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Scamming India
WSN Network
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Imagine a
bunch of well-heeled corporate captains tripping over one
another to deposit demand drafts worth over a thousand crore
rupees each in the dingy corridors of Delhi’s Sanchar Bhavan at
a notice of a few hours. Imagine a scarce national resource
being doled out on a “first-come-firstserved” basis in the way
cinema tickets are sold. What was the loss to the country? Only
Rs 50,000 crores! |
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 As
India prepares
to welcome 2010, it will do its intelligentsia a lot of good to try
and come up with a list of top scams that the country has seen in
its short history as an independent nation state. That it ranks ever
so high on the list of the corrupt drafted by organisations such as
Transparency International is well known, but for a country which
simply does not stop being religious — every day hundreds of its
politicians break coconuts for various ventures — the exercise in
drafting a list of top scams should be very educative. Recently,
when Pranjoy Guha Thakurta was asked by a newspaper to undertake the
exercise, he was surprised there were so many over just the last two
years alone.
One didn’t have
to look that far, towards the late unlamented Harshad Mehta, former
employee of the New India Assurance Company who became a notorious
stockbroker by presiding over a financial scandal involving Rs 4,000
crores. Or, for that matter, another gentleman with the same
initials who lives a quiet life in Kolkata: Haridas Mundhra was
involved in a scandal that rocked the political establishment like
never before in the late 1950s, a scam that was publicized in
Parliament by Jawaharlal Nehru’s son-in-law Feroze Gandhi and which
led to the resignation of the then finance minister T.T.
Krishnamachari, besides a host of other official bigwigs.
One doesn’t have
to rewind halfa- century but look just beyond our nose. Byrraju
Ramalinga Raju, who headed Satyam Computer Services, decided he
would rather spend time behind bars in India than elsewhere. So he
confessed that he cooked the books of account of his flagship firm
to the tune of Rs 8,000 crores. In the process, he, his family
members and his cronies ended up jeopardizing the fate of the Metro
Railway project in Hyderabad that was supposed to have been executed
by a consortium led by Maytas. Satyam spelt backwards was still a
scam and nobody asked what happened to the 1,000 suits that he
possessed. Imagine wearing a new suit each day for three years!
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The nexus between business and politics is neither new nor
unique to India. What’s a few thousand crore rupees among
friends? |
Ketan Parekh is
a pale shadow of his former cocky self (Satyam was one of the scrips
he loved to manipulate) and few remember C.R. Bhansali’s claim to
infamy. The IPO (initial public offering) scam involving India Bulls
and stock-broking firm Karvy is a distant development. And, have you
recently heard anything about a man who started life as a fruit and
vegetable seller before he decided to bribe his way into the Nashik
security printing press and forged wads of stamp paper. Abdul Karim
Telgi’s story has been overshadowed by at least one more
rags-to-riches story.
Madhu Koda
started off as a labourer in a mine and a windowgrill fitter before
he realised that the gift of the gab that he possessed could be put
to better use. From a small-time flunky in the Bharatiya Janata
Party to a bigtime beneficiary of the vagaries of coalition
politics, his lessthan- three-year-long term as chief minister of
Jharkhand was rather lucrative to put it mildly. He reportedly
almost bought up a couple of uranium mines in South Africa before
the celebrations abruptly ended.
But Koda’s
shenanigans faded into insignificance before the occurrence of the
“biggest” scam in independent India, namely, the allotment of
electro-magnetic spectrum to a clutch of mobile telephone companies
at prices that were at least one-seventh their true market value.
Imagine a bunch of well-heeled corporate captains tripping over one
another to deposit demand drafts worth over a thousand crore rupees
each in the dingy corridors of Delhi’s Sanchar Bhavan at a notice of
a few hours. Imagine a scarce national resource being doled out on a
“first-come-firstserved” basis in the way cinema tickets are sold.
What was the loss to the country? Only Rs 50,000 crores! This is
India, after all, the world’s greatest democracy, where sibling
rivalry can paralyse the working of the government.
Imagine a tycoon
splurging on front-page advertisements in dozens of newspapers to
tell the world how the Union ministry of petroleum and natural gas
was depriving the exchequer of huge amounts by favouring a company
by agreeing to pay a higher price for natural gas taken out of the
bed of the ocean in the Bay of Bengal. More than 250 aircraft and
helicopters valued at not less than Rs 16,000 crores that were
imported into the country between May 2007 and July 2008 by more
than 70 companies controlled by some of the country’s most prominent
industrialists after evading customs duty worth Rs 4,000 crores.
What is noteworthy is that most of these private aircrafts were used
not merely by corporate honchos, their family members and business
associates but also by their “politician friends” during their
election campaigns. The nexus between business and politics is
neither new nor unique to India. What’s a few thousand crore rupees
among friends?
23
December 2009
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