Senior French Environment Minister François de Rugy, the number two in the Government, has just resigned over allegations that he hosted sumptuous ‘lobster and champagne' dinners for his social circle at taxpayers' expense. He and his wife Séverine, a celebrity journalist, are alleged to have hosted around ten dinners in 2017 and 2018 when he was president of the National Assembly.
The couple also allegedly had a 63,000-euro beautification work done on their state apartment.
However, the Minister says he is only a victim of media lynching. Most shockingly, Severine had even allegedly managed to steal vintage wines from the French Parliament wine-cellar, each bottle costing up to €500.
De Rugy, who joined Emmanuel Macron’s centrist party during the 2017 presidential campaign, kept insisting that the expensive dinners were absolutely official and not social events.
But no one has believed him. So, the people are happy that he is gone. Ironically, de Rugy was leading Macron’s environmental policy at a time when the government was under pressure to cut costs after being accused of doing too little to combat the climate emergency.
Similarly, Christian Sewing, a Deutsche Bank CEO, has given his top executives some tough dressing down over personal suits they had bought with bank money. These executives had ordered tailors to their London office as thousands of traders were let go on Monday after details of the pricey suit fitting were revealed in the media.
After two men carrying suit bags were spotted leaving the Deutsche Bank premises, the London-based Financial News reported the bespoke outfits from ‘Fielding' and ‘Nicholson' were worth as much as £1,500 each. All this while the bank was on the verge of being taken over for quite some time!
In India, squandering public money by politicians is considered birthright and the party bosses including PM or CM look away to keep every colleague in good humour to avoid trouble of dissent or rebellion.
The latest shaming act on record is Goa Governor Mridula Sinha’s daily cow puja ritual at the Raj Bhavan which draws continuous applause from the BJP. A few weeks after assuming office, Sinha had told the media about building a cowshed in the Raj Bhavan premises.
She had herself travelled 50 km to a village to handpick a particular species of cow and calf from a trading agency. Sinha, also an eminent writer, chose to remain in news for stonewalling all RTI applications over her extravagant expenditure put under ‘office spending' that has little to do with nurturing cows or promoting the Prime Minister’s Swachh Bharat mission as she has mentioned blatantly. Further, she has tried to prove her literary skills by writing a special song, a few slogans and pledges to popularise a little over-hyped ‘Modi endeavour' to keep the surroundings clean.
But until now, no particular effort by the Governor has made any difference to the ground reality. All the same, she has been splurging heaps of public money on the cowshed upkeep and the daily puja without remorse. When RTI activists raised questions about it, she did not simply give a damn.
When the State Information Commission, on being petitioned, ruled that she was squandering public money, the Governor’s office moved the High Court to challenge the ruling that ‘the Goa governor, as a person of public authority, is subject to the Right to Information Act'.
India is still a poor country where paradoxically, the economic growth is impressively high on record; but the distribution of wealth has remained appallingly inequitable all these decades. Public officials, particularly the political class, have devised ingenious methods of eating up public money.
The media role to pull up errant public officials has been awfully timid because most media houses, heavily corporatised now, wouldn’t carry pro-people stories solely to reap revenue benefits anyway. And the state is a massive revenue giver.
The role of the editor as legend or icon is a phenomenon of the remote past. Now, the marketing executive is boss and he decides what the editor should or should not carry by way of news or commentary. No wonder, the strange thing called ‘paid news' is strongly in vogue.
The social media is hyperactive; but it engages more in spreading fake news for sensationalism. The tenterhooks on the social media masters have not gone deep enough though there are instances of backlash now and then.
Most disturbingly, the species called statesmen or the truly compassionate community of intellectuals have long since been extinct or turned dumb about people’s issues with a view to agitating the masses. Nation building by people’s participation is a fairytale fiction today.
Surprisingly, it is quite heartening to know that the Odisha administration under Naveen Patnaik is rather stringent to officials in any genre.
Members of the political executive are under constant surveillance, so much so that even their choices of state officials to assist them are scrutinised lest they should gang up and form vicious nexus to loot people under the pretext of doing public good.
Now that the elections are over, vigilant activist groups in Odisha are waiting to see which unworthy politician is being rehabilitated out of turn. Ordinary corporations are ignored as the political creatures can hardly do much damage with civil servants dangling the rulebook before their low-vision eyes. But serious bodies like the State Planning Board are under watch.
If an ineligible fellow is put as head, the indication will be that it is intended to be kept a non-functional body like several times before. Unfortunately, the Planning Board has been a sore point on the otherwise popular Naveen Patnaik establishment for never having functioned at all. Similarly, people keep cringing at the very thought of a non-priestly Jagannath Temple servitor occupying the chair of the OSIC boss.
The guy does not even know how to write in Odia clearly, let alone draft a sentence in English. The Naveen Patnaik administration has been hailed as exemplary during all the past four stints. The fifth one has to be the best on record. Hopefully, all the State agencies will have real leaders and skilled planners as bosses!