Chitra Subramaniam| The News Minute| Bangalore| August 19, 2014|
It doesn’t have to be brought back from Switzerland or Isle of Man. Or for that matter even from London, the world’s latest tax haven or Mauritius, the island nation which is amongst the largest investors in India.
But it has to be accounted for, considering it was a major electoral plank for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) in New Delhi. Home Minister Rajnath Singh said if BJP was voted to power, black money would be returned to India within 100 days. That means by now, the government is in possession of information on what to do next i.e. produce the evidence in court (as opposed to leaking names in a random fashion), arrest the guilty and report back to the nation. Maybe we will hear something soon, maybe we won’t, but action is more important than what can be heard and heralded. This is not a rah-rah moment. It is a time for reckoning.
To be fair, the government established a Special Investigating Team (SIT) to do the job. It was received with varying degrees of enthusiasm and caution across the political and economic spectrum with people saying there was more black money in circulation in India to those suggesting that everything was tucked under vaults in Switzerland. The media (this journalist included) commented generously and the corpus of stories had varying degrees of accuracy and facts. There is some speculation that the SIT will submit an Action Taken Report to the Supreme Court detailing activities since inception, but it remains to be seen if this would be decisive in any manner, or just procedural.
Most of them however largely focused on Switzerland as the chief thief.There is a deep-rooted and very mistaken impression in India, especially in the Indian media, that Switzerland is changing its laws under pressure from New Delhi. Nothing is further from the truth. The Alpine nation has been changing its banking rules for over a decade now, but much more radically since 2008 because of legal action led by the United States and supported by some European nations.
It’s a bad idea for politicians to set deadlines, especially if the issue is a burning one as corruption is in India. But they prevailed and among the noisiest was not only a politician, but yoga guru Baba Ramdev who went from curling his stomach and eyebrows simultaneously on television and addressing large gatherings to chief economist - cum chief sleuth to chief spokesperson on accountability and transparency in public life.
This piece does not have any numbers or names. That’s the point. It doesn’t matter what a thief is called as long as there is a process that separates the chalk from the cheese. In this case, the process is more important than the product. Accountability can start with a person, but unless it is swiftly institutionalized, it will mean little. India has some experience there.