I have always had a soft corner for our Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee. I hope I’m not wrong, but it seems to me that his moral sense is always struggling to master petty political expediency. Stark and inconvenient truth does manage to escape even from his guarded disclosures to the nation made to sustain a plausible claim of transparency for his departmental actions and attitudes.
The latest is the statement of 29 November 2011 made by the Finance Secretary, R.S. Gujral, the substance of which is that about ten countries have provided us automatic information about Indians who had stashed cash in foreign countries, including Mauritius, Germany, France, Finland and Denmark. He did not name the remaining five. He stated that the Income Tax Department has already started its probe and government has already initiated prosecution against those whose names were found in the LGT Bank list obtained from Germany in 2008. The secretary then proceeded to make a further statement — I hope not authorised by Pranabji or the Cabinet — that black money is akin to tax evasion and does not merit trial for the offence of money laundering. His statement, as reported by the Times of India of 8.12.2011 is somewhat unclear and confused, but it raises many serious questions which the Finance Ministry and the Government of India must promptly answer. Some of these are:
- What is the meaning of automatic disclosure? All this information has obviously been given outside the Double Taxation Avoidance Treaty. Why can it then not be disclosed?
- Even if these are just cases of tax evasion, is not the nation entitled to know of the identities of the tax evaders so that they can be dislodged from political office if they are occupying any, or may in future attempt to occupy, and also to verify whether the assessments and penalties are honestly made, imposed and recovered?
- Doesn’t the Money Laundering Law have a section which raises the presumption that money stashed in a secret foreign account is the product of a scheduled crime, attracting serious punishment under the law?
- Has the government read the judgement of the Hon’ble Supreme Court in the bail cancellation case of the notorious Hassan Ali of Pune? Gujral should read it to understand the difference between tax evasion and money laundering.
- Would this government have withheld the names from disclosure if the money belonged to Ram Jethmalani or any Opposition leader or Anna Hazare or Baba Ramdev or a carping journalist?
- Is it not a fair inference that the names concealed are of those who control the Congress party or its supporters?
We are entitled to conclude that India, the country, India the state and Indian citizens have a terribly paradoxical relationship with one another even today as always.
India, our country, no doubt, we love, whether we are criticising it, exalting it or grieving for it. But our state (the inevitable offspring of the country), by and large is viewed by the aam admi with considerable antipathy and contempt, even disgust. It is seen as a predator, an expropriator, almost an enemy. Never has the compulsive predatory nature of the Indian State demonstrated itself to the people of India as convincingly as in the UPA regime, particularly in the last five years, with cases of mega corruption of a mindboggling magnitude surfacing one after another in quick succession. The cash for votes scam, the Commonwealth Games scam, the black money scam, the spectrum scam, the ISRO Devas scam, to name just some headliners. These are not the day to day scams that spring from corruption of the petty politician or official functionary drawing his legitimacy from our traditional mamool or hafta tradition of centuries, which persisted even during British rule, despite the import of rule of law. These are scams crafted, perpetrated and actuated by the deliberate will of the Indian state, personified by its ministers, elected representatives of the people, bureaucrats and enforcement agencies, to cheat and deprive India the country and Indian citizens of their legitimate national wealth that should rightfully have been used for their development and progress.
Our alienation from the state is perhaps rooted deep in our psyche. Looking back into history, it could well be said that for more than a thousand years before Independence, the state fell into the hands of a succession of invaders, conquerors and enemies. Though many of them indigenised and settled here through marriages and alliances, the state still remained apart and external to the people. This is not to forget one of the best emperors, the Mughal Akbar, who ruled as an Indian and never behaved like a conquering alien.
People’s participation or ownership could hardly happen in a state apparatus managed by conquerors and outsiders, of whatever domicile. Tyrannical or benign, the state was always “the other”, a despot, to be feared and submitted to, and nothing that could represent the soul or common aspirations of the people. Centuries rolled — invaders gave way to other invaders and colonizers. The state, however, remained the same — controlled by others, with scant concern for the people, who only had only themselves and their communities to fall back upon.