A question of accountability

At four per cent growth in 2002-2003, the gains of the Manmohan Singh period, which took growth from five to nearly eight per cent in 1993-97, have been wiped out. Even the gains of the eighties, the last decade of socialism, which took us to an annual average growth rate of 5.6 per cent over the decade (with a high never before — or since — attained of 10.7 per cent growth in 1988-89) have been wiped out.

The cost to the country of then finance minister Yashwant Sinha and his cohorts turning a blind eye to rampant improprieties in the capital market runs to tens of thousands of crores. UTI was the most spectacular victim of the atmosphere of “anything goes provided the stock market rises” which the Yashwant Sinha dispensation encouraged. Bailing out UTI has cost the country almost the same as is spent on subsidising food security for 300 million of our poorest countrymen and women.

For the staggering damage inflicted on the economy, the former UTI chairman, P.S. Subramanyam, has been sacked and the former finance secretary Ajit Kumar, disgraced — but neither Yashwant Sinha nor the other two ministers indicted by the JPC, Arun Jaitley as then minister for company affairs and the prime minister as the minister in charge of the hopelessly incompetent and negligent investigative agencies, has made even a gesture of contriteness let alone resigned as Manmohan Singh had done the minute the 1992-93 JPC report on the securities scam was tabled.

The present prime minister and his finance minister, Jaswant Singh, were in December 1993 the loudest voices demanding ministerial retribution for that JPC report, but have fallen strangely silent over the NDA government, and its agencies and regulators, conniving through the sins of commission and omission detailed in the latest JPC report with the likes of Ketan Parekh and his ilk to milk this nation of thousands upon thousands of crores of the savings of small investors.

And this notwithstanding the telling one-line paragraph in the JPC report which lays down that “ministerial responsibility for this report” flows from the same principles adumbrated in the previous JPC report.

If no minister is responsible for all that went wrong in our capital markets over the first eighteen months of this government’s rule (October 1999 to March 2001, the period of the scam as defined by the JPC) does it mean the liberalisation of the economy has liberated ministers from their responsibility to the country through Parliament?

How can those, especially Vajpayee who bayed for blood at the special extended session of Parliament on December 29-30 1993 and then disrupted proceedings for two long weeks from July 27 to August 11 1994, now turn their backs on the principles they so vigorously upheld when they were in Opposition?

Especially as no less than seven of the members of the present council of ministers were in 1992-93 members of the previous JPC. Is not what was then sauce for the goose now sauce for the gander?

The government’s Action Taken Report (ATR) on the JPC’s findings, slipped quietly on to the table of the House on the last day of the Budget session, adds insult to Parliament to the injury done by the scams to the country and its economy. It rejects all ministerial responsibility for the scams on the specious grounds that ministers cannot be held responsible for the sins of statutory regulators. This is rubbish — and the JPC, an all-party microcosm of Paliament, has explicitly and unanimously rejected the argument. Under our parliamentary system, neither can Parliament summon statutory regulators nor can statutory regulators directly proffer their explanations to Parliament.

Parliament hears about them and asks about them through the finance minister and it is the finance minister who answers for them in Parliament. Unless and until the established parliamentary mechanism is fundamentally changed, the finance minister must carry the can for whatever has gone seriously and persistently wrong.

The ATR takes refuge behind the claim that what had gone desperately wrong was not within the knowledge of the finance minister. That is neither here nor there. Why was it not within his knowledge? Why did he not enquire? Why did he not find out? Could he have found out? Should he not have found out? Was he “kept in the dark”, as Yashwant Sinha claimed in the Rajya Sabha, or did he and his ministry keep themselves in the darkness as the JPC has discovered?

The parliamentary system is founded on the principle of the minister concerned being responsible to Parliament and through Parliament to the country. What is at issue as Parliament reconvenes for the monsoon session to discuss, among other matters, ministerial responsibility for the stock market/UTI scams in the light of the government’s ATR, is the parliamentary system itself and

its established mechanisms for ascertaining and ascribing responsibility. Apart from the many and varied prevarications in the ATR which attempt to disguise, dilute and distort the truth culled by the JPC so laboriously, judiciously and, let it be remembered, unanimously, the ATR, by absolving ministers of any responsibility whatsoever, undercuts the very foundations of our parliamentary system.

If the NDA government — which means its ministers, not petty officials — is not held accountable, the loot will continue unimpeded and Indian democracy will be reduced to a banana republic. Stock market manipulators will with impunity continue drawing the wool over the willing eyes of regulators, secure in the conviction that no minister will interfere in their misdoings and that their statutory status renders both regulators and their ministers immune from parliamentary reprimand or punishment.

This ATR must, therefore, be rejected. As in 1994, a fresh ATR must be demanded.