The stance of the Narendra Modi government in the Supreme Court on the question of black money retrieval from foreign shores on Friday, and making public the names of Indians stashing their ill-gotten gains in banks abroad, seems a shocking about-turn from the position adopted by the BJP, its top leaders (including the present Prime Minister), and allies such as Baba Ramdev and former top police officer Kiran Bedi in the campaign for the Lok Sabha election. But it is a shock only if it was required of us to accept the pronouncements of all of the above at face value, and those of others — such as the “saint” of Ralegan Siddhi and his former storm-trooper Arvind Kejriwal, the AAP leader.
If these entities — who had sought to paint themselves as paragons of virtue, and their opponents as “land thieves” and “water thieves”, to borrow from Shakespeare — had not undertaken a patently populist campaign on corruption centred on the legend of black money looted from ordinary folk and parked abroad through the winking of (Congress party) politicians, today there would be no reason to feel let down.
What in fact is true is that the official position now being presented in the Supreme Court by the present government is not illegal. It is not intended to hoodwink the people and be indulgent toward crooks of all description — dirty politicians, businessmen, the real estate mafia, and the bureaucracy. It is consistent with India’s treaty and international law commitments. What finance minister Arun Jaitley says is right — the names of holders of black (unaccounted) money in foreign banks can be disclosed after due process is completed, not now. What the Congress, the then governing party, maintained is exactly what attorney-general Mukul Rohatgi and the finance minister are now saying. In between, the BJP and its friends played devious politics. This alas has been our bane. Black money is a serious matter which has gained populist attention from (even crooked) politicians and their cronies, and no serious attention.
The fight against the menace has to be on two fronts. User-friendly laws, procedures and tax systems are needed to check the generation of black money, and election laws have to be changed in a way that unaccounted money is not needed to win votes. Two, pressure has to be mounted on banks holding fishy money in certain countries to release the data on their own, take their cut through a tax on interests earned, and have illegally parked sums transferred to sovereign governments — India, in this case — and not to the account holders. Politicising the debate doesn’t help. All parties have to come together to maximise the pressure on foreign banks.
