh tonnes of the seized ore was stolen and exported.

This would not have hit the headlines if the political leadership had not shown its true colours. The ports minister, Krishna Palemar, suspended Gokul soon after the seizure, forcing justice Hegde to resign from his post in protest. Sheer public pressure made the tables turn against the BJP government. Justice Hegde returned after the BJP patriarch, LK Advani, spoke to him. Advani’s respect for justice Hegde’s father, who was also a former supreme court judge and former speaker of the Lok Sabha, overweighed his affection for his protégé, Sushma Swaraj, whom the Reddy brothers considered their “tai” (mother).
The crestfallen UV Singh team was elated not only because justice Hegde had returned, but also because it had landed on critical documentary evidence that was elusive until then.

The team’s report, which was recommended for implementation by justice Hegde, runs into 24,000-odd pages. The report stands out for its description of the meticulous “rape” (as justice Hegde called it) of the country’s natural resources. There was not a single check post that had not fallen to the transporters of illegal iron ore. This was not just in Karnataka but along all the routes leading to the ports in Goa, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu. Between 2006 and 2010, justice Hegde’s report calculated illegal export of 2.98 crore metric tonnes of iron ore. Interestingly, this figure was not far off the mark from what chief minister Yeddyurappa had stated on the floor of the legislature almost a year before justice Hegde submitted his report!

It meant that the government was aware of illegal mining and the rape of Bellary. But then, nothing could be done to stop it because the political stakes involved the chief minister’s chair. Such was the rule of the Reddys that when Dr UV Singh went on a raid, he was surrounded by people who wanted him to speak to Somasekhara Reddy. The legislator asked him if he had taken permission from the district in-charge minister before entering the district. Somasekhara Reddy was politely told by Dr UV Singh that he need not take anybody’s permission as he was a citizen of India.

A nervous justice Hegde heard out the introverted Dr UV Singh telling him that the threat did not have any effect on him as he let it pass from one ear and out through the other. Justice Hegde took the sanction of the then DGP, Dr Ajay Kumar Singh, to let his personal gunman go along with Dr UV Singh. But, nothing deterred him from snooping around to unravel the loot of the country, the politician-official nexus and corruption, all of which led to the estimated loss to the nation of Rs 1,22,28,14,22,854!

The Lokayukta report brought in political changes in Karnataka, including the chief minister’s post, and the CBI’s efforts have put Janardhan Reddy behind bars. In fact, practically every top member of the Reddy mafia has been put behind bars and those who haven’t have faced imprisonment for some time, including those in the audacious cash-for-bail scam in Andhra Pradesh.

The decision of the then Andhra Pradesh chief minister B Rosaiah to refer the Obalapuram Mining Company scam to the CBI was the trigger that set the investigation rolling. (This was soon after the then union home minister, P Chidambaram, made a mess of the Telangana issue.) Rosaiah, obviously, had been weighed down by the problems that he would face from the supporters of his predecessor, YS Rajasekhara Reddy, whose proximity to the Reddy brothers is only too well known. Many in bureaucratic and political circles firmly believe that the CBI would not have been able to move a step if the helicopter crash had not happened. Nevertheless, a stay by the Andhra Pradesh high court on the CBI from carrying out the investigation needed HR Bhardwaj, Karnataka’s governor, to speak with prime minister Manmohan Singh, to get it vacated. 

PLUG THE HOLES
The question that arises is whether the nation has learnt its lesson. The answer is a yes and a no. Under pressure from the supreme court, a lot of systems have been put in place. The mining industry had never embraced technology earlier but it has now fallen in line with e-auction of iron ore (an estimated 23 million tonnes has gone through this process since June 2011), weighing machines at check posts that are monitored, every mine to have a reclamation and rehabilitation (R and R) plan that ensures jobs as well as environmental protection, e-permits, among many other norms.

The impact of these norms is not much because the ban on mining would be lifted only after the CEC gives clearance for each mine. Currently, there are just three mines operational. (During the export boom, over 60 mines were functional). The industry expects this process to be completed in September 2013. The Karnataka government is also keen, if not overzealous, to abide by supreme court’s diktat to ensure that it gets a minimal revenue of '2,500 crore annually through direct taxes like royalty, and indirectly through power bills of industries.

The negative aspect lies in two critical actions and inactions of the Karnataka and central governments, respectively. The Karnataka government dumped the lokayukta report in cold storage by raising a silly objection. It related to the lokayukta not seeking the opinion of the accused when the reference to it was itself made under a rule that facilitated only recommendatory advice. But more critical is the role of the Centre, which has shown a peculiar lack of political will.

Unlike the CBI or the income tax department, which contributed in a huge measure to the investigation, a similar effort from the enforcement directorate appears to be dismal, if not lackadaisical. This is despite Congress leaders from Karnataka, literally, going door to door — from prime minister Manmohan Singh to the then finance minister Pranab Mukherjee, to the then home minister P Chidambaram — giving concrete cases of money laundering against the Reddys.

This is one aspect that bothers investigators of practically all the agencies because the real picture of where all the ill-gotten monies from anti-national activities went is yet to be found out.

Perhaps, the matter would have to be raised before the apex court for the ball to get rolling on this front.

But the real test of the administrative machinery would begin once the mining industry gets into full-scale operations without the sword of the supreme court hanging above its head. That is when the real might of the lathi will be tested.