What is this Fairfax question all about? Certainly not about the administrative propriety or otherwise of engaging a detective agency, domestic or foreign. Our principal concern, which will remain until satisfactorily resolved, is: Was this a means to investigating wrong or to punishing the virtuous? It is symptomatic that instead of engaging themselves with this core question, our government chose to tackle only the peripherals.

There was a riot of confusing euphemisms: Fairfax was not "engaged", they are not our "agents", merely voluntary "informers". Then a lurch into the counter-offensive; the CIA is involved, it is an imperialist conspiracy of "disinformation", a security risk and such other fevered vapourising — until V. P. Singh, the principal actor in this still unfolding drama, nailed the canard in one pungent synoptic sentence: "How can an inquiry into corruption be a security risk?"

MARCH OF FOLLY

It is ironical in the extreme that had that infamous raid on Ramnath Goenka and the arrest of Gurumurthy not taken place (on Friday, 13 March), we would all have remained blissfully unaware, not just about all these evil imperialist machinations, but also about the very name of Fairfax. There was another bitter irony in that original misstep. The agencies of state went about their task of safeguarding the nation, not by rounding up the corrupt but by arresting those that were engaged in exposing them. The day the CBI presented forgeries as evidence for the prosecution, it pitted one investigative agency of the government, the CBI, against another, the Enforcement Directorate, and launched prime minister Gandhi on a course of irretrievable folly.

Now examine the subsequent scenes in this unfolding drama: Scene II opens with the government being compelled to make a statement on the subject (3 1 March), only because the parliament obstinately refused to let go. A hapless Brahm Dutt then rose, not so much to clarify as to persist with fanciful assertions and unnecessary political innuendos. It was an unmitigated disaster; a gross misreading of the situation, misutilised for veiled attacks on V. P. Singh, which some said were command performances ordered by the premier himself.

Not surprisingly, thereafter, the country became witness to an unedifying debate: that between the head of this detective agency, sitting continents away, and our confused government. Daily salvoes were exchanged between them; Brahm Dutt menacingly threatening "to fix Fairfax" and Hershman easily unfixing it all, merely by picking up the telephone and giving interviews. Few stopped to ponder the sheer indignity of this unbecoming spectacle, a detective agency managing to discomfit our government!