One step back: H C Gupta's conviction has important implications

Officers should not be forced to make decisions with an eye to avoiding future prosecution rather than on efficient outcomes

The conviction and three-year imprisonment imposed earlier this month by a special Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) court on the former coal secretary, H C Gupta, and a former joint secretary over the allocation of a coal block to a private business group in Maharashtra has important related implications beyond the narrow confines of this case. First, it highlights the repeated weakness of the judicial system in terms of its tendency to follow the letter rather than the spirit of the law. Second, it underscores yet again the undue risks that bureaucrats are under in discharging their day-to-day duties. This judgment, along with several others under the rubric of the coal block allocation scandal that was raised by the Comptroller and Auditor General’s office in the mid-2010s, is likely to impose collective decision-making paralysis on the bureaucracy that the country can ill afford.

Mr Gupta, who had been coal secretary between 2005 and 2008, has been convicted in 11 out of 12 cases filed against questionable allocation of coal mines — he was acquitted in one of them and appeals against the others are pending. The critical point here is that he did not bear sole responsibility for the allocation decisions, which were taken by a screening committee that included members of the prime minister’s office, none of whom appear to have suffered similar punitive action. It is unclear why Mr Gupta, 74, should have been singled out, more so when it is abundantly clear that he has not garnered any personal gain from these transactions. In fact, he could not afford lawyers to fight his cases.

No less concerning was the fact that Mr Gupta’s conviction is the result of the application of a dated and loosely-worded section of the Prevention of Corruption Act — Section 13(1)(d)(iii) — that allowed that the mere fact of wrongdoing was enough to convict an officer whether or not there was criminal intent or not. This section was subsequently amended in 2018 but the special CBI court appears to have ignored the updated interpretation. At the very most, the court could have admonished Mr Gupta for failing to conduct a more thorough due diligence on the prospective applicants. Indeed, the Probation of Offenders Act, 1958 provides for this sort of latitude for a person of Mr Gupta’s standing and reputation for iron integrity. Indeed, the fact that the Indian Administrative Service (IAS) lobby has stood staunchly behind Mr Gupta is a strong endorsement not just of his innocence but also of the need for some protection against retrospective punishment for decisions taken in the line of duty. That may explain 

why the IAS Association pooled in money to provide Mr Gupta legal aid even as it lobbied the government to amend the relevant section of the Prevention of Corruption Act.

The coal-mine allocation controversy is, in fact, one of several issues that have been open to aggressive retrospective examination —disinvestment and telecom being others — where former bureaucrats in retirement have been called up and questioned for their decisions. It is nobody’s case that bureaucratic corruption is non-existent. But it is equally valid that officers should not be forced to take decisions with an eye to avoiding future prosecution rather than on efficient outcomes.