Have you been following the build up to the presidential poll?

Are you aware that the UPA-Left’s candidate for the president is a woman named Pratibha Patil?

Who’s Pratibha Patil, you ask?

That’s not a bad question at all. The whole nation has been asking that question. So it doesnt mean your general knowledge is poor.

However, did you ask: Why did the UPA (led by Sonia Gandhi), out of all Indians in a billion, zeroed in an Pratibha Patil for presidential candidature?

Before you read the rest, you are advised to familiarize with Pratibha Patil and the presidential poll by reading this post of mine.

Arun Shourie may have the answer. The BJP has published a booklet with two articles penned by Arun Shourie. In the articles, he uncovers the link between Sonia Gandhi and Pratibha Patil:

The Cooperative Bank Employees Union wrote one memorandum after another exposing how the directors of the Pratibha Mahila Sahakari Bank were systematically bankrupting the bank. They demanded dismissal of the family-controlled board. They demanded ‘a CBI inquiry against Pratibha Patil, former Deputy Chairperson of the Rajya Sabha, for the irregularities in the bank’. They wrote these letters, in Marathi, to the relevant authorities in Maharashtra looking after the affairs of cooperative banks. They sent them to the then President, to the then Prime Minister, to among others, ‘Smt. Sonia Gandhi, Leader of the Opposition (Lok Sabha)…’

And:

A pattern

Memoranda of the Employees Union show that such enterprising sleights-of-account-books were part of a pattern. The memoranda and communications were sent to, among others, Pratibha Patil herself. For instance, in a letter to her on 13 March, 2002, the President, Vice-president and Secretary of the Union informed her that.

She had allowed her elder brother, Dilipsingh Patil, to use the bank’s telephone (no. 224672, which he had got installed at his residence) for running his stock exchange business. He ran up a bill of Rs. 20 lakh. Phone records showed that the calls were made to sharebrokers in Mumbai. These records were subsequently destroyed. But later the charge was found to be one of substance. It was one of the things that Amol Khairnar, who was appointed as the chief administrator of bank, asked P.D. Patil, manager of the bank, to explain in the show-cause notice that the former issued on 1 February, 2003.

The show-cause notice also mentioned that the Pratibha Mahil Sahakari Bank had extended unlawful loans to the Sant Muktabai Cooperative Sugar Factory from time to time. As you will recall, the sugar factory too was set up by Pratibha Patil herself to help rural youth! It was inaugurated by Sonia Gandhi in 1999. As The Asian Age has reported, like the Pratibha Mahila Sahakari Bank, the mill too has closed down – but only after running up a loan default of nearly Rs. 20 crore and without ever producing much sugar!

A little background to what follows:

15 August, 2005: nine office-bearers of the DCC issue a press release saying that G.N. Patil, the brother of Pratibha Patil, has not submitted accounts of funds that were collected by Congress workers for felicitating Pratibha Patil.

Vishram Patil commences an inquiry within the Congress into the misappropriation of the funds. He also commences an inquiry into financial dealings of Ulhas Patil and his NGOs. He brings the matter to the attention of the high-command of the Congress. (Which means the Congress or atleast one man in the Congress knows all this.)

He receives three anonymous letters. Written in hand, they state that a supari has been given out to kill him, that he should be careful. He persists with the inquiry.

He is killed. Local dailies are full of the murder. They surmise that it is the result of political rivalries in the District Congress Committee.

Because of the enormous commotion among the local people, the Police act. Within a few days, they nab the killers.

They make swift progress in the investigation. They tell Rajani Patil, the widow, that 90 per cent of the investigation is over, that they will soon get the ones who instigated the murder also.

Suddenly, the investigation goes off the rails. The police now put out a story that the murder actually took place because of a dispute over money that Raju Mali had borrowed from Vishram Patil. Rajani Patil strongly refutes the insinuation. Local papers puncture holes in this new concoction of the Police. As suddenly as the concoction had been put out, the investigation is taken out of the hands of the local police entirely, and turned over to the CID of the state Government.

Then, Rajni goes to Sonia Maino for help!

26 September, 2005: alarmed at the way the investigation is being derailed, the widow, Rajani Patil writes to Sonia Gandhi. She says, ‘The brain behind the crime is pressurizing the investigation process.’

Rajni also meets Sonia Gandhi personally and Sonia doesnt do anything about it! Forget doing anything, even the FIR is dropped!

Rajani Patil travels to Delhi. She meets Sonia Gandhi personally in January 2006. She narrates the sequence of the case. She also meets other Congress bigwigs – Ahmed Patel, Sushil Kumar Shinde, Margaret Alva and others.
They move not a finger. Instead, the FIR against the two who are said to have financed the murder is dropped. Having first snatched the investigation away from the local police and transferred it to the state CID, the Government now decides that the investigation is best done by the CBI!

Three months pass – ostensibly waiting for the CBI to respond. Eventually, the CBI informs the state Government that it is overwhelmed with work, that as the case has no ‘inter-state or international ramifications’, it is not a fit case for the agency.

Desperate, Rajni writes yet again to Sonia Maino:

5 March, 2007: disheartened and broken, Rajani Patil again writes to Sonia Gandhi. As you also lost your husband, you are the one person who will understand my wound, she writes. She recalls the anonymous letters that her husband had received warning him to desist from the inquiry, warning that ‘a supari to murder my husband had been given by Dr. Ulhas Patil and Dr. G.N. Patil, the brother of Smt. Pratibha Patil, Governor of Rajasthan. On the morning of 21.9.2005, my husband was brutally murdered…’ ‘I fear that my whole family is likely to get liquidated by these brutal murderers if they continue to get politically patronized by the party,’ she concludes.

She receives no reply.

Impressive resume? Clean candidate? Did great service to empowerment of women? What nonsense! Sonia Gandhi, the chairman of the UPA, KNOWS Pratibha Patil, she knows about the murder of Rajni’s husband. There’s something very very dirty here and we, the people of India, demand answers!

Arun nails it in the conclusion:

The politics

Could it be that the Congress high-ups, in particular Sonia Gandhi, did not know about these associations of Pratibha Patil? I was at first inclined to think so. After all, Pratibha Patil’s name had been picked out of a hat at the last minute. There might have been no time for a background check.

But on going through these letters after letters, these memoranda after memoranda – one and all of them written and sent by Congressmen, one and all of them sent to Congressmen; after reading Rajani Patil’s account of her meeting with Sonia Gandhi and other Congress leaders in Delhi; after going through the proceedings in courts; after seeing the screaming headlines of the local papers, I just can not believe that neither Sonia Gandhi nor her immediate colleagues remembered nothing of the case. After all, the head of their own party in the district, the very man who had been thrice elected to the post, had been killed. After all, all concerned in the party unit had been pointing to an ex-MP of the Congress and the brother of the Governor of Rajasthan… how could everyone have forgotten? Murders of district Congress chiefs are still not that common.

So, the only inference is that they knew of the antecedents of Pratibha Patil and for the very antecedents selected her.

And that stands to reason. A person who is weak and dutifully submissive is already Prime Minister. But he has one defect – being financially honest, he is not vulnerable. There is always the danger, inconceivable though it seems at present, that at some point, he may throw up his hands…

So, what is needed is not just a weak person. What is needed is a person who is weak and vulnerable…

Precisely. Do read the two articles if you are really concerned about the future of this country. They can be found here.