Moga bus incident shakes foundations of Badal empire

Sunday, 03/05/2015

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CHANDIGARH: For the Parkash Singh Badal government, the timing of the Moga bus incident couldn’t have been worse. If the farmers’ anger over tardy wheat procurement was simmering, the ruling coalition is now also feeling the heat of the shocking death of a 13-year-old girl who was molested and thrown out of a moving bus.

What has fuelled the political outcry and public criticism is the fact that the men who allegedly molested the teen and her mother on Wednesday were staffers of Orbit Aviation, one of the several public transport companies owned and operated by the Badal family.

Smelling blood, the opposition – Congress and Aam Aadmi Party – lost no time in grabbing the issue that has left the Shiromani Akali Dal-Bharatiya Janata Party government red-faced and on the backfoot. The incident has dramatically galvanised Badal-baiters, particularly those in the factionalised Congress, which fancies its comeback in Punjab’s next election in 2017.

Upping the ante, the victim’s family and the Opposition have pegged their protests to demand for an FIR being registered against Badal family members with stakes in the bus company.

Worse, the incident has seemingly spiked public ire against the Badal family, which at first clumsily tried to fob off its link with the bus company. “I don’t know...will check who owns this...,” is how Union minister Harsimrat Kaur Badal, the chief minister’s daughter-in-law, reacted outside Parliament the day the incident rocked the Lok Sabha.

Within hours, the media called Kaur’s bluff, ferreting out the 2014 election affidavit that showed her as a major stakeholder in the controversial bus company.

It was left to her husband, deputy chief minister Sukhbir Singh Badal, to mount a belated damage control by announcing compensation of Rs 20 lakh and a government job for the victim’s family. Curiously, he chose to shell out the grant from the state exchequer instead of the cashrich account of his privately owned bus enterprise.

But the victim’s family has spurned the government bait to get them to cremate her body, and instead made common cause with the opposition-led protests for holding the Orbit bus owners criminally liable – an action the police have categorically ruled out while it was prompt in arresting all the four accused. Sukhbir’s order on Saturday suspending the Orbit bus operations across the state was clearly dictated by the public anger that the opposition is intent on exploiting to the hilt.

The longer the agitation drags, the worse it will be for the state government – a grave portent the Badal government is acutely worried about.

On a tough test are Sukhbir’s crisis-management skills as he pulls out all the stops to defuse the Moga logjam and brace up for a collateral damage arising out of a negative spotlight on the business empire of the Badal clan. “The issue may be resolved soon but the political damage it has inflicted will not go,” says a top functionary of the government. And, he is not off the mark.