It is a notorious fact of history that corruption is prevalent almost throughout the world. The rich countries are less infested than the poorer ones. Amongst more than 150 countries surveyed by international organisations, India and Pakistan have stood almost at the bottom of the scale. India is marginally superior; nothing to be proud of.
The international community finally reached a praiseworthy conclusion. The cancer of corruption can only be cured by international cooperation. The United Nations Convention against Corruption was the product of this perception. It was preceded by negotiations during seven sessions between January 2002 and October 2003. It was adopted by the General Assembly by Resolution 58/4 on 31 October 2003 and came into force on 14 December 2005 after the requisite number of states put their signatures to it. India had signed it only five days before that. If properly used India would have been one of the greatest beneficiaries of this initiative.
Under international law, merely signing a convention does not make it binding. The convention has to be ratified and the instrument of ratification has to be lodged with the United Nations. The government in power when the Convention became ready for ratification was, unfortunately, the Manmohan Singh government. Mired in corruption of all kinds, it was in no hurry to terminate it. The nation was helplessly watching the shameful disclosure of scams involving Cabinet ministers and crucial leaders of the ruling party. It is possible that other corrupt politicians and bureaucrats were also involved. But the main responsibility can only be of the ruling government and the Prime Minister, an impeccable white knight of political integrity. This is what he had succeeded in making the nation to believe about him.
A few eminent friends of mine and I approached the Supreme Court to track down the Indian dacoits who had in a short time stolen an estimated sum of US $1,500 billion. When the failure of ratification began to appear as the most conclusive evidence of the UPA government’s determination to conceal from the poor people of India the identity of the dacoits, the government woke up to find some way out of the awkward situation.
While I write this I am perhaps creating a misunderstanding. Readers might think that the government finally decided to act as the honest guardian of the poor man’s wealth. No: instead they decided to find out a way by which the ratification will not help to trace the criminals and retrieve the booty.
Let me now expose the fraud of frauds. If the Swedish Academy had a Nobel Prize for successful concealment of corruption and the corrupt, it would have gone without competition to our Prime Minister and his government. The following is the description of the brilliant scheme of a fake ratification without any useful result.
The Supreme Court was to reassemble after its summer holidays on 4 July 2011. The judgment in the foreign money case was expected to be delivered on that day. The nation is now apprised of the stinging criticism of the government’s apathy in tracing the money and the criminals. The government must have expected that judgment. It is now anxious to have the judgment modified or revoked, taking advantage of the fact that a senior judge of the Bench has now retired. The government pretended to ratify the Convention only a few weeks earlier, on 9 May 2011.
The UPA friendly Times of India on the next day reported the Prime Minister’s statement: “The ratification of the United Nations Convention Against Corruption is a reaffirmation of our government’s commitment to fight corruption and to undertake vigorously administrative and legal reforms to enable our law-enforcement agencies to recover the illicit assets stolen by corrupt practices.”
To this statement the newspaper added the following flattering comment: “The move will help the Manmohan Singh government blunt the Opposition’s charge of UPA dilly-dallying on this agreement. The government has been under pressure not just from its political opponents but also from the courts which have cracked the whip in several cases such as the 2G scam.”
Now let us look at two brilliant actions designed to make a mockery of this delayed ratification. The attempted explanation for the delay is itself false and fraudulent. The Prime Minister said that his explanation for the delay was that ratification had been under active consideration since September 2010, when a Group of Ministers was deputed to oversee the process. This does not explain why India signed the Convention in early December 2005 and the ratification Group of Ministers was created five years later, in September 2010. There is no excuse for the delay of five years which had elapsed after India put its signature on the Convention. Besides, even this Group of Ministers created in September 2010 was not considering a genuine ratification, but how to make the ratification totally worthless and incapable of rendering any meaningful assistance. This was made sure in August 2010 itself.
Now let us see what happened in that month. On 30 August 2010, a few days before the Group of Ministers was created. The government entered into the Amending Protocol between the Swiss Confederation and the Republic of India for the Avoidance of Double Taxation with respect to taxes on income. This document was thus a continuation of an earlier fraud by which demand for information about the stolen money was not being demanded under the Convention, but under a Treaty for the Avoidance of Double Taxation on income. The Double Taxation Avoidance Treaty (DTAT) had nothing to do with thieves. It deals with honest businessmen who for the same business and the same income are liable to be taxed in two different countries, in the present case India and Switzerland. Some minor changes made by this Protocol may be ignored, but deadly mischief arises from the provision that India will be able to obtain information only about transactions after 1 April 2011.
n other words, India gave up for all times the right to obtain information even under this treaty for any transaction prior to 1 April 2011. Having already made a dead letter of even the DTAT the government perpetrated a further fraud when it pretended to ratify it in May 2011. While ratifying the Convention Government of India made the following reservations:
Reservations: “The Government of the Republic of India does not consider itself bound by paragraph 2 of Article 66 of the Convention…
“The Government of the Republic of India declares that international cooperation for mutual legal assistance under Articles 45 and 46 of the Convention shall be afforded through applicable bilateral Agreements, and where the mutual legal assistance sought is not covered by a bilateral agreement with the requesting State, it shall on reciprocal basis, be provided under the provisions of the Convention.”
The essence of the Convention is legal assistance in detecting the criminals and evidence of their crimes. This reservation nullifies that provision by providing that mutual legal assistance will not be sought under the Convention if any bilateral agreement exists. The only bilateral agreement is the Double Taxation Avoidance Treaty (DTAT) in its new version under the protocol of 2010. For this fraud alone those who perpetuated it should be locked up in Tihar Jail; but may be not Manmohan Singh, because he is an honourable man.