'BJP and Congress are one party' : Arun Shourie

Source: Rediff

Arun Shourie discusses the real meaning of the Radia tapes with Rediff.com's Sheela Bhatt Arun Shourie is a former newspaper editor, twice a member of the Rajya Sabha, a former Union minister, right-wing thinker and author of 25 books.
He is currently working on this 26th book at the Lavasa complex near Pune, an attempt to understand human suffering through various religions.

Despite the spiritual thrust of his latest book, Shourie, 69, keeps a sharp eye on New Delhi [ Images ].
Here he takes readers through the minefields of the 2G spectrum scam and the Niira Radia tapes and explains how the political milieu in New Delhi has reached the tipping point.
The first of a two-part conversation:
How can we make sense of what is happening in New Delhi after the expose of the 2G spectrum scandal and the release of the Niira Radia tapes?
What's the bigger message that comes out of Radia's conversations?
This shows the extent of corporate penetration into government, into the media and into details of policy making.
The main point that emerges from the tapes is the level of corporate penetration. These tapes have shown that everybody is now linked to everybody else.
Democracy survives on counter-rallying power. It survives when there are alternate sources of authority. But now those have joined hands. There is, what my friend (Union Urban Development Minister S) Jaipal Reddy has once called, an invisible government of India [ Images ] which is completely stable.
The visible Government of India keeps changing, but that invisible government of India remains completely stable.
That is the real danger because now the Opposition is no different from the ruling party, whichever is the ruling party. The influence of those puppeteers behind the scene works on both sides. As a result, no issue is pursued to conclusion.
Is the 2G issue a new one? No. It is two years old. I know how I have taken documents to editors, to senior people in government. How can it be that only one reporter in one newspaper The Pioneer was following it? He was not withholding information, but not one newspaper or television channel touched it.
Today also the reportage is about what (former telecom minister) A Raja says, what Arun Shourie says. Is that the end of the story? I hardly read newspapers now. I just don't watch television. There is nothing to be learnt.
Why are journalists going for sound bytes? Why don't they take the documents home, study it and come to their own conclusions? I can't understand.
I feel completely distanced from this profession (journalism) and, of course, politicians. They are in bed with each other and with everybody.
Don't you think the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party [ Images ]) also has a lot to answer for in the current situation?
I don't see the difference between the two. I feel they (the BJP and the Congress) are one party. They are jointly ruling. It is a dinner party. They meet at dinners. They meet socially. They decide on what has to be done about issues.
It is all very cooperative behaviour. They (the BJP) are shouting (for a Joint Parliamentary Committee). They know that it will kill the investigation.
A JPC will raise side issues and that is what both sides want. Because the corporates behind both sides are the same. They don't want the 2G spectrum investigation to proceed.
If you see the bigger picture of 2G spectrum, it is a battle between the old operators and the new operators in telecom...
But that's the separate issue...
It was during the NDA (National Democratic Alliance) government led by the BJP that (then Union minister) Ananth Kumar introduced Niira Radia to the New Delhi set-up.
Yes, that's one point. I remember there was a report in that regard in the Indian Express which had an eight column front-page story just below the masthead. The story was about Ananth Kumar and Niira Radia's association with each other. I don't recollect if Annath Kumar was then the civil aviation or tourism minister.
I was astonished to read that such person has been named in the report. I was told by a very senior official about the observations made by some agency. He was in a position to know about the minister. He told me that the report about Ananth Kumar and Radia's association is correct and that is why no action was taken against the published report.
See, issues are not taken up in New Delhi by anybody. The political parties and corporates have complete liaison with the media. Its not just Barkha Dutt and Vir Sanghvi, it is the whole lot involved with each other.
That's why political parties are not taking up the issue of the Radia tapes. The cpi-m (Communist Party of India-Marxist) shouted about the tapes, but the next day the story came that West Bengal [ Images ] Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya [ Images ] was dealing with Radia for the West Bengal Industrial Development Corporation.
Now can the CPI-M [ Images ] shout 'crony capitalism' in the same way?
The problem is the homogenisation of India's political parties. All are becoming clones of each other. That means there is no counter-wheeling power any longer in the country.
Do you accept the argument of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's [ Images ] supporters and Congress leaders that there are limitations to a coalition government?
Also, a Congress leader claimed that you can't ask the government to abdicate the duty to govern by taking action under pressure.
Why have they taken action now? Has the coalition fallen? No. These arguments are not right.
The prime minister of India has unlimited power. Our system is so structured that the PM knows everything.
Yashwant Sinha [ Images ], when he was finance minister, told me an incident. He got a message from a leader of the state that s/he wanted to see him. He asked Prime Minister (Atal Bihari) Vajpayee if he could can meet that person. Vajpayee said he could meet her/him.
When Sinha went to the state he met the particular leader without anyone knowing about it. He had lunch and talked about all sorts of things. At the end of it, the leader gave him an envelope. He kept it in his pocket. He came to New Delhi and only then opened it.
It was a legal brief on why cases against that leader should not be pursued by the Enforcement Directorate. He put the envelope in his drawer and did nothing about it. He forgot the case.
Several days later he met Vajpayee and spoke about his meeting with the state leader. Vajpayee listened quietly and kept looking at him. At the end of the meeting he asked Sinha, 'Aur woh lifafa (what about the envelope)?'
Sinha was astonished since he had told no one about the meeting and he did not act on what was requested.
Unless the prime minister deliberately shuts his eyes there is no difficulty in knowing everything. It would be incredible that the prime minister would not know. The system is so structured.
Second, all the telecom dealings were done in public. The Prime Minister's Office would certainly read the newspapers. There was so much commotion in Sanchar Bhuvan that people were beaten up the day the allotment of 2G spectrum was announced.
The point is that the prime minister himself wrote a letter and as politely as possible gave instructions that please examine the issue of auctioning of spectrum and determining its price in a fair and transparent manner.
And his minister disregards that.
Do you think that the PM would not know that?
It was the letter signed by him that was ignored.
Coalition dharma doesn't mean that I will become protector of the corrupt.
I feel the prime minister must have known about the 2G issue. That's evident from all sorts of facts.
Second, coalition compulsions do not give you the licence to abdicate your duty.
If your minister is doing something wrong, as captain of the team, the prime minister owes the responsibility to the country to stop the minister.
If the PM had confronted (Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam [ Images ] chief M) Karunanidhi with all the evidence, I don't imagine he would have told the PM, 'Don't take action against Raja'.
It is possible that the Congress party must have prevailed over the PMO in that matter.
I don't know. I have heard the opposite. Six months ago, the Congress party had told the prime minister that you remove Raja and it is your responsibility to explain this matter to Karunanidhi. That is what senior leaders of the party have been saying.
I don't know the inner party politics of the Congress. But your point of view or mine is immaterial.
The material fact is that nothing was done. People are asking, 'Raja ke khilaf karwai kyon nahi ki? (Why was action not taken against Raja?)'

A few extracts from the book

Source: Indian Express
Tuesday , Aug 25, 2009 at 0529 hrs

Now, it so happens that I profoundly disagree with Mr. Jaswant Singh’s assessment of Jinnah. Ever since I read the multi-volume Jinnah Papers — brought out by the National Archives of Pakistan; the two-volume, Foundations of Pakistan, edited by Syed Sharifuddin Pirzada; and the four-volume History of Partition of India, edited by the Pakistani historian, K.K. Aziz, Jinnah has seemed to me a pinched, narrow-minded, diabolic schemer — one who used and was used by the British to divide India. To use his words, he ‘forged a pistol’, the armed thugs shoring up the Muslim League. He unleashed them in his ‘Direct Action’ against Hindus. He paralysed the Interim Government through Liaquat Ali. From 1937 onwards, he worked stealthily and continuously with the British to thwart every scheme that might have preserved a united India. His contemptuous characterisations of India, of Hindus, of our national movement and its leaders, make one’s blood boil to this day. That he talked Islam and drank whiskey, ate ham, and the rest, that he hardly knew the Quran to say nothing of living by it, do not prove his secularism to me, they make him out to be a hypocrite. In a word, far from being ‘attracted’ by Jinnah, as my senior Jaswant Singh is, I am repelled by him.

And book after book that I have read regarding those decades since I wrote about him and his stratagems twenty-five years ago has etched that image even deeper. My perspective also differs for another reason from the one that informs Jaswant Singh’s book, and that, if I may add, of those who still dream of a ‘grand confederation of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh’, of those who still talk of Akhand Bharat. Having waded through the writings of Islamic leaders and clerics of the period, and seeing the direction in which Pakistan and Bangladesh have evolved — have inevitably evolved, given the principles on which they were founded, principles that Jinnah articulated and insisted upon incessantly — I have come to realise that Girilal Jain was the one who was right. You are dead wrong, he told me, after reading what I had written about Jinnah. The best thing that has happened for us is the Partition. It has given us breathing time, a little time to resurrect and save our pluralist culture and religions. Had it not happened, we would have been bullied and thrashed and swamped by Islamic fundamentalists. So, my lament is the opposite of Jaswant Singh’s today. And it also so happens that I am an adorer of Sardar Patel as of the Lokmanya, and a worshipper of Gandhiji.

But first the book, and a few extracts.

A glimpse of the contents

A chapter, ‘Compromise on national symbols’ — not by the British nor by Jinnah, but by the Congress leaders. By Congress leaders does the author mean, ‘Sardar Patel’, or even “Congress leaders, in particular Sardar Patel”?

A chapter, ‘Boost to Jinnah by Congress’.

A sub-heading: ‘Azad shocks Gandhi’ — when Maulana Azad, then Congress President, conveyed acceptance of the Cabinet Mission Plan, in particular of excluding non-League Muslims from the Cabinet, and his assurance to the British that he would carry the Congress with him, that they need not worry about any misgivings that some, including Gandhiji might have. All this without telling either the Congress or Gandhiji, and he ‘mis-stated’ the facts, to boot, to Gandhiji’s face, till he was confronted with the letter he had sent. The author sets out the ‘devastating effect’ of the episode on Gandhiji.

Citations from Sardar Patel

He recalls how the Congress Working Committee, in spite of the strenuous, indeed broken-hearted opposition of Gandhiji, accepted the British proposal to divide Punjab and Bengal. He quotes the letter that Sardar Patel wrote to a member of the Working Committee, and points out how very unrealistic the Sardar was in this case:

“If the League insists on Pakistan,” the Sardar wrote, “the only alternative is the division of the Punjab and Bengal... I do not think that the British Government will agree to division. In the end, they will see the wisdom of handing over the reins of Government to the strongest party. Even if they do not, it will not matter. A strong Centre with the whole of India — except East Bengal and part of the Punjab, Sind and Baluchistan — enjoying full autonomy under the Centre will be so powerful that the remaining portions will eventually come in.” The author remarks,

“Both Nehru and Patel surmised that by this counter-strategy Jinnah would be paid in his own coin; he would be made to realise that his argument would be turned against him; that what would be left to him ultimately was the ‘truncated, mutilated, moth-eaten Pakistan’ which he had scornfully refused to look at some years ago.”

Recounting subsequent events, the book records, “Patel was so fed up with the League’s tactics inside the Interim Government that he saw nothing but endless intrigue and troubles ahead in any kind of working with the League; it was better to have a clean separation rather than have pinpricks every day. Nehru too had lost all hopes of joint action with the Muslim League in any kind of arrangement; the League would never see eye to eye with the Congress on any of the issues. He felt, despairingly, that there was no way out except Partition. Rajendra Prasad came out with the same explanation: ‘It was the Working Committee, and particularly such of its members as were represented on the Central Cabinet, which had agreed to the scheme of Partition... (They) did so because they had become disgusted with the situation then obtaining in the country. They saw that riots had become a thing of everyday occurrence and would continue to be so; and that the Government... was incapable of preventing them because the Muslim League Ministers would cause obstruction everywhere... It had thus become impossible to carry on the administration.’”

“With Nehru and Patel finally acquiescing to the demand for Pakistan, the atmosphere, especially in the north, began to hot up as never before”, the book records, and elaborates what followed.

‘Benumbed mental state of Congress’

The book turns to what it calls “Benumbed Mental State of Congress”, and cites Acharya Kripalani’s admission to nail it. Kripalani, then the president of the Congress, wrote about the crucial meeting in which, unknown to Gandhiji, the Working Committee met, and endorsed the Partition Plan: “The Working Committee met in a tense atmosphere. Everybody felt depressed at the prospect of the Partition of the country. The Viceroy’s proposals were accepted without much discussion. As a matter of fact, Jawaharlal and Vallabhbhai were already committed to the acceptance of the proposals. There was no critical examination...” Kripalani noted the manifest infirmities in the Plan that had been drawn up, and which the CWC approved, and wrote, “It was quite natural for our foreign masters to ignore all these inconsistencies in order to favour the League; one cannot understand why we of the Working Committee did not even draw their attention to these important details.”

The Plan had been accepted behind Gandhiji’s back. He was dead-set against it even after Panditji and Patel told him that they had already agreed to it in their meeting with the Viceroy, and had already got the Working Committee to endorse it. Gandhiji was torn — telling his closest associates one moment that he would put up a last fight, telling them the next that he was helpless. At the crucial moment, he told Congressmen that, as their leaders had already accepted the Partition Plan, they should do so also. The book quotes Panditji sort of placing the responsibility on this falling in line by Gandhiji! Panditji told Leonard Mosley, “But, if Gandhiji had told us not to accept Partition, we would have gone on fighting and waiting.”

The book records that, given the extent to which it had been weakened by the Second War, the British had come to realise that their time was up, that there was no way they could impose their conditions on the Indians. So, they set about their fallback option — to divide India so that they would have a strategic foothold in Pakistan. Having documented the mirages and miasmas of the Congress leaders, the book remarks, “the Pakistan demand assumed prestige mainly because of the Congress vacillation on that issue and pampering of the League...”

The book shows how the rationalisation the Congress leaders advanced — that the only alternative to Partition was civil war — is blown by the massacres that followed. It recalls Panditji telling a New York audience two years later, that if they had known the terrible consequences of Partition in the shape of killings etc., they would have resisted the division of India. It recalls, Rajendra Prasad exclaiming, “If only we had known!” “As for Acharya Kripalani,” the book records, “his choicest epithets in later years were reserved for those in the Congress High Command on whom he put the entire responsibility for Partition — so far had his own mind traveled from the position he had taken (of defending the June 3 Plan) in that fateful session of the AICC meeting in June 1947.”

The book records Pyarelal’s telling assessment: “Pandit Nehru’s speech revealed — what had all along been suspected — that it was the Interim Government’s helplessness, owing to sabotage from within by the League members in the Government and retention of control by the British, to cope with the spreading anarchy that had driven the Congress High Command to desperation, so that they were glad to escape from the intolerable situation they found themselves in, even by paying the price of Partition. The Congress leaders were past the prime of their lives. After a quarter of a century of wandering in the wilderness they had come within sight of the Promised Land. They were doughty warriors and were not afraid, if necessary, to take the plunge once more. But they were afraid that it might not be given them to see another successful fight through, and the fruit of their struggle and the countless sacrifices of a whole generation of fighters for freedom might slip through their fingers when it seemed almost within their grasp. If the hour of decision had come earlier when the Congress was in the wilderness, when they were young and before their experience in the Interim Government and the exercise of power had coloured their thinking and outlook, their choice might have been different.”

But that was not just Pyarelal’s assessment. Panditji’s own assessment was harsher. The book records what he told Leonard Mosley in 1960: “The truth is that we were tired men, and we were getting on in years too. Few of us could stand the prospect of going to prison again, and if we had stood out for a United India as we wished it, prison obviously awaited us. We saw the fires burning in the Punjab and heard every day of the killings. The plan for Partition offered a way out, and we took it.”

A few questions

I can go on reproducing extracts, but the main theme of the book’s thesis will be evident. According to the book, while the British had the manifest design to partition India; while Jinnah and his Muslim League subordinates were manifestly working for Pakistan, neither of the two would have succeeded but for the vacillations, mistakes and compromises of the Congress leaders.

To assess the anger that the Gujarat government has worked up, ask three questions:

• Is it just this book alone that asserts that mistakes by Congress leaders contributed to the outcome? Was that fact not acknowledged by the Congress leaders themselves?

• When the book speaks of the vacillations, mistakes and compromises of the Congress leaders does it mean, “the vacillations, mistakes and compromises of the Congress leaders - excluding Sardar Patel”?

Manifestly not. So, is the author guilty of insulting Sardar Patel or not? Should the Gujarat government not, therefore, ban the book? And so, the final question:

• Whose book are we talking about?

The book is The Tragedy of Partition by one of the longest-serving and most revered pillars of the RSS, H.V. Seshadri. It is the standard text of the RSS on the Partition. It is sold at every RSS bookshop, and read, its message is internalised, by every RSS swayam sevak.

Now that the Gujarat government knows the name of the author, two further questions:

• Is there one passage in Jaswant Singh’s book, even one passage that casts the Sardar’s role into graver doubt than Seshadri’s book?

• Is the Sardar’s reputation, in the view of those prancing about to shield it, so fragile that such references as there are in Jaswant Singh’s book or Seshadri’s will undermine it?

Nor is Seshadri’s book alone in documenting the lapses of the Congress leaders. Professor R.C. Majumdar nailed the lapses extensively in lectures that the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan published. He nailed them in his three-volume study, History of the Freedom Movement in India. The lapses are nailed even more firmly in Struggle for Freedom, which forms Volume XI of the great series, The History and Culture of the People of India, ‘prepared under the direction of’, as the cover of each volume says, that other distinguished son of Gujarat, K.M. Munshi — one of the closest associates of the Sardar himself. And they are nailed — not as lapses, but as inexcusable blunders — in the work on the Partition of India of the greatest constitutional scholar we have had since Independence, H.M. Seervai. The self-serving speeches of the Congress leaders are available in Mitra’s Annual Register. The anguish of Gandhiji, his torment at what Congress leaders, in particular the two closest to him, Panditji and the Sardar, had done is recorded from day to day in his addresses at the daily prayer meetings and in Pyarelal’s searing volumes, The Last Phase — “The purity of my striving will be put to the test only now,” Pyarelal records him saying as he lay in bed, having awakened earlier than he was meant to. “Today I find myself all alone. Even the Sardar and Jawaharlal think that my reading of the situation is wrong and peace is sure to return if Partition is agreed upon...They wonder if I have not deteriorated with age... Nevertheless, I must speak as I feel if I am a true and loyal friend to the Congress and to the British people as I claim to be...”

As all these books, as well as many more, can be stretched to cast the same doubts on the role of the Sardar, as one of the principal leaders of the Congress, how many of them will the Gujarat government ban?

(To be continued)

The writer is a BJP MP in the Rajya Sabha

Bringing India’s money back to Indian shores

Source: Indian Express

Tuesday , Apr 21, 2009 at 1531 hrs

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?

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• •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?”

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

This customarily self-serving rationalisation was put out by one of the Congress party’s lawyers and spokesmen. At this very time the party was trying to insinuate that, actually, the PM had taken up the matter at the G-20 summit. As its spokesmen could not point to any statement he made either at the summit or the subsequent press meet, they drew solace from a passing reference he had made at Gordon Brown’s dinner.

In any case, if the G-20 summit was not the right forum for taking up this matter, how is it that in the communiqué that the G-20 leaders issued on April 2, 2009, in paragraph 15, entitled, “Strengthening the Financial System,” they pledged”to take action against non-cooperative jurisdictions, including tax havens. We stand ready to deploy sanctions to protect our public finances and financial systems. The era of banking secrecy is over. We note that the OECD has today published a list of countries assessed by the Global Forum against the international standard for exchange of tax information”? Were they also, in the view of the Congress party, acting inappropriately when they made such a strong commitment in their communiqué at the summit?

And recall that no sooner had they issued the threat of imposing sanctions that countries which had been blacklisted by the OECD that very day began declaring that they would indeed sign up on the agreement to exchange tax information, and that includes evasion.

•In any case, there is doubt about the figures.

As is its custom, the Congress is trying to cover up the basic question of the money which has been looted from India and is lying in tax havens, by raising questions about the precision of figures and estimates. This is exactly the kind of legalisms with which persons like P. Chidambaram and other legitimisers were fielded to cover up the loot from Bofors. In its paper, “Overview of the OECD’s Work on International Tax Evasion,” the OECD itself lists studies that state that there are $1.7 trillion to $11.5 trillion which are today parked in tax havens. This OECD paper has been widely reported in the Indian press. The basic point is: even if the amounts are just a few scores of billion dollars and not one and a half trillion dollars, why should they not be brought back to India? And the fact is that other countries, much smaller countries with no superpower pretensions, have succeeded in getting their money back. Even as of last October, when the OECD released its paper, little Ireland had succeeded in recovering almost a billion Euros through an investigation into offshore banks.

Given that even small countries like Ireland have got money back, is it not a shame, is it not an outrage that, as of yesterday, 18 April, 2009, The Times of India, should be quoting the Swiss ambassador to India saying that so far, the Swiss government has received no request — not even a request — from the Indian government?

The real question is different: can the money looted from India be brought back to the country when the attitude of the government continues to be as determinedly inactive?

Can the government which allowed Ottavio Quattrochi to take his money out of banks —where it was lying frozen on court orders — be trusted to bring back the loot that is lying in Swiss banks and other tax havens? Can the government which prostituted the CBI so that he may get away from Argentina be trusted to bring the loot back?

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

Again, the Congress is relying on the short memory of its audience. The fact of the matter is that no one had been pressing more for the replacement of the harsh provisions of FERA than the Congress itself. The changes were being contemplated since 1996. The demand for doing away with the harsh provisions came to a crescendo during the VP Singh government when FERA came to be used for interrogating captains of industry — like Mr. S.L. Kirloskar — under harsh circumstances. As news reports of that period themselves indicate, FEMA which was approved by the government in July 1998, was on the lines of a draft which had been prepared under the leadership of the preceding finance minister, P. Chidambaram. Even today, if you go to the Rediff website and turn to their dispatch of 25 July, 1998, on “FEMA, Money Bills: Cabinet nods, Parliament’s turn next,” you will read, “The Bills were broadly on the lines of a draft prepared under the leadership of then Finance Minister Palaniappan Chidambram.”

In any event, there is no mystery about the reasons on account of which the law was changed. They are well set out in the following passage:

“Until recently, we had a law known as the Foreign Exchange (Regulation) Act. Its object was to conserve and augment the forex reserves of the country. The way to hell, it is said, is paved with good intentions. Like many well-intentioned laws, FERA paved the way to disaster. FERA created a flourishing black market in foreign exchange. It brought into the economic lexicon the word ‘Hawala’. Illegal forex transactions became the fuel for the growth of crime syndicates with trans-border connections...FERA also became a tool of oppression. Successive governments persisted with FERA and added COFFEPOSA and SAFEMA. International markets do not respect draconian laws that run counter to common sense. India’s reserves, far from being augmented, dwindled at an alarming rate...Mercifully, FERA was buried finally on May 31, 2000.”

When and where was this written? In an article that appeared The Indian Express on 25 August 2002. Who wrote the article? None other than P. Chidambaram!

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

Another clever little statement by yet another clever lawyer of the Congress party! Would the looters who have stashed away money in tax havens from India still need to be alerted after Germany got the names from Lichtenstein as long ago as last year? Would they still need to be alerted after Germany offered to furnish the names to governments that asked for the names? Would they still need to be alerted after the United States got the names from the leading bank of Switzerland, UBS in February this year, and got it to submit to paying a fine of $ 800 million to boot? Would they still need to be alerted after the G-20 leaders, including Manmohan Singh as the Congress would like to remind us, declared their determination to get the tax havens to disgorge the names? But such is the confusion in the Congress party and such the brilliance of its lawyers that all it can do is to seek to deflect the nation-wide demand for getting the loot back from tax havens by such witticisms!

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

Leaders of the Congress party would be better advised to ask, “During that very period, what was the Congress party doing, what were its lawyers and leaders doing, to thwart the efforts of the NDA Government to uncover the names of persons who had looted the country even on defence deals like Bofors?” But even if the NDA had done nothing — whether on terrorism or money abroad — is that any reason for not hurrying to avail of the unique opportunity that has arisen now?

Even while replacing FERA with FEMA, the NDA government made sure that it would have an additional two years to file prosecutions under FERA. And it filed as many as 2000 cases against those who were under investigation before FERA lapsed. The reason for doing so, a reason that is well known to lawyers in the Congress party, was that, when a prosecution is filed it is adjudicated according to the law which prevailed at the time at which the case was filed. These are the very cases which the Congress did not pursue later.

The fact is that it is now that the unique opportunity has arisen to get the loot back: Germany has succeeded in getting the names; the US has succeeded in getting the names; the G-20 leaders have pledged themselves to ensure the end of bank secrecy; countries that had hitherto refused to share the requisite information are pledging to do so — within a week of their names being published by OECD in the list of countries that were dragging their feet on the question, Costa Rica, Malaysia, Philippines and Uruguay pledged to enter into the relevant agreements.

Conclusion

There is a real fight ahead: a fight in the national interest, a fight that will have to be waged doggedly to get the names from the tax havens and to get the amounts back to India — as tax havens will not easily part with their route to lucre. And not all countries will be eager to wage the fight — so many rulers in Africa, in Latin America, to say nothing of the princelings of China — will be loath to see the fight succeed. So, determination and leadership will be required of India, and persistence, and forging alliances with civil society in Europe and elsewhere.

Nor are bilateral agreements any substitute to multilateral pressure. With close to seventy tax havens, decades will pass before agreements are concluded with each haven, even as money is spirited from the haven that has signed up to the one that is holding out. As has been correctly emphasised, a consensus is already emerging across the country. Leaders outside the political realm, parties such as the CPM, SP, BSP, JD(U), AIADMK have all demanded that the government act energetically to get the names from the tax havens and to get back the amounts. Instead of quibbling, the Congress would be well-advised to endorse the consensus, and act on it. Not joining secular forces on even so secular an issue?!

The writer is a BJP MP in the Rajya Sabha

Arun Shourie on the Mitrokhin Archives OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS

Part-I

Standard Operating Procedure
The weekly organ of the CPI(M), People's Democracy, September 2005, declaims, ''The Mitrokhin balloon of lies has been well burst recently. The statement of the secretary of the Bengal unit of the CPI(M), Anil Biswas on September 21 may well perhaps be the last nail on the coffin of the 'archival misdemeanour'. Anil Biswas told the media at the Muzaffar Ahmad Bhavan that 'after having procured the so-called Mitrokhin archives and poring over it, we find no reference of the kind alleged or otherwise, to the late Promode Dasgupta'.''

There are just two short chapters in this book about India. On the very second page of the very first of these, we read, ''As KGB operations in India expanded during the 1950s and 1960s, the Centre (that is, the KGB headquarters in Moscow ) seems to have discovered the extent of IB's previous penetration of the CPI. According to a KGB report, an investigation into Promode Das Gupta, who became secretary of the Bengal Communist Party in 1959, concluded that he had been recruited by the IB in 1947 . Further significant IB penetrations were discovered in the Kerala and Madras parties...''

Did the ''poring over'' not reach even the second page? But this is standard procedure for Marxists — lie outright!

In the full confidence that no one will look up the original material.

The second, adopted this time round by the Congress too, is to just dismiss revelations. Extracts from The Mitrokhin Archive had but to appear in the press, and they, and their favoured commentators pronounced, ''No evidence...,'' ''Fiction...,'' ''An author in search of lies.'' And simultaneously, ''There is nothing new.... These things have been well known for long!'' Well known for long, but require new proof!

The third device also has been on display this time round: paste motives on all concerned. A favourite of Marxists, it has been deployed even by ''intelligence experts'' this time. One of them writes that the book has three aims. The first, he says, is ''To discredit the present Russian leadership.'' Presumably this is accomplished by indirection: as Putin is known to have been in the KGB, as it is well known that he has appointed his former colleagues from the KGB to vital posts across Russia, pointing to what the KGB used to be doing, tarnishes ''the present Russian leadership''. Second, our expert says, the purpose of the Mitrokhin account is ''to drive a wedge between the present leaderships of Russia and India .'' And, third, the British secret service has always been hostile to leaders of the Labour Party in the UK , this has been a plot to discredit the Labour Government and leaders of Britain.

Assume all this to be true, does it amount to a reason for India not to examine what the disclosures spell for our national security and governance? The fourth device is to smear whoever has brought out facts that are inconvenient. ''A former low-grade clerk of the KGB archives,'' they write about Mitrokhin, he was not the head of KGB archives. Assume that to be true: low-grade clerks are as useful sources of information as heads of departments! Mitrokhin was an incompetent officer, they say — if he had been any good at field work, he would not have been assigned to a backroom tending old records. But the point is whether, having been relegated to backrooms, he had access to thoe tell-tale records. Just one who ''stole'' those ''clandestinely obtained'' documents, they say. But does that suggest that the records he transcribed were genuine and valuable or does that establish that they were fakes?!

As it isn't just Vasili Mitrokhin who was involved in this project, the British professor, Christopher Andrew who collaborated in writing and editing the volumes also comes in for the standard treatment. The professor, we are told, ''was alleged to have been embedded in the intelligence agencies.'' He becomes ''the ever-obliging Christopher Andrew.'' The CPI(M) mouthpiece, People's Democracy, is even more elaborate: ''No wonder, these scions (those running the 'corporate media' here in India) have now picked up the Soviet defector's ramblings, which have been put together in a fashion in a book by an English author who is not only not known for his scholarship but also just not known in the academe as a practicing historian.'' That phrase is literally standard issue.

When ''Why?,'' does not work, ask, ''Why now?'' That is the standard device since Lenin's time! And this time too we have had it in full display: Mitrokhin defected in 1992, why is this book being released now, in 2005? demands one of these tele-Communists. In fact, the six cases full of notes that were brought over were examined threadbare for years, and the first volume was printed in 1999! But again, standard.

In truth, there never is a right time to talk the truth about them! Communist journals in India used to be full of glowing accounts about the industrial excellence of East Germany and Czechoslovakia, about the achievements of Ceausescu and his Romania, about the unequalled might of the Soviet Union; about how unemployment had been abolished, how ills that plagued capitalist societies — divorce, crime — were non-existent in Communist countries. If before 1989 you questioned the claims, you were denounced, ''Do you think one-third of humanity is wrong, and you alone are right?'' And after 1989, when the entire Soviet bloc collapsed?

True to form, this time also we read in the CPI(M)'s mouthpiece, People's Democracy, ''The principal reason why this cheap thriller (the phrase for the Mitrokhin record) is being played out in the corporate media now more than ever is not difficult to guess. The recent resurgence of the communists, socialists, and the Left across the globe has certainly made the imperialists press the panic button.... In India, the presence and growth of the CPI(M) has long since been a worry for the ruling classes and their friends and patrons out in the West. The corporate media has, as a willing handmaiden, been periodically albeit regularly feeding out stories maligning the Party and its leadership.''

Facts about Mitrokhin's records:
To gauge the worth of these denunciations, recall that Vasili Mitrokhin defected in 1992. Between 1992 and 1999, his notes were subjected to minute and most careful examination by various levels of the British Government. They scrutinized the information, they examined who to engage as co-author, they weighed how the material ought to be published. Questions such as these were considered by senior civil servants, intelligence agencies, by an interdepartmental committee, by Ministers, by two Prime Ministers. The way the material was handled was subsequently debated in the House of Commons and was examined threadbare by the Intelligence and Security Committee of the UK Parliament. The Committee was tasked in October 1999 to examine whether it had been handled well. The Parliamentary Committee submitted a detailed report in June 2000. This report was debated extensively.

The first volume of the present work was published in 1999. No one in India made the kinds of allegations that are being hurled now. While we are being fed insinuations to belittle Mitrokhin; while we are being fed the line, for instance, that the entire project has been a conspiracy of British intelligence agencies to discredit British Labour Party leaders, this is what Jack Straw, then Home Secretary and currently the Foreign Secretary of the Labour Government - to tarnish whom we are being told this plot has been engineered — said about Mitrokhin. He told the House of Commons on 21 October, 1999,

''....I entirely endorse what the right hon. Gentleman says about Mr. Mitrokhin's courage. It required huge courage to do what he did. I do not doubt that a great many other people working in the KGB during that long period were pretty disgusted with the work that they were asked to engage in, but very few of them had the courage and tenacity to work, as Mr. Mitrokhin did, to record the huge amount of what was passing across his desk and then to make himself known to intelligence agents in Moscow and have himself and his family brought out at considerable risk. I pay tribute to his courage and acknowledge the benefits that the whole of the West has received as a result of his disclosures''

Similarly, the Parliamentary Committee observed, ''The Committee, during the course of the inquiry, had the opportunity to meet Vasili Mitrokhin. The Committee believes that he is a man of remarkable commitment and courage, who risked imprisonment or death in his determination that the truth should be told about the real nature of the KGB and their activities, which he believed were betraying the interests of his own country and people. He succeeded in this and we wish to record our admiration for his achievement....'' But in India, ''a former low-grade clerk,'' one who ''stole documents,'' one who was so incompetent that he had to be consigned to a backroom dusting archives....

Similarly, while in India the account has been dismissed as ''vague'', ''complete fabrication,'' ''fiction'', ''a spy thriller,'' Britain's Parliamentary Committee had this to say about the value of the material that Mitrokhin had brought over, and on which the Mitrokhin-Andrew volumes are based, ''We are aware that the Western intelligence communities are extremely grateful for Mr Mitrokhin's material, which has shown the degree to which the KGB influenced and penetrated official organizations. Historians also find The Mitrokhin Archive of tremendous value, as it gives a real insight into the KGB's work and the persecution of dissidents.''

But in India , to use Lenin's phrase, ''a shroud of angry words to cover inconvenient facts''! The one question we should be asking, is not being asked: Indian and British intelligence agencies have had close relations; was the material offered to us, as it was offered to other agencies? What did we do about it?

Instead, all sorts of red-herrings are being thrown in the way. Why was this unknown professor, why was this person who was ''alleged to have been embedded in intelligence agencies,'' why was he of all persons chosen as co-author? It just so happens that this question too was examined by the UK Parliamentary Committee. It concluded that in Professor Christopher Andrew of Cambridge University, just the right man had been chosen for the project. Andrews had previously worked on the Gordievsky books. He had been security cleared and had signed the Official Secrets Act, the Committee noted. ''The Committee regards Professor Andrews as a distinguished academic who has specialized in the espionage field,'' the report stated. ''He was a good choice to undertake this work.'' But in India....



Part-II
A society and state in denial In his justly famous memoir, Encounters with Lenin, (Oxford University press, 1968) Nikolay Vladislavovich Volsky, who wrote under the pen-name Valentinov, narrates what is for Communists the hadis in such matters. He recounts what Lenin said to him: ''Marxism is a monolith conception of the world, it does not toler ate dilution and vulgarisation by means of various insertions and additions. Plekhanov once said to me about a critic of Marxism (I've forgotten his name) 'First let's stick the convict's badge on him, and then after that we'll examine this case.' And I think we must stick the convict's badge, on anyone and everyone who tries to undermine Marxism, even if we don't go on to examine his case. That's how every sound revolutionary should react.''

As that is the operating procedure for the much lesser offence — that of mere ''dilution'' of the doctrine — you can imagine how much greater must be the zeal with which the ''convict's badge'' is stuck on one guilty of the much greater crime — the crime of revealing the truth about them.

In a word, we should see that the put-on derision with which Communists and the Congress spokesmen have been trying to bury Mitrokhin's records is just standard procedure, and not let it deflect us from the revelations. For there can be no doubt at all that, as far as India is concerned — our governance, our national security — Mitrokhin's records point to the gravest danger. Remember that the two brief chapters in this volume are but the distillation of trunk-loads of scrupulous notes taken down over twelve years. Even this briefest of brief accounts speaks of penetration by foreign agencies of departments of our Government, including intelligence agencies; of Mrs. Indira Gandhi's coterie; it speaks of the foreign agency's intervention in what we regard as our hallmark, our ''free and fair'' elections; it speaks of the confidence with which the agency maneuvered to build up preferred successors to Prime Ministers; it speaks of funding of Left parties, of trade unions, of the Congress itself; it speaks of how one of the prides of that period — Indo-Soviet trade — became such a handy channel for secret funds; it speaks of infiltration of our other hallmark, our ''free and fair'' media — it recounts the ease with which the KGB and the CIA were able to plant stories; it speaks of the ease with which, and the paltry sums for which the KGB was able to organize ''spontaneous demonstrations'' by Muslims....

Consider just a single paragraph from the chapter: ''Oleg Kalugin, who became head of FCD Directorate K (Counterintelligence) in 1973, remembers India as 'a model of KGB infiltration of a Third World Government': We had scores of sources throughout the Indian Government — in intelligence, counterintelligence, the Defence and Foreign Ministries, and the police.' In 1978, Directorate K, whose responsibilities included the penetration of foreign intelligence and security agencies, was running, through Line KR in the Indian residencies, over thirty agents — ten of whom were Indian intelligence officers. Kalugin recalls one occasion on which Andropov personally turned down an offer from an Indian minister to provide information in return for $ 50,000 on the grounds that the KGB was already well supplied with material from the Indian Foreign and Defence Ministries: 'It seemed like the entire country was for sale; the KGB — and the CIA — had deeply penetrated the Indian Government. After a while neither side entrusted sensitive information to the Indians, realising that their enemy would know all about it the next day.''

Even if we have become so immune to shame by now that we are not led to hang our heads on reading a passage such as this, at least we should consider what that kind of information implies for our national security. Moreover, as the KGB had such ingress into our governmental structures, agencies of other countries too would have had no greater difficulty in suborning persons and influencing policies and decisions. And can that surprise us? When every corporate house is able to plant stories, what difficulty would a foreign government face? And remember, that passage is about the state of affairs thirty years ago. Since then, there has been a precipitate deterioration in both the quality and integrity of persons in public life as well as in the civil service.

For none of the things that Mitrokhin records is the KGB is to blame. That agency was just doing its job for its country. The question is, what were we doing for our country? The question is, what are we to now do to protect our interest? Recall what the British Parliamentary Committee reported about the worth of Mitrokhin's disclosures, and how invaluable these had been to agencies of other countries to neutralise dangers those countries faced — ''Western intelligence communities are extremely grateful for Mr. Mitrokhin's material...,'' ''a case of exceptional counter-intelligence significance, not only illuminating past KGB activity against Western countries but also promising to nullify many of Russia's current assets''.... ''the most detailed and extensive pool of CI (counter-intelligence) ever received by the FBI''.... ''the biggest CI bonanza of the postwar period'' — contrast these acknowledgments, contrast the way agencies of other countries put the material to work, contrast all that with the resolute shutting of eyes in India.

Several lessons leap out from this episode. Notice first what the Communists, their megaphones and their current dependents would have been blaring had even one-thousandth of such disclosures come out about some organization or individual affiliated to the RSS. Two points arise from that contrast. First, is such penetration a threat to our national security if it relates to the RSS and not a threat when it relates to the Communists or the Congress? Second, where do the disclosures leave the high moral ground that the Left appropriates?

It is entirely true that just because someone is named by a foreign intelligence agency or agent, that does not establish him to have been a spy. But surely the right response would be to inquire, at least to find out whether British agencies had offered the information to us and we had failed to follow it up. Nor is this a one-off. Professor Patrick Moynihan was one of the most respected of American academics. He was appointed Ambassador to India during Mrs. Indira Gandhi's time. As Mrs. Gandhi's speeches about the ''foreign hand'' — that always meant the CIA — became incessant, Moynihan commenced an inquiry into what Americans had been doing. In his memoir of the period he wrote that he came across two occasions on which the CIA had provided funds to counter Communist candidates. He wrote, ''Both times the money was given to the Congress Party which had asked for it. Once it was given to Mrs. Gandhi herself, who was then a party official.'' His book was published in the US as well as in India . If what he had said was untrue, what could be a clearer occasion for a defamation case? But absolutely nothing of the kind was done. Just the standard operating procedure: denounce, smear, bury. When the Government so resolutely refuses to make any inquiries, whether the account is of Moynihan or Mitrokhin, what should one conclude?

In the case of the Communists, disclosures about their having received money are the least of the matter — and it does seem to me that the Mitrokhin figures are gross understatements, as if some few zeros have got left out. The figures of Indo-Soviet trade, the quantum of Indian purchases of Soviet arms, and what was said in those days of the sudden wealth of the private parties through whom the Soviets insisted these transactions be made, would suggest transfers of much, much larger amounts. But in their case, money is the least of the matter. Their entire outlook, their ''line'' has been foreign, it has been derived from, to use Mao's phrase, ''the dung-heap of textbooks written abroad.'' And, as has been documented time and again, from instructions received from abroad.

As a result, working for the interest of heir ''international movement'', specifically for the ''fortresses'' of that ''movement'' — the USSR, China — is in their very genes. They traduced Gandhiji and the freedom movement from 1939 for not taking advantage of Britain's difficulties — the war in Europe is just an ''Imperialist war'', they shouted; Gandhi is guilty of collaborating with the Imperialists by not launching a movement to liberate India when Britain was caught defending itself against Hitler. Hitler was, of course, on the side of history then as he had signed a non-aggression pact with Stalin.

Then they switched suddenly — the ''Imperialist war'' became ''People's war'', not because India 's interests had changed but because Hitler had attacked the Soviet Union. They now denounced Gandhi for launching the Quit India Movement! And there was no doubt about the reason: the Soviet Union is ''The Only Fatherland'' for us, they proudly announced in their resolutions, and, in accordance with this new ''assessment'', they entered into a secret understanding with the British Government in India to sabotage the Quit India Movement. In 1947, apart from the Muslim League, they were the only party that advocated the vivisection of India. When India became independent, they declared that India was in fact still under the tutelage of capitalist, Imperial powers, and so its Government must be overthrown.

In 1962, their thesis was that India is the aggressor, not China — which, by definition, could never launch aggression as it was a ''workers' State''. In 1975, they — they, we now see, at the goading of their KGB minders - were all for the Emergency. When China exploded its atomic bomb, they proclaimed it to be a great triumph — a fitting answer to the Imperialists, a decisive step that breaks the monopoly of Imperialist powers. When India went in for atomic weapons, they denounced it — a blow at world peace!

The Mitrokhin disclosures are particularly disturbing for them as they remind us once more, among other ''well known'' facts, of how they and their fellow-travelers, unable to work their Revolution, worked at securing the same goal by infiltration — of the Congress; a sort of ''Revolution-by-stealth''. This was the famous ''Kumarmangalam thesis'' that, as Mitrokhin reports, got such enthusiastic assistance from the KGB. But surely that is not just a reminder of what is past. The Communists have never been closer to attaining that goal as they are today — what with a supine Congress so completely at their mercy.

Nor is it just that the Congress is so completely at their mercy. As Swapan Dasgupta pointed out the other day, the danger is twice compounded — the Congress is completely dependent on the Communists, and the Communists are completely compromised. The Communists have been busy denouncing Mitrokhin's revelations. But as Dasgupta points out, there are several other caches that are coming to light. He draws attention to the fact that the private diaries of a former Soviet Ambassador to India, I. A. Benediktov can now be accessed on the Internet — at the website of the Cold War International History Project of the Woodrow Wilson Centre, Washington, DC ( http://wilsoncentre.org) In these diaries, Benediktov records plaintive pleas of Bhupesh Gupta, Secretary, National Council of CPI, for funds. He records Gupta's plea that, with Ajoy Ghosh through whom the monies used to be received and disbursed, gone, Namboodripad should be allowed to be brought in to handle funds from the Soviets.

A little later, during China's invasion of India in 1962, Benediktov records Namboodripad's fevered appeals to the Soviets that they abandon their support for India, and the sycophantic gratitude Namboodripad expresses for an editorial that Pravda has carried that suggests a shift away from India. Namboodripad asks Benediktov to inform the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union ''that the publication of this article and the advice of the CPSU contained in this letter of the CC CPSU, truly will help our party get out of the extremely difficult position it is now in. Before this, there were moments when we felt ourselves to be simply helpless, but now the party will be able to help this situation. We are grateful to the CC CPSU for this help. You can transmit this personally from me and from Comrade B Gupta.'' In a word, the Congress is completely in the hands of the Communists, and the Communists can be ''motivated'' by so many — those who gave them assistance and guidance, as well as those who may reveal what they got, and with how much gratitude they received it.

So, first of all we must see through their invective. As the Government is in their grip; as, given what Mitrokhin records about infiltration into Mrs. Indira Gandhi's circle, of its own accord the Government itself will not want to pursue the matter, inside Parliament and outside, citizens must put pressure on the Government to institute a full and public inquiry. It must be made to request the British Government for access to Mitrokhin's records, and it must be made to make public what those records reveal about India. But we do not have to go on waiting for the Government to do something in the matter. Papers of several senior Soviet officials are now in various archives. We should form teams of scholars on our own and scrutinize that heap of material for entries that pertain to India.

These are important steps, and they must be taken. But even they are but tiny ancillaries to the main debility we must overcome. The reaction in India, that is the non-reaction to The Mitrokhin Archive is but a symptom — of a state and society in denial. On every matter — what Pakistan was doing in Punjab; what it has been doing in Kashmir as well as its current stratagem to acquire it ''peacefully''; infiltration from Bangladesh; jihadi curricula; the threat Naxalites pose and their links in Bihar, in Andhra; the threat ULFA poses and its links in Assam; the militarization of Tibet, the modernization of Chinese defence forces and their deadly implications for India; the opportunity that the breakdown of governance in vast tracts like Bihar spells for the country's enemies — on each and every matter, our society and state just do not want to face the facts.

The media must see how it assists in this shutting of eyes. By the current ''your reaction journalism'' for one. Mitrokhin's volume is published. It goes to someone from the BJP, ''Sir, this new book by this Russian alleges..., what is your reaction? In brief.'' And then to a Communist, ''Sir, this new book by this Russian alleges..., what is your reaction?'' Both sides covered. Balanced story on air. End of matter. This is the condition that we have to reverse, and disclosures of the Mitrokhin kind are yet another occasion when we can commence to do so. On each of these questions, at each of these turns, induce readers, compel governments to face the facts, and thereby take steps that would save the country.

(Concluded)

On their own yardstick

Arun Shourie: Thursday, March 27, 2008

Arun Shourie puts the Budget to the aam aadmi test and argues why the UPA fails miserably

One problem is that while the Government committed itself in that new scripture – The National Common Minimum Programme – to doubling the proportion of GDP that is devoted to social sectors like health and education, in fact, as NC Saxena, member of the UPA’s National Advisory Board, points out, the proportion continues to hover around half the pledged targets.

But that is the lesser problem. The even more debilitating one has been much in the admonitions of the Prime Minister and the Finance Minister. In his Budget speech for 2005/06, Chidambram drew pointed attention to this: ‘At the same time,’ he told the Treasury Benches that were cheering his announcements of higher outlays, ‘I must caution that outlays do not necessarily mean outcomes. The people of the country are concerned with outcomes. The Prime Minister has repeatedly emphasized the need to improve the quality of implementation and enhance the efficiency and accountability of the delivery mechanism.’

So what did he propose to do? ‘During the course of the year, together with the Planning Commission, we shall put in place a mechanism to measure the development outcomes of all major programmes,’ he told Parliament. ‘We shall also ensure that programmes and schemes are not allowed to continue indefinitely from one Plan period to the next without an independent and in-depth evaluation.’ Given that activists were said to have the ear of the Highup, Chidambram added, ‘Civil society should also engage Government in a healthy debate on the efficiency of the delivery mechanism.’

Two years went by, little happened. Chidambram returned to the theme in his Budget of 2007/08. ‘There is no dearth of schemes,’ he told Parliament, ‘there is no dearth of funds. What needs to be done is to deliver the intended outcomes.’

The Prime Minister has been proclaiming the desideratum just as frequently and even more emphatically. ‘We have generated adequate resources in the last three years for use in social sector without sacrificing fiscal prudence,’ he told the ‘Roundtable on India’ organised by The Economist in March 2007. ‘However, we cannot spend our way to prosperity and having tangible outcomes is, therefore, as important as increasing outlays. This is the single biggest concern of our government today and we have to address this issue if we need greater returns on our social investments.’ And a few months later, in November, 2007, he told the full meeting of the Planning Commission, the Gross Budgetary Support provided for in the 11th Plan is almost double what it was in the 10th Plan. More than that ‘the architecture for inclusive growth’ has been laid out, the ‘basic elements’ of that architecture ‘are now fully in place.’ ‘This is a matter of satisfaction and indeed of pride,’ he said. ‘For the next few years, the emphasis must be on ensuring that these programmes deliver what they promise. We must work purposefully to realise the socio-economic transformation the Plan seeks to achieve.’

And what is happening on the ground? After all, these worthies are not consultants to Government. They are the ones directing it. The answer can be gleaned by picking up any one of what Chidambram calls ‘the flagship schemes’ of this Government.

If this is the flagship…

‘The object is to guarantee 100 days of employment in a year to one able-bodied person in every poor household,’ Chidambram told the cheering MPs during his Budget speech for 2004/05 as he explained the Government’s commitment to the poor. So, what was he going to do? Pending legislation, the Food for Work Programme is being extended to 150 districts.

And where is the money to come from? Chidambram’s solution was one that has become the hallmark of this Government: ‘Allocations under different schemes will be pulled together to support the Food for Work Programme,’ he declared. There are substantial funds totaling over Rs. 6,000 crore under SGRY, SGSY, SJSRY, REGP and PMRY.’ A typical stratagem: if there is one big programme, split it into five and announce five path-breaking, closer-to-the people initiatives; if there are five programmes, club them, and announce one historic initiative! In either event, rename them – giving them one of the two permissible names.

In the 2005/06 Budget, while announcing that he was increasing the allocation for this programme to Rs. 11,000 crore, Chidambram correctly noted that there were two components to the allocation – a cash component and a food component.

By the 2006/07, the commitment had got altered, a word got slipped in: while the original commitment was to ‘guarantee 100 days of employment in a year to one able-bodied person in every poor household,’ the commitment now became to guarantee 100 days of employment in a year to one able-bodied person in every rural household. As for allocation, Chidambram said, ‘In the current year, under a clutch of schemes including the Food For Work programme, a sum of Rs. 11,700 crore is expected to be spent on rural employment.’ A few sentences later, the figure was given as 11,300 crore. And there was to be in addition, Rs. 3,000 crore under the Sampoorna Gramin Rozgar Yojna (SGRY).

In the Budget for 2007/08, the scheme was expanded from 200 districts to 330, and the allocation was increased to Rs. 12,000 crore, plus another Rs. 2,800 crore for (SGRY) for rural employment in districts not covered by NREGS.

In this new Budget, Chidambram proclaims, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme ‘has proved a historic measure of empowerment of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, and, especially, women’; that the allocation for it will be raised to Rs. 16,000 crore, and that it will be rolled out to all 596 rural districts of India.

In a note that he has sent to all the Highups, NC Saxena punctures the balloon. First, he points out, since this Government took office, the allocation for rural employment has actually fallen! While Chidambram has been parading financial outlays, he has forgotten to mention what has been happening to that other component of outlays on this programme, the food component: this, Saxena shows, was sixty eight lakh tonnes in 2005/06; it fell to twenty four lakh tonnes in 2006/07; and this year, it was just a little more than seven lakh tonnes till Novemebr, 2007, and may not reach even fifteen lakh tonnes by end-March 2008. Converting these figures into cash, Saxena points out, the outlay by the central Government on wage employment schemes has come down from Rs. 18,406 crore in 2005/06 to Rs. 15,000 crore.

The second point he makes is almost cruel! Recall the other part of the announcement: the programme will be extended to all 596 rural districts of India. But one-fourth of the districts are short of labour, Saxena points out! ‘Reckless expansion will only promote migration and fudging of documents,’ he writes.

That must have been obvious, even to Chidambram. So, what happened? Rahul Gandhi, with his insights into India, is said to have ‘suggested’ that the programme be extended to all districts. The revelation having descended, Chidambram at once did the needful, as they say in Government! ‘They are perfect practitioners of dialectics,’ that distinguished civil servant, the late Ashok Mitra told me about the type, ‘Strong to the weak; weak to the strong’!

And then there is the fatal point, one to which …. has already drawn attention in The Indian Express: larger outlays or smaller, on the ground the programme is riddled with leakages, fraud and the rest. In the draft report on the Performance Audit of the NRGES that has been sent to Government in December 2007, the CAG states, among other things, that under the programme

•Only 3.2 per cent of the registered households have been given 100 days or more of employment;

•The average employment that has been provided to each household is just 18 days;

•While projects are to be taken up in low-wage areas, such areas have not even been identified in 53 of the test districts;

•Works have been taken up without the kind of planning and scrutiny that the guidelines require – on occasion just on the ‘recommendation’ of VIPs;

•While no more than 40 percent is to be spent on materials, in case after case much higher proportions – on occasion up to 80 per cent – are being spent on materials;

•Materials are being purchased without the mandatory tenders being called;

•Contrary to guidelines, work has been assigned to, and payments are being made to contractors and the like;

•Registers of materials received, and utilized of work assigned and executed are not being maintained;

•Workers are being paid wages that are far, far less than the minimum prescribed;

•Muster rolls as well as registers of materials and payments are being fudged wholesale – the report is full of shameful examples;

•When wages are not paid in time, workers are to be paid a compensation; this is not being paid – ‘because it has not been claimed,’ say those in-charge…

And so on. NC Saxena draws attention to these findings also about this ‘flagship’, saying only, ‘As regards its implementation, I think the CAG has said whatever needs to be said.’

Another flagship

Another ‘flagship’ that Chidambram mentions in his Budget is the provision of drinking water. This too has all the hallmarks of this Government.

‘I turn now to one of my big dreams,’ Chidambram declared in his Budget for 2004/05. He described how ‘Water is the lifeline of civilization,’ and lamented that the water bodies of yore had fallen into disrepair, and said that, ‘I therefore propose to launch a massive scheme to repair, renovate and restore all the water bodies that are directly linked to agriculture.’

So, what shall be done? ‘In the current year, we shall begin with pilot projects in at least five districts, and we shall select at least one district in each of the five regions of the country. The estimated cost is Rs.100 crore.’ The big dream has become a little dreamlet. Even so, from where shall the funds for even this dreamlet come? ‘Funds for the five pilot projects will be drawn from existing programmes such as SGRY, PMGJSY, DPAP, DDP and IWDP. Once the pilot projects are completed and validated, Government will launch the National Water Resources Development Project and complete it over a period of 7 to 10 years.’ And then there is the LIC, and those much derided institutions, the World bank, and others. Funds will not be a constraint.

The much bigger dream, of course, has been the Rajiv Gandhi National Drinking Water Mission. In this year’s Budget, Chidambram lists it again as one of the ‘flagship programmes’ of the UPA. He increases the allocation for it from 6,500 crore to 7,300 crore. And he carves out Rs. 200 crore out of this for providing drinking water for schools.

Excellent. Who can deny the importance of water? Who cannot agree that it is a shame that even 60 years after Independence we are not able to provide drinking water to all our people?

The first thing we have to remember is that this is almost an ancient programme. It used to be known as the Accelerated Rural Water Supply Programme – ARWSP.

Second, its implementation remains woeful, living up to Rajiv Gandhi’s statement that only 15% of outlays reach the poor in whose name they are defrayed. As Ganesh Pandey and Ravish Tiwari have reported in The Indian Express, the CAG has conducted a Performance Audit of this flagship also, and sent his findings to the Government in December, 2007:

•While guidelines require that states prepare Annual Plans for works that are to be taken up, of 26 states, 8 had not prepared the required Plans at all. Of the remaining 18, 9, while saying they had prepared them, did not submit them to the central Government; 10 had put together something at the state-level but these had no district or lower level details; Plans drawn up by 10 turned out to be ‘sketchy’; 9 had no shelf of schemes and likely size of allocations.

•While the guidelines require that 35 per cent of the outlay be on schemes that benefit SC/STs, the CAG’s Audit finds that in state after state, no separate targets or schemes have been formulated for the Scheduled Caste population; that the allocation, instead of being 35 per cent of the total, is much, much lower.

•An enormous portion of the funds have been diverted – for paying salaries, for defraying office expenses, for paying outstanding bills, for other schemes.

•Works said to have been completed do not exist; works have been ‘completed’ in non-existent villages; in other cases they have been taken up in villages that are already ‘fully covered’; works have been abandoned – in typical cases, pipes have been laid only part of the distance, pools have been dug where there is no water.

•Guidelines provide that the quality of water must be assessed: it is not assessed at all – water treatment plants have just not been installed as required.

•One half the Rural Protected Water Supply projects and a fifth of the tubewells shown as ‘completed’, found to be ‘non-functional’ or abandoned.

•In state after state, the expenditure figures turn out to be manifestly inflated; they turn out to be not just without authorization but ‘fictitious’.

•The Guidelines have provided a remedy very close to Chidambram’s heart – they require that Village Monitoring Committees and Special Monitoring and Inspection Units be set up; the CAG finds that in 14 states the committees are not holding regular meetings; 21 states have not nominated the required officials from the Health Department; 15 states have not established Special Monitoring and Investigation Units; in the remaining 11 states, these MIUs do not carry out field-level monitoring of quality of water, adequacy of service, etc.

•Guidelines require that the central and state governments monitor and evaluate the works from time to time: in 22 states, no evaluation studies have been carried out at all; in 17 states, officials from state headquarters have not visited districts, blocks and villages for inspections.

A ‘flagship’?

Or the tattered rag covering a sunken vessel?

(To be continued)

For all stories visit www.indianexpress.com/arunshourie

The fabrications of government

Arun Shourie: Wednesday, December 12, 2007

If energy security is what we are after, shifting to power dependency on imported technology, reactors, components, uranium, each of which is controlled by an even tighter cartel than oil, is hardly the answer

Explaining his assessment about the cost at which nuclear power would be available, the prime minister told the Rajya Sabha on August 17, 2006, “Arun Shourie asked me what calculations I have seen. I have seen many calculations in the Department of Atomic Energy. In the eighties when K.C. Pant was the chairman of the energy policy committee, a detailed study was done and it was shown that if you are talking of generating power and reaching it to a place 700 km away from a coal mine, nuclear energy is the right economic answer. Things can change. And I think the Planning Commission has done recent work, and they have also come to the conclusion that having the nuclear option is something which will give us a greater degree of security on the energy front.”

Actually, if energy security is what we are after, shifting from power dependent on imported oil to power dependent on imported technology, imported reactors, imported components, imported uranium, each of which is controlled by an even tighter cartel than oil, is hardly the answer. And, as we saw, even the Planning Commission’s Integrated Energy Policy acknowledges this.

As for some study done in the 1980s, the price of uranium used to be $7 per pound then. It is over $140 per pound today.

The change of much greater consequence relates not to the price of uranium, but to that of reactors. The US has not placed an order for a new reactor since 1978 — and that order was cancelled. The last order for a reactor was placed in 1970 — and it took 26 years for that reactor to come into operation. With this attenuation of demand for reactors, the capacity of the US nuclear industry today to build reactors is very limited. By contrast, see what that industry has to do just in the US in the coming years. The MIT report, The Future of Nuclear Power, 2003 — as well as the study by the University of Chicago published the following year — had already established that energy from nuclear sources would be one and a half times to twice as costly as that from coal and gas. Since then an all-important consideration has been the focus of analysis. The US has a total of 103 commercial reactors today. The original licensed life of US reactors used to be 40 years. This life has been extended for forty-odd of these reactors for 20 more years. Even with that having been done, every single reactor of the US will have to be replaced by 2056. Other countries too have plans to build reactors. Given the extremely limited capacity to build reactors, the price that will be charged by vendors is bound to leap up. (A recent study published in April 2007 by the most influential organisation on US foreign policy gives a succinct and authoritative account of the prospect in this regard: Charles D. Ferguson, Nuclear Energy, Balancing Benefits and Risks, Council on Foreign Relations, April 2007.)

What of “recent work” by the Planning Commission that the PM mentioned? The most recent one is the Report of the Working Group on Power, which the commission published as recently as February 2007. The working group lists the cost per megawatt for generation projects. The report places the cost at Rs 4 crore per megawatt for coal based projects; Rs 3 crore per megawatt for gas based projects; Rs 4.50 crore to Rs 5 crore per megawatt for run-of-the-river hydro projects; Rs 5.50 crore to Rs 6 crore for storage hydro projects. And for nuclear power projects? Rs 6.50 crore per megawatt. And, recall, this group was straining to pad up the necessity for nuclear power to justify recourse to the deal.

But we don’t have to go just by estimates: there is an actual and current example. The new unit at Tarapur is supplying power at Rs 2.70 to Rs 2.80 a unit. What is the price per unit that has been accepted for power from the new ultra-mega thermal power project? Rs 1.19 per unit! The moment I recalled this contrast in the Rajya Sabha the other day, Dr Kasturirangan, who had just spoken in favour of the deal, interjected, “That price for nuclear energy is subsidised.” Others who have studied the matter intervened, “Actually the cost is Rs 9 per unit.” So, power at double or seven times the cost from other sources.

Indeed, even at these levels, these Indian estimates of the cost of nuclear power are gross underestimates. To cite just one fact, they do not build in the cost of disposing nuclear waste. The US itself is today plagued by this problem — having spent over $9 billion for developing a storage repository in the Yucca Mountain in Nevada, having striven for two decades to develop the site, the expectation is that the site will not become operational till 2015/2020 or so.

Nor do our estimates build in the cost of the more and more stringent and increasingly expensive security arrangements that will have to be made to prevent theft of fissile material as the number of reactors multiplies. Even countries that have exerted to the utmost to secure such material are experiencing insuperable difficulties. “The nuclear material currently unaccounted for at plutonium reprocessing facilities could make many bombs,” Ferguson notes. “For example, Japan cannot account for more than two hundred kilograms of plutonium at the Tokai-mura plant. In Britain, the Sellafield plant cannot account for about thirty kilograms of plutonium. According to the IAEA, only eight kilograms of plutonium are needed to make a bomb. But even less than that was used in the Nagasaki bomb, which employed six kilograms. More advanced designs could use as little as one to three kilograms.” (In addition to Ferguson’s study, for an instructive analysis of all this see the oft-cited report by Brice Smith, Insurmountable Risks, The dangers of using nuclear power to combat climate change, Institute for Energy and Environment Research, Md., 2006.)

But: “I have seen many calculations in the Department of Atomic Energy. In the eighties... a detailed study was done... And, I think, the Planning Commission has done recent work, and they have also come to the conclusion that...” says the PM. And that is the end of the matter.

The fabrications in regard to uranium

The argument that we need nuclear power would not have been enough to justify the deal — for the response could have been, “All right, use domestically available uranium to generate it.” Hence, two further myths were fomented: we are woefully short of uranium; such uranium as we have is of poor quality.

The authoritative compilation on uranium supplies is what is known as the Red Book of the IAEA and OECD. The latest one — published in 2005/06 — records India’s uranium reserves as being 94,000 tonnes. Of these, 64,000 tonnes are what are termed as ‘RARs’, Reasonably Assured Reserves; and 30,000 tonnes are EAR-I, that is, ‘Estimated Additional Reserves’. Currently we are using 1,334 tonnes a year. By every stretch, these are enough to see us through to the time we will master fast breeder and thorium technologies. What is probably the best available study of the potential of these reserves, Atoms for War? (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2006) has been done, in fact, by one of the architects of the deal, Ashley Tellis. In it, he shows that India has more than enough uranium — even if it were to aim in the coming decades at a nuclear arsenal of 2023 to 2228 weapons.

Now see how the twin myths are formented. The Planning Commission’s Integrated Energy Policy states: “India is poorly endowed with uranium. Available uranium supply can fuel only 10,000 MW of Pressurised Heavy Water Reactors. Further, India is extracting uranium from extremely low grade ores (as low as 0.1 per cent uranium) compared to ores with up to 12-14 per cent uranium in certain resources abroad.” Notice the sleight of words: our average — 0.1 per cent — is compared to other unspecified countries’ highest, their “up to...”

The facts are more reassuring! The most important suppliers of uranium are Australia, Kazakhstan and Canada — half the world’s output comes from them. The most recent account of uranium reserves, put out as recently as November 2, 2007, again by the Council on Foreign Relations, notes that it is only in Canada that the ore — about a fifth of it — is above the 1 per cent grade. “In Australia, on the other hand, some 90 per cent of uranium has a grade less than 0.06 per cent. Much of Kazakhstan’s ore is less than 0.1 per cent.”

Nor has the government ever explained why we are not able to get more uranium from countries that are not members of the Nuclear Suppliers Group — Niger, Nigeria, Mongolia. Is it that we have been fixated on our traditional suppliers, like Russia? Is it that we have tried but found that, in fact, the governments of these countries are so weak that eventually they go by the dictates of multinational companies and the major powers that control the NSG itself, the US, France, Russia, China? Is it that these controllers have blocked the non-members from supplying uranium to us even as they themselves have blocked members of the NSG from supplying it? If that is indeed the case, how come we are putting so much faith in these very controllers as to place our future energy security in their hands?

That last question also arose in regard to what the prime minister said when he charged Yashwant Sinha with spreading falsehoods. Yashwant Sinha was asking why the deal with the Russians for four additional reactors had not been signed during the PM’s recent visit to Moscow. Was it under US pressure? The PM said that “it had always been understood” that this agreement would be signed only after restrictions had been lifted by the NSG. That was certainly not the impression he gave in the written statement that he read out during the joint press conference that he held with President Putin in New Delhi on January 25, 2007. In that statement he thanked President Putin for the help that Russia had given in ending the international restrictions that had been placed on imports of nuclear materials by India. He pointed to the memorandum of intent that had been signed by India and Russia for the construction of four new reactors at Kudankulam. There was not the shadow of a hint that further progress was contingent on anything that was to be done by the very countries that had imposed those international restrictions. And now, suddenly, “it was always understood...”

‘Why don’t you believe the CEO of America instead of some undersecretary?’

The Americans have been absolutely candid in what they intend to accomplish through the nuclear deal. To halt, roll back, and eventually eliminate India’s nuclear capability. To draw India into the non-proliferation regime. To have it sign up on other international protocols that the US, etc are crafting — the FMCT, the PSI, the Wassener Agreement... To make its energy supplies so dependent on imported uranium, imported reactors, that it would ‘on its own’ desist from testing. Provision upon provision of the Hyde Act speaks to this design explicitly. Statements upon statements of US Congressmen, Condoleezza Rice, Nicholas Burns and others testify to it.

Each time these have been cited by persons like me, government spokesmen have said, “But why relying on what some undersecretary has said? Why don’t you believe what the CEO of America, President Bush himself said when he signed the Hyde Act into law — that he would not be bound by the provisions? Did he not say that he would treat these as ‘advisory’ — that is, they shall be non-binding — and go by his own assessment?”

It just so happened that the very morning when the debate was to take place in the Rajya Sabha in December last year, every Indian correspondent in Washington received the statement — in hard as well as soft copy — and was urged to creed it to India post haste. Jaswant Singh received it from a correspondent in Washington and gave me a copy. The use to which the government would put it, and the construction it would put on it, were obvious. So, during my speech, I mentioned the statement, and said that before the debate was done, government would be invoking it. Sure enough, the minister for external affairs didn’t just invoke the statement, he read into it exactly what I had said government would. Since then, he has himself invoked it twice in Parliament, and of course sundry government spokesmen have been touting it to insinuate that the Hyde provisions are not really going to apply.

That is typical of what the government has been doing, with full confidence that no one will read or remember the original. In fact, what President Bush said can provide no solace to anyone concerned with India’s options in regard to its strategic programme.

The statement had to do only with a long-drawn tug of war between the executive and legislative in the US over who has the final say on the country’s foreign policy. Sticking to the position he has taken in invading Iraq, Bush said that the conduct of foreign policy is the prerogative of the executive and so he would construe the provisions in the Hyde Act that had a bearing on foreign policy as advisory. That is little consolation for us — the provision that prescribes penalties which must befall India should it test, for instance, is NOT one of these provisions.

For the same reason, he said that the provision in the Hyde Act that lays down that should NSG guidelines prohibit the export of some item to India, the US too would desist from exporting that item to India, would entail that the conduct of US foreign policy would be ceded to some international body, and this the executive could not do under the US Constitution. What use is this assertion of presidential powers to us? The provision of concern to us is the opposite one — it is the direction to the president, repeated more than once, that when the US terminates nuclear exports to India, it shall ensure that no other member of the NSG steps in to provide those materials components, fuel, and so on to India.

The third point Bush made was about information the executive shall collect regarding India’s nuclear programme. He said, the executive would not automatically disclose all of it. Again, no help to us. He did not say that the US government shall not collect the enormous amount of information about every aspect of our nuclear programme that the Hyde Act requires it to collect — including information about every bit of uranium mined, milled, used, the power produced from it, and how much is left over for weapons, and so on. The fact is that parts of such information are collected through US intelligence agencies also. The executive does not automatically make it public. Often, it gives the information to committees of the Congress in closed hearings. How does that help us?

Nor is it that the statement does not in the least say what the government has been trying to make us believe it says. The farcical thing is that it is seeking to find solace in the fact that on provisions regarding foreign policy — say, Iran — Bush will go by his own assessment, and not be constrained by the US Congress!

And then there is the obvious point: the law is not what a president says at some signing ceremony, the law is what the US Congress has enacted. Clinton specifically set aside signing statements of President Reagan and President Bush Sr. Will the next president, or one twenty years down the line, go along with the Congress in regard to even these provisions regarding foreign policy or with Bush’s statement?

Obvious. And yet the fabrication. In the full confidence that no one will read the original — even when it is as brief as Bush’s statement is, just 15 lines! How disheartening that the confidence is all too often justified in regard to our media.

The moral is simple:

•Don’t run after secret documents;

•Just read the printed ones;

•But do read them;

•Governments will be brought to heel.

editor@expressindia.com