Stupefied by the string of endorsements across the country of the demand that the money looted from India must be brought back, the Congress has tied itself in knots. Its spokesmen — led, as will be clear from the arguments they have advanced, by four lawyers — have given five reactions:

• •Why is Advani taking up this matter now, on the eve of elections?

• •The G-20 meeting was not the proper forum for taking up the issue.

• There is doubt about the figures.

• •Why did the BJP government replace FERA with FEMA, and thereby make the offences compoundable?

• •Is Advani not unwittingly alerting those with illegal money abroad to spirit it away from Switzerland to other tax havens?

• •What was the NDA doing when it was in office? In any case there is doubt about the figures.

•The reactions betray panic as even the littlest reflection would have shown the “arguments” to be indefensible. Let us consider them one by one.

•Why is Advani taking up this matter now, on the eve of elections?

The fact, of course, is that Advani took up the matter with the prime minister in April last year. He wrote to Manmohan Singh soon after it became known that the German government had obtained names of persons who had stashed money in the LGT Bank in Lichtenstein. The reply from the then-finance minister P. Chidambram showed that the government intended to do little except go through the pretence of taking some steps. Soon thereafter, we were alarmed to learn that a senior official of the finance ministry had written to the then Indian ambassador in Germany not to press the Germans for release of the names of Indians in the list that they had obtained from Lichtenstein — lest the Germans take offence and conclude that they were being pressurised and their bona fides were being questioned! [This information was later confirmed by the report filed by Amitabh Ranjan in The Indian Express of March 31, 2009]. Subsequently, we took up the matter in Parliament too. And yet the evasion, “Why now?”

... contd.