'Guilty Ones to be Punished'

Wonders will never cease. We now have Assam’s Agriculture Minister Rockybul Hussain telling a group of young farmers at Golaghat on Sunday that those with proof of being involved in corrupt practices will be punished regardless of whether they are ministers or bureaucrats. Quite obviously, he seems to have forgotten what has happened to corrupt ministers and bureaucrats during the last 14 years. We have quite a few instances of the Chief Minister of Assam himself admitting that there is no government department in the State that is free of corruption. At the same time, we have also seen that not a single minister or officer has been punished for any act of corruption. This is a clear indication of the Chief Minister’s total disinclition to punish anyone for corruption. A simple definition of intelligence is “the ability to profit from experience.“ We are not quite sure whether Hussain who has seen the free hand given to corrupt practices and the loot of the exchequer has profited from experience at all. At a time when the Enforcement Directorate has registered a case against his predecessor, the present Agriculture Minister probably knows that no one will be allowed to prove anything to establish any crime.