DC Debate: The biggest corporate espionage scandal ever seen

The details, as emerging in the media, are frightening for their sheer brazenness in execution. The use of “government” cars, the fake identity cards, and the manner in which the after office-hours heist into senior officials’ rooms and vaults was executed, exposes the impunity with which this operation has been conducted. This is not a fly-by-night operator showing his greed. This is greed energised by a sense of immunity, which is very difficult to explain.

It may help to remember that the petroleum ministry has had a particularly challenging decade. Earlier, under the NDA government led by Mr Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the ministry was handled by a single minister for the entire duration. The decade after that saw at least four different ministers “as though playing the roulette” moving in and moving out.

Irrespective of what reasons governed this game of roulette, the perception outside was certainly that of ministers feeling incapacitated for not being able to rise to meet the expectations of perhaps the unseen forces. Desperation to find the right person to balance the needs of governance with that of the unsustainable demands of forces, unaccountable to Parliament or to the public, was exposed each time. Under pressure, such ministers even voiced their angst and issued statements of bravado that they shall not yield to such pressures.

The investigation is on and, therefore, there is no hurry for us to judge whether this is a problem of legacy inherited by the present government. This government has shown a resolve to act on erring officials, be they high in rank or low in profile.

Criminal wrong-doings, which undermine the authority of the sovereign, eat into the vitals of the Indian State. Looking the other way, even as such offences are gnawing at our systems is a disservice to the nation. By taking timely action, this government has put India above all. Attempts to deflect this debate based on arguments whether this will go to its logical end, only verge on the irresponsible.

Institutional memory will show that no government in India in the recent past has exhibited courage of conviction in containing organised white collar crimes by “insiders”.

The resolve shown by minister Dharmendra Pradhan, that firm action will be taken and the guilty shall not be spared, is reassuring to the Indian public who want a government that governs and not one which lives in paralysis.

But anyone with even a passing knowledge of the way government offices function, would know that such leaks cannot take place just at a junior level. In all likelihood, certain senior officials both in the government and even in the companies, are involved. Therefore, the probe must not stop with the punishment of junior officials.

However, there are limits to what the police can achieve. It is the government that needs to tell the public how it plans to bring to justice the ‘big fish’ behind the scandal. There is no way it can prevent such leakages purely by assigning lower level accountability.

Besides the obvious criminality of the scandal, the leaks also represent a very serious governance failure, for which Mr Narendra Modi’s government is squarely to blame. Never before has the sovereign functioning of the Government of India been so severely compromised to corporate interests as it has under this government. What could be more symbolic of this failure than the fact that certain corporate executives and the dubious consultants hired by them have been made privy to parts of the finance minister’s Budget speech weeks before it is presented before Parliament?

The pilferage of secret documents from the Union government’s offi-ces is only an extreme manifestation of the cronyism that this government is plagued by. Mr Modi’s favourite industrialists find a prominent place in his business delegations and on international high tables. The State Bank of India gave a Rs 6,200 crore loan to one of these industrial houses for a project that no international bank wanted to touch with a barge pole.

Those behind the corporate espionage have been emboldened precisely by this culture of cronyism fostered by the BJP. But this culture of cronyism, particularly in the petroleum sector, is not restricted to Mr Modi’s government. During the previous NDA regime, a senior functionary of one India’s biggest private petroleum company was given an important political assignment in the petroleum ministry, then headed by Mr Ram Naik.

Contrast this to the manner in which the UPA promoted transparency and accountability by bringing in the Right to Information Act. More specifically, in the petroleum ministry, the UPA government, in 2010, set up an Audits and Ethics Committee in the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation. After such a massive scandal, it is imperative that the government launches a crackdown.

Knowing the way Mr Modi’s government functions, it is likely that it will use this incident to clamp down on transparency, while continuing in its unabashed promotion of cronyism. What is needed is a comprehensive policy framework to assign accountability and prevent such scandals from happening.