The problem is the indignant Sushma Swaraj does not realize that 'people who live in glass houses should not throw stones' applies equally to her.

“A senior Congress leader was pressing me hard to give diplomatic passport to coal scam-accused Santosh Bagrodia.”

“I will disclose the name of the leader on the floor of the House.”

Thus tweeteth Sushma Swaraj.

Swaraj wants to prove that people who live in glass houses should not throw stones.

That’s why she wants to shame the Congress which has been demanding her head by naming a senior Congress leader who she says had been pressing her “hard” for a diplomatic passport for Coal-scam accused Santosh Bagrodia.

The problem is the indignant Swaraj does not realize that the proverb applies equally to her.

She is as much the person in the glass house as the senior Congress leader. And she should be careful before she starts throwing stones.

All this time Sushma Swaraj’s main line of defence was what she tried to do for Lalit Modi was a “humanitarian” gesture because of his need to be with his cancer-stricken wife when she went for treatment. She has denied any wrong doing or even an appearance of impropriety.

Swaraj’s intervention in Yemen to save an 8-month old child after her mother’s desperate plea was indeed “humanitarian”. That plea for help and Swaraj’s response unfolded in the public on Twitter. Only the most naïve would think that Lalit Modi’s long professional history with Sushma Swaraj’s family had nothing to do with either his request or her response to it.

As Swaraj tries to name and shame the Congress, she only weakens her own case. If she understood the impropriety of helping an accused with a diplomatic passport in that case, her blind spot for Lalit Modi looks more wilful than humanitarian. She was a stickler for the law when it came to Bagrodia but happy to go out of her way to try to help another man on the run from the law.

One person’s Santosh Bagrodia is another person’s Lalit Modi. That can hardly be a shining example of principles in action.

But Swaraj’s new charge bares the old rot that bedevils our politics. Every party coming to power promises change, poriborton, acche din. But the new broom rarely sweeps clean. And when confronted with a scandal in its own ranks, its reflexive defence is to point fingers at the other party and say “They did it too.”

Mamata does it to the CPM. AIADMK and DMK do it to each other like a ping-pong game. Samajwadi Party does it to BSP. And the BJP is now doing it to the Congress. They don’t understand what every school child is taught over and over again – two wrongs don’t make a right.

What none of them realize is that from the point of view of a frustrated public it does not matter. They threw the Congress-led UPA out because they were frustrated with scams and corruption and influence peddling. They believed Narendra Modi when he said “Na khaaonga na khaaney doonga.”

The shady land deals of erstwhile First Son-in-law Robert Vadra do not mean that Vasundhara Raje and her son’s financial deals get a pass from scrutiny. But every political party thinks the quickest way to clear itself is by pointing fingers at others. That was utterly clear from BJP’s Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi’s statement that “this is nothing more than the noise of skeletons of Congress’ corruption.We are ready to discuss pending issues from ‘damaad’ to Quatrochhi.” Not to mention “Kerala fodder scam, Goa watergate project scam, Uttarkhand flood scam, Himachal Pradesh steel scam.”

He was basically threatening the Congress that the BJP would not hesitate to wash their dirty laundry in public if they didn’t stop trying to take the BJP to the cleaners in parliament. And he is smug in the knowledge that the Congress has way more dirty laundry than the BJP. Naqvi does not realize this hardly gives his party a clean chit. It just reinforces what the public already suspected – politicians are all cut from the same cloth and in the end help each other out. As journalist Hartosh Singh Bal tweeted “this is wonderful, break the easy compact, let them all spill the beans on each other.”



To make one scam the defence of another scam is the greatest scam of all and it is perpetrated, like all scams, on the fed-up public. For Swaraj to now point to Congress misdeeds as a defence for her own actions shows how the political class live in a bubble where they just shadow box with each other. That couldn’t be more clear than the BJP’s Ravi Shankar Prasad’s response to his own party veteran Himachal Pradesh’s Shanta Kumar’s mann ki baat saying the Vyapam scam “made all of us hang our heads in shame.” Prasad retorted “if he is so pained why did he not raise the corruption charges against Virbhadra Singh (Congress CM from Himachal)?” Like Swaraj, Prasad too thinks that in the end all that matters is Congress-BJP tu tu main main, that they are only accountable to each other.

But Sushma Swaraj is not accountable to the Congress. Or any of the other parties baying for her resignation. She is ultimately accountable to the public. Her actions have to pass the public sniff test not Rahul Gandhi’s.

By offering up Bagrodia-gate to counter her own Lalit-gate, she just made it tougher for her to pass that sniff test.