Hearing finance minister Arun Jaitley say the things he said while delivering the D.P. Kohli Memorial Lecture, to remember the CBI’s first director, on Tuesday, it was hard not to rub one’s eyes in disbelief. Clearly, it is one thing to be in the Opposition, and quite another to be in government.
Finding that decision making on economic matters has slowed down under the Modi sarkar to the point where red flags are being raised, reminding one of the so called “policy paralysis” in the UPA-2 era, the finance minister spoke of the need to revisit the Prevention of Corruption Act of 1988, some of whose provisions and language, he said, are putting officials on the guard, and deterring them from taking decisions.
The Manmohan Singh dispensation could have benefited from the observations of the present finance minister who, of course, was frequently in attack mode when the country’s Prime Minister was an economist but was unable to get the economic side going.
Only recently Dr Singh was sought by a subordinate court as an accused (along with industrialist Kumaramangalam Birla and former coal secretary P.C. Parakh) in the Talabira coal block allocations case for changing his mind about a decision. He was within his rights to do so as the matter was in the executive domain, but the court read into this a non-existent large conspiratorial scheme of corruption. It was expected that the present government would at least have an observation to make, especially of the kind Mr Jaitley has done now. But it kept quiet. Perhaps politics trumped good sense and the instinct for good governance.
Nevertheless, Mr Jaitley’s forthright talk was much needed, if decision-making by officials — who fear being roped in for investigation years after their retirement, given the wording and nature of the present law on corruption — is not to slow down altogether, the phenomenon Mr Jaitley has rightly termed “passing the parcel”.
Those who have followed supervision by the Supreme Court of CBI’s investigation into the spectrum and coal blocks allocation cases, a fact that had delighted UPA-2’s political opponents, may note that Mr Jaitley has now rightly raised concerns about the judiciary monitoring CBI investigations, thus compelling the agency’s officials to go out of their way to take a case to court, robbing investigators of the chance to exercise their “sixth sense” of “balance” and stopping investigations when the path leads nowhere.
These are important — and perhaps non-partisan — thoughts in the wider interest of the nation’s economy. Parliament should pay heed to the finance minister’s words and revisit the Prevention of Corruption Act.
