The flaccid state

AS a member of the current joint parliamentary committee (JPC) my lips are sealed on the scam which overtook our stock markets in March. But I was also a member of the joint parliamentary committee which investigated the Harshad Mehta scam of 1991-92. And what happened in the wake of that JPC report is in the public realm.

The most important thing which happened is that the Harshad Mehta JPC has over the past few years transformed itself into the NDA’s council of ministers. Nearly a quarter of its members are serving as, or have been, members of the NDA government. They include Yashwant Sinha, finance minister, whose parentage of the present scam is under scrutiny.

Sinha’s signature does not appear on the 1993 JPC report because he switched colours from pink to saffron literally on the eve of the finalisation of that report. But he was a most diligent participant almost till the end.

Another most diligent participant was foreign and defence minister Jaswant Singh, finance minister in the 1996 Vajpayee Mark-I government of 13 days, who left his indelible mark on bankrupting our most prosperous state by pushing Vajpayee into clearing the Central counter-guarantee to Enron during a five-minute lunch break meeting on May 27, even as the Lok Sabha was winding its dreary way to the end of a vote of confidence debate, a vote that did not need to be taken because, immediately after giving the counter-guarantee, Vajpayee was to go to Rashtrapati to confess that his mand- ate-less government had failed to manufacture a majority.

Besides the Yashwant-Jaswant duo, the most colourful character undoubtedly was George Fernandes, now cooling his heels as head of the NDA alliance but only after throwing the ministry of defence into deep disarray and ripping off the country courtesy the delicate hands of his live-in party president. Then there was Murasoli Maran, now commerce minister, at least until Jayalalitha catches up with his many and multi-coloured misdeeds.

We also had Ram Naik, the man whose reforms in the oil sector have our oil pool deficit mounting to twice what the budget is willing to put out for food for the poorest of the poor. Two young ones of marginally less distinction round off the list: Harin Pathak, the former minister of state for defence production, now eating his heart out as member of yet another stock-market JPC after a court charge-sheeted him for murder; and Digvijay Singh, minister of state for railways, who came into the last JPC at the last moment as the poor man’s socialist replacement for arch-defector Yashwant Sinha.

Now that’s about as distinguished a club as you can get. Between them, under the benevolent gaze of Vajpayee, they have been the lead members of the Government of India for well over three years. Those three years have been climaxed by a stock-market rip-off that runs to so many countless crores, and involves so many of the same characters we investigated last time, that, ho-hum, we have to have yet another JPC to find out what went wrong.

What went wrong is that criminal action has been so slow there is no question of letting the punishment fit the crime. For example: the income tax authorities issued demands for the payment of taxes in excess of Rs 11,000 crore. That alone is adequate to finance an entire year’s foodgrains allotment to the public distribution system. But close on a decade after the income tax department claimed Rs 11,000 crore, the same department has confirmed only around Rs 2000 crore of what it itself has demanded. And actually recovered not much more than Rs 200 crore, ten per cent of the confirmed demand and 2 per cent of the original demand. Clearly, the most profitable business to be in is to be in hock to the income tax authorities, not for the few thousands that you and I are relentlessly chased after but the really cool moolah running to so many zeros that you and I simply lose count.

For at least three years of the several more years in question, Yashwant Sinha, member JPC 1992-93, has been the finance minister. Does the blame for the snail’s pace of progress vest entirely in the bureaucratic hares who run the Central Board of Direct Taxes?

The CBI registered some 72 scam-related cases. Forty seven have, one way or the other, been brought to the courts. So dynamic has been the prosecution that as many as six of the 72 cases have actually been brought to a conclusion. And the heart-warming number of three have actually resulted in conviction. That is less than 5 per cent success in nearly ten years of the CBI’s conscientious pursuit of criminals.

The black hole which the previous JPC found itself unable to plug was what it called the ‘‘nexus’’ between big business, banks and brokers. Sternly, Yashwant and Jaswant, George and Maran, Ram Naik, Harin Pathak and Digvijay Singh, not to mention the lesser breed, that is, men like me, demanded that the ‘‘nexus’’ be thoroughly exposed. Manmohan Singh was flayed on the floor of the House for brushing aside the nexus in his first action taken report (ATR). He, therefore, had to produce a second ATR in which he said that owing to the ‘‘stupendous task’’ involved in uncovering the nexus, no single department could do it; a Special Cell had, therefore, been constituted to rip the mask off the nexus.

For the last one thousand and some days, Manmohan’s successor, Yashwant Sinha, has been charged with the responsibility for harrying the Special Cell to push forward its investigations — fearlessly and with all deliberate speed. His colleagues in the cabinet, all honourable men, with as many as seven JPC signatures on their CVs, have held the collective responsibility to hold Yashwant’s hand as he bravely battles the nexus. Yet, the special cell has not met even once in all the thousand days and more that Yashwant Sinha has been finance minister. Yashwant Sinha does not even know whether SEBI is or is not a member of the special cell.

The fence eats the grass. Blame it on the babus? Well, why not? Except that it was Yashwant and his severe seven who insisted — paragraphs 16.61 to 16.63 — that Manmohan Singh’s distinction between ministerial responsibility for ‘overall policy guidance’ and ‘administrative failures’ could not be ‘sustained by the constitutional jurisprudence under which the parliamentary system works’ and, therefore, ‘the responsibility and accountability of the finance minister to parliament cannot be denied’. Resignations, anyone?

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