Additional Special Judge, Anti-Corruption Court Srinagar on Wednesday convicted a retired IAS officer and former member of the J&K Special Tribunal, and sentenced him to one-year imprisonment and 15 lakh fine in a long-pending disproportionate assets case. The FIR against the accused was registered in 1997 at under FIR No. 22/1997 at Police Station Vigilance Organization Kashmir (VOK), now Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB) Srinagar. The officer in question retired from the service way back and was convicted 28 years after the FIR was registered. This is how the system here works. The menace of corruption is eating into the vitals of the society but the process of prosecution is so slow that it doesn’t scare the culprits. In may cases, investigations are done so unprofessionally and carelessly that at the end of the day, the people charged of corruption and corrupt practices walk free.
Every day, the local media reports about some official being caught by ACB on the charges of corruption, however, the details of convictions are rarely shared with the public. Even the newspapers on Thursday carried three reports abot ACB actions. They reported that ACB has filed an FIR in connection with a financial scam in the Directorate of Tourism after detection of fraudulent entries in the J&K PaySys system, leading to misappropriation of lakhs of rupees by officials; produced chargesheet against 14 accused officials and private beneficiaries in connection with abuse of official position and criminal conspiracy and registered a disproportionate assets case and also against AHD employee for allegedly amassing huge wealth disproportionate to his known sources of income.
These reports suggest how widespread the corruption is in the government departments. Every now and then, the government here claims to have waged a war against corrupt officials and corruption but still the menace goes on. Question arises that if a war has been waged, why the corrupt are not feeling the heat? Why every day reports of corrupt practices come to fore? Is there something fundamentally wrong with government’s anti-corruption mission. The conviction of a retired IAS officer 28 years after the FIR was registered against him indicates that the delivery pace is too slow to scare people. Law is for the protection of the people so people should respect it. But it should be executed in such a way that those who don’t respect it should be scared of it.
It is responsibility of the ACB to quicken the investigations in the cases and ensure thorough, professional and error-less investigation. Once the conviction rate increases and the ACB shares it publicly, those with corrupt tendencies would think thrice before indulging into corrupt practices.