A Sinhful scam

Now that the chairman of the Joint Parliamentary Committee, Gen. Prakash Main Tripathi, has denied on the floor of the House that he ever sa...

Now that the chairman of the Joint Parliamentary Committee, Gen. Prakash Main Tripathi, has denied on the floor of the House that he ever said the JPC had given former finance minister Yashwant Sinha 8216;a clean chit8217;, the decks are cleared to see what the JPC actually has to say about Sinha and the ministry he headed.

The JPC report has commented adversely on the ministry in at least 52 paragraphs of its report. The adverse findings range across virtually the entire spectrum of the ministry8217;s interaction with the stock exchanges, SEBI, RBI, UTI, and its flagship scheme, US-64, so called because since 1964 it has been the most important national instrument for mobilising household savings. Specifically, the report says, 8216;8216;The ministry of finance, in our scheme of constitutional jurisprudence, is responsible for the financial health of the economy, including sectors regulated by statutory and other regulators8217;8217; page 7. Of course, SEBI and RBI, as statutory regulators, are expected to function autonomously but the JPC report says, 8216;8216;accountability must go hand-in-hand with autonomy and the principles governing the responsibility of the minister to parliament8217;8217; page 320. So, the minister has to carry the can, especially when things have gone so seriously wrong that a JPC had to be established to pin responsibility on those whose bungling has cost the country and its small investors tens of thousands of crores in rupees and foreign exchange.

8216;8216;The finance minister should own moral responsibility since he was presiding over a system that has been found to be rotten8217;8217;. That was Atal Bihari Vajpayee in Lok Sabha on December 29, 1993 on the last JPC report! Here is another quote: 8216;8216;The JPC report is a verdict against the government. As such, the entire government should go.8217;8217; That was the BJP spokesman, Krishan Lal Sharma, on December 28, 1993. And, finally, Venkaiah Naidu, the current BJP president: 8216;8216;either the government should take collective responsibility or the concerned ministers should take individual responsibility. All those indicted either personally or for the ministries and departments under them should resign.8217;8217; December 27, 1993. Well, is sauce for the goose not sauce for the gander?

Indeed, this JPC attempts no doctrine of ministerial responsibility of its own. It merely reaffirms what the previous JPC had said on the subject. And please remember, as many as seven ministers of the present council of ministers 8212; Yashwant Sinha, Jaswant Singh, George 8216;Tehelka8217; Fernandes, Ram 8216;Petrol Pump8217; Naik, Murasoli Maran, Harin Pathak and Digvijay Singh 8212; were members of the previous JPC. That JPC rejected Manmohan Singh8217;s contention that the minister was responsible only for policy decisions, not administrative mistakes.

In words resonant of Jaswant Singh8217;s brand of English, that JPC sternly remonstrated: 8216;8216;such a distinction cannot be sustained by the constitutional jurisprudence under which the parliamentary system works.8217;8217; Quoting this principle at page 309 of its report, the present JPC says 8216;8216;ministerial responsibility in regard to this Report flows from the same principles.8217;8217; Thus are Yashwant Sinha and his entire ilk, beginning with Prime Minister Vajpayee, hoist with their own petard.

Shockingly, Sinha today asks what else can one expect of the Opposition but the demand for his resignation. Is it because he and his cohorts were in Opposition then that they demanded the resignation of Manmohan Singh? Sinha must be pinned down. And pinning him down is the constitutional duty of the prime minister. Nine years ago, almost to the day, Vajpayee was insisting on record in the Lok Sabha that the finance minister must own 8216;moral responsibility8217; for the sins besetting the system. So Vajpayee must now send Sinha packing.

Instead, there is nit-picking. Where, we are asked, does the JPC 8216;name8217; the minister? We will come to that in a minute. But can there be a minister without a ministry? When at least 52 times over, the ministry is indicted for its many and varied sins of omission and commission, can the minister escape the blame?

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Sinha sacked chairman UTI and pushed all the blame for the crisis on his officials, his regulators, the stock exchanges, brokers, corporates, banks 8212; everyone but himself. I know his party symbol is the lotus but can Sinha say that, like the lotus, he blooms beautiful but has nothing to do with the muck in which he grows?

In any case, the JPC does 8216;name8217; the minister. Page 186, paragraph 8.97: 8216;8216;little or nothing was done by the ministry or by the minister8217;8217; to raise with Mauritius issues relating to the Mauritius route even after the Mauritius minister offered on March 27, 2001 to 8216;address Indian concerns of recent origin.8217;

Recent Indian concerns which needed to be addressed included several overseas corporate bodies registered in Mauritius with 8216;nominal share capital ranging from 1 to 10008217;, many belonging to the Ketan Parekh group, which the JPC says at pages 171-172 of its report, took out of India nearly Rs 4000 crore more than they brought in! And what did Sinha do? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Almost all of page 384 of the report names Yashwant Sinha and repeatedly quotes from his testimony on oath before the JPC. Sinha reaffirmed before the JPC what he had said in Parliament, that the UTI chairman, P.S. Subramanyam, had kept him 8216;deliberately in the dark8217; about the crisis enveloping US-64 and its 20 million small investors. He also repeated to the JPC what he had said in Parliament that 8216;8216;repeatedly we were told by the UTI that there were no problems.8217;8217;

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Even if he had been told this, how could Sinha believe UTI had no problems when the largest nationalised bank under his direct charge, the State Bank of India, was responsible, says the JPC for 8216;the maximum redemption from US-648217;? SBI knew but the minister did not?

Besides, after examining minutely over eight pages 380-388 the interaction between the ministry and UTI in the run-up to the freeze on US-64 redemptions on July 2 2001, the JPC concludes: 8216;8216;Even if chairman UTI did indeed keep everybody in the dark, as FM note the name again! told the Rajya Sabha, the Committee find that the ministry did little to bring itself out of the darkness.8217;8217; After that indictment, with what face can Sinha continue in the cabinet? He must go.

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