Reactions to recent reports of the
Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) of India
The reports are either consciously aimed
at embarrassing the government using dubious data and specious assumptions or
these are attempts to bring about greater transparency in public finance and
curb corruption in high places. Everything depends on which side you are on. The
CAG has repeatedly talked about “presumptive” or “notional” losses. The
government, in turn, argues that the losses are not real but hypothetical and
that the auditors of the constitutional body need more than a few basic lessons
in mathematics and economics. So what if the coal has not been mined?
The fact is simply that the coal acreages no longer
belong to the government. Forget local inhabitants or indigenous communities,
the coal blocks now belong to particular privately controlled companies, some
of whose promoters and directors have rather close links with relatives of
certain Congress leaders. Coal, incidentally, is a subject of the federal
government.
In both the “Coalgate” and the 2G scam reports, what
the CAG has stated is that there was inaction by those at the top, including
Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh and Finance Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram.
Both predictably protest their innocence. Despite the clean chit given to the
finance minister by the Supreme Court on August 24, what cannot be disputed is
that he knew very well what the disgraced Former Communications Minister Andimuthu
Raja had been doing (he, in fact, says that he did not approve of some of his
actions).
In fact, it was Dr Singh’s own government’s ministers
and bureaucrats (including those in his office) — and not just those
representing the state governments of Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, West
Bengal, and Orissa — who ensured that his advice to have competitive bidding
for coal blocks was not operationalized for more than six years.
Dr Singh, Chidambaram and their supporters have
provided long, detailed and convoluted explanations about why what should have
happened — auction of coal blocks and spectrum — did not happen. In both
instances, previous governments (especially those run by the NDA) have been
blamed. Two wrongs do not make a right.
Prime Minister’s
Reaction
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh took “full
responsibility” for the coal allocations made under a policy in existence since
1993. Amid slogan-shouting by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) the prime
minister has told Parliament that there is no impropriety in coal allocations.
The CAG report is “flawed” as the auditor’s methodology to calculate the loss
is questionable, he says and argues that it is not the CAG’s job to suggest a
change of policy from allocation to auction of natural resources and tell the
government to overrule state objections in changing the law.
Speaking both inside and outside Parliament, Dr Singh
said he was not running away from taking “full responsibility” for decisions
taken by the coal ministry when he had held the portfolio himself. He, however,
declared that the allegation of impropriety “is without any basis and is
unsupported by facts”.
As the uproar by the BJP on the floor of the two Houses continued for the fifth day in a row, the Prime Minister read out his statement amid the din. After reading a few paragraphs, he laid the statement on the table. Daring the BJP to hold a debate in the House to let the country judge the truth, he declared: “We have a very strong and credible case as the CAG’s observations are clearly disputable.” As BJP continued to create a ruckus, both Houses saw repeated adjournments, and no legislative businesses could be transacted.
Unconvincing
Remarks
The prime minister’s statement presented in the Parliament and the
remarks he made to the media outside the Parliament on the controversial coal
block allotments are as unconvincing as the stand that his party has
adopted since the scam broke out in public few months ago.
In fact, it is because Dr Singh wants to
gloss over the salient aspects of the charges that have been leveled against
him that he has tried to present the image of a ‘combative' leader; he took on
the comptroller and auditor general of India for alleging “impropriety” which
was “without basis and unsupported by facts”. Well, that is not for Dr Singh to
decide since there is the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) which will study
CAG's observations and submit its report to the Parliament on the merits of those
observations.
The prime minister does refer to his government's resolve to
‘challenge' in the PAC the findings of the country's premier audit organization,
but then we also know that the Congress has scant regard for what is one of
Parliament's most important panels. The obnoxious manner in which members of
the party, assisted by some of their allies, had conducted themselves when the
PAC was hearing CAG's 2G Spectrum scam report, is still fresh in the minds of
the people.
The prime minister pats his own back by saying that
it was the UPA government which “for the first time conceived the idea of
making allocations through the competitive bidding route in June 2004.” But
that unfortunately is not the point here. What happened thereafter is. Dr Singh
swiftly dumped the auction idea and cleared a proposal to dole out coal blocks
to private parties at vastly under-priced rates. By the time the government
returned to its original ‘concept' of putting in place a mechanism for
competitive bidding — and it took the regime over two years to do so — more
than 140 coal blocks located in various States had been sold down the river to
private players, many of whom have not even till date begun mining the resource.
BJP's Flawed
Reasoning
After disrupting the winter session, BJP is at it
again, insisting that the prime minister must resign for the so-called Coalgate
scam before the Parliament is allowed to function. Led by senior leaders like
Arun Jaitley and Sushma Swaraj in the presence of LK Advani and cheered on by
Nitin Gadkari from outside, it rejects a debate in Parliament as the matter
will merely be talked. A non-confidence motion is, however, ruled out as the
numbers do not favor them. Meanwhile, disruption of Parliament is being paraded
as a national duty. The argument is that similar disruption alone forced the
resignation of Raja and Maran following the CAG’s 2G Spectrum scam report. And
if Raja could resign as Minister for Telcom, Dr Singh must resign as he held
additional charge of the Coal Ministry during the years when Coalgate occurred.
In the Coalgate matter, four Opposition-led state
governments (Chhattisgarh, Orissa, Rajasthan, and West
Bengal ) and Jharkhand had opposed coal auctions as proposed by the
Centre and recommended allocations of coal blocks in their states for local
power and cement manufacture. Taking federal sensitivities into account, the
federal government did not press its case for open auctions, a factor
indirectly noted with some approval by the chief justice of India in a lecture delivered in Delhi
Instead of allowing the Parliament to debate the
matter and send it to the Public Accounts Committee for detailed scrutiny
before the House takes a final view on the matter, the Jaitley argument is that
the party is entitled to trump the whole, thus enabling a strident minority in
the House to impose its will on the majority, and that too without the
requisite parliamentary debate and investigation, in violation of every rule
and canon of democratic process and conscience. This is the kernel of the
matter, not the bogus, political spiel spewed out by the BJP and other persons
before TV channels looking for meaningless but high-TRP-rated gladiatorial
fights night after night.
Jaitley says “Parliamentary obstructionism … is a
weapon to be used in the rarest of the rare cases.” But, unfortunately, the BJP
seems bent on disrupting the Parliament constantly.
Assessment
It can be said that the UPA government’s strategy to
hold the ground until winter sets in is neither politically prudent nor morally
defensible. If one were to accept the finance minister’s argument that there was
no loss in the allocation of coal blocks as the coal has not been “taken out of
mother earth,” then surely the proper course would be to ensure that the
companies which benefited from the discretionary allocation of the blocks are
not allowed to profit from the coal that still remains unmined.
Nevertheless, the problem is that the government’s
defense of the allocation is varied, full of holes, and contradictory. On one
hand, the UPA is trying to present a luminously clean picture of the whole
scenario, on the other BJP is not a less known perpetrator of corruption. It is
high time that the parties stopped fooling the public and appreciated the
intelligence of the common people.
