Lotteries in Karnataka, as borne out by the recent arrests and the suspension of a senior IPS officer, are very much prevalent although the State was declared lottery-free by the coalition government of H.D. Kumaraswamy from April 2007.
The decision of the Siddaramaiah government to hand over the lottery scam , presumably owing to inter-State ramifications, to the Central Bureau of Investigation is unlikely to yield results, leave alone curb the lottery menace. According to an estimate, the daily turnover in the single-digit lottery alone is around Rs. 10 crore in the tier-1 and tier-2 cities of Karnataka, and all of the transactions are unaccounted given the fact that it is run illegally.
The single-digit lottery (the prize amount is for a given last digit) has gone hi-tech, obviously an abuse of information technology, more so in a State known as the IT capital of the country. It is largely a paperless lottery and well networked by computers and cellphones, with the interface between the lottery operators and the clients largely invisible. And yet, most of those addicted to this form of lottery are generally daily-wage earners.
Credit should go to Mr. Kumaraswamy for standing up against lotteries of any kind. During his Chief Ministership, he had driven home the concept of Karnataka being a lottery-free State despite all the opposition that he faced from both within the coalition government, which he headed, and those connected with running lotteries. The Karnataka High Court had also quashed a petition filed by some of the lottery operators, and the State government, which ran the Mysore State Lottery for several decades, also shut down the venture.
What has come as a shocker to the people of the State is the reported part played by some senior police officers in enabling the lotteries, while the role of some subordinate police personnel, including sections of the constabulary, is well known. As a political leader said: “Lotteries thrive thanks to the support of the police and some political leaders. Nothing can change until this support is dismantled.”
Unlike in other important criminal cases where an incumbent government refrains from opting for an investigation by the Central Bureau of Investigation, the quick manner in which the lottery scam investigation has been handed over to the CBI by the State Cabinet has also come as a surprise.
It is another matter that it is the prerogative of the Union government to direct the CBI to take charge of the investigation, and for the CBI to pull out the skeletons in the cupboard, if any.
It is obvious that political leaders of a rival political party may stand exposed even as the government seeks to convey that members of the ruling party have had no role in the murky lottery business. Interestingly, the former Prime Minister H.D. Deve Gowda has held that the Chief Minister is responsible for the single-digit lottery scam even as his son, Mr. Kumaraswamy, has demanded action against all those responsible for nurturing illegal lotteries.
(The writer is Resident Representative, The Hindu Centre for Politics and Public Policy, Bengaluru )
