For months now in Maharashtra, the political discourse has been dominated by the talk of the Samruddhi Expressway. This ambitious ₹46,000-crore worth six-lane highway between Mumbai and Nagpur, Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis’ home constituency and the winter capital of the state, is his dream project and he wants it to get off the ground at any cost, even if it means depriving farmers of their fertile land.

With barely two years to go for his government, Samruddhi has run into several roadblocks from farmers who have protested on various stretches including in Amravati, Aurangabad and Nashik. It is in the Sinnar and Igatpuri talukas of Nashik district that the opposition has been the fiercest and the Maharashtra State Road Development Corporation (MSRDC), which is the nodal agency to deliver on the project, has been resorting to all sorts of measures with the help of the local administration to trick the farmers into parting with their lands. Among these were use of drones to measure their land (which the farmers literally shot down with their rifles) and arresting them for a day on some pretext or the other to enable surveying officials to enter their property in their absence, etc.

The message that he wants the expressway at any cost, human or otherwise, has not gone down well with the farmers but it has also led to a lot of administrative misdemeanours that the chief minister is either unaware of or is incapable of controlling. Fadnavis is on record as saying that most bureaucrats don’t listen to him but it is now on record that he does not listen to his boss, Narendra Modi either when it comes to dealing with his favourite bureaucrat. Radheshyam Mopalwar, until last week, was the managing director of MSRDC and a man Fadnavis implicitly trusted to deliver the Samruddhi Expressway to him. Mopalwar seemed to be willing to adopt all means, fair or foul, in his dealings on Samruddhi and that is why perhaps Fadnavis did not act on complaints of corruption against Mopalwar forwarded to him by the PMO in January this year.

Mopalwar has been described by many local media outlets as “the most corrupt IAS officer in the country” and even the Vigilance Division of the Income Tax department has been probing him for disproportionate assets. Some say his wealth is worth Rs 800 crore or more. Even the Union Home Ministry had written to the Maharashtra Director General of Police in December 2016 to investigate Mopalwar who was earlier Involved in the multi-crore fake stamp paper racket, popularly known as the Telgi scam, with its chief protagonist Abdul Karim Telgi claiming that Mopalwar knew about the scam from the beginning and was an equal partner in his crime.

Yet for six months or more, Fadnavis continued to ignore all warnings against Mopalwar until on Sunday, July 30, he discovered just by accident that the man he trusted to deliver Samruddhi was in fact creating the biggest hurdle in the project.

Bureaucrats have got so used to inaction from the Chief Minister on corruption or their defiance of his authority that Mopalwar actually, on the record, brazenly blamed the Chief Minister for stalling his own pet project by sitting on a file for a special purpose vehicle (SPV) to be created for the project. It was only when reporters in Nashik asked him on July 30 why he was not moving that file that Fadnavis realised what was afoot. There was no such file and Chief Secretary Sumeet Mullick who was accompanying the CM was equally startled into asking, “What file? What SPV? Why does Mopalwar need a SPV for Samruddhi? The MSRDC itself is a SPV.”

But before he could have questioned Mopalwar on his blatant lies and misuse of office, local Marathi channels began to play an audio tape of Mopalwar striking a land deal for Rs 4 crore in a previous assignment in 2009. Although the CM, true to his style, tried to shrug off responsibility for that by lobbing the ball in the Congress’ court for having kept Mopalwar in plum jobs despite his corrupt acts, he had no words to explain why he turned a blind eye to the MSRDC chief's corrupt acts, despite warnings from the PMO and the Home Ministry.

As Nawab Malik, chief NCP spokesperson, alleges, “Fadnavis knew of the nexus between the bureaucrats and many of his party leaders. A judicial inquiry into Samruddhi will reveal how many IAS officers and BJP leaders knew Samruddhi was coming and how they bought land from farmers along its route at throwaway prices. The expressway is meant to benefit merely cargo companies and transporters. Protecting those officers is necessary, else the BJP will be thoroughly exposed.”

Nawab also says that corruption by bureaucrats is allowed to happen because they are expected to pass on percentages of their collections to their political masters and mentions an astronomical figure that makes its way to the BJP’s coffers every month.

Mopalwar’s case is only the tip of the iceberg, he says, accusing the Chief Minister of protecting the bureaucrat rather than acting against him. Eight months before his retirement as the first concrete evidence of his involvement in land deals went viral, Fadnavis asked him to go on a month’s forced leave rather than suspending him, pending investigation.

Dhananjay Munde, leader of the Opposition in the Maharashtra Legislative Council, says, “Mopalwar should actually be probed by the Enforcement Directorate. But before that, he should be divested of all offices to ensure a free and fair probe.”

Congress spokesperson Sanjay Nirupam is of similar view but goes a step further to charge the Chief Minister with protecting corrupt bureaucrats. Nirupam had tagged Modi in a tweet asking him to sack Housing Minister Prakash Mehta for involvement in real estate scams in Mumbai as Fadnavis seemed “helpless” to do so.

But in the case of Mopalwar, even Modi seems helpless to get Fadnavis to act on the complaints by the Home Ministry, the CBI and the Income Tax department.

That is raising several eyebrows not just about Fadnavis but also Modi’s commitment to clean governance. Is there a reason why Modi is unable to crack the whip on his own hand-picked Chief Minister?