Finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman is an artist with words when it comes to trashing previous corruption-tainted governments. She often uses the expression “phone banking” in parliament. Her target is erstwhile governments that she says used to call up public-sector banks to award loans to their friends in Indian industry, causing huge bad debts.
If she ever tries to repeat that joke, the joke is on her.
Sitharaman’s bosses have turned the State Bank of India (SBI), the burnished showpiece of our banking excellence, into a lackey, denying it any kind of autonomy. Thanks to the details available so far from the electoral bonds and the observations made by the Supreme Court, it can be discerned that the present dispensation has done more harm to the Indian banking system than any of their predecessors! SBI has now been reduced to a sidekick by the government, which has tried to force it to the ledger era, by arm-twisting it to delay publishing details regarding the purchase of electoral bonds.
The destruction of our institutions has been for all of us to see. Deeply troubling, therefore, is the immunity the government now enjoys. What is in the public domain are statements by grandees of the establishment. The people in power are made to look beyond reproach. If Mahatma Gandhi were alive today, he would not have found his way into our current discourse because he had nothing to do with conventional notions of power or power politics. Evidently, very few entities want to call out the government for having put in place a scheme called electoral bonds that was, in the first place, designed to enable a quid pro quo with its donors.
It is a system that has a corrosive effect on democracy because big corporations are allowed to not only flourish to the extent of cannibalising competition within the industry but also prompt the government to tweak policies in their favour. The apex court in the country had ruled against it, but the argument being zealously handed out to whitewash the government by projecting a corny argument is the following: politicians and businesses have always had thick ties. At no time in the history of free India have we seen such misgivings about reporting any such collusion or sweeping them under the carpet. We must be more cautious as crony capitalism has the potential to stunt not only democracy in the country but also to slow down its growth, notwithstanding tall claims of achieving economic superpower status and lofty goals of a five-trillion-dollar economy.
Also read: Voters Must Not Remain in the Dark About Buyers of Electoral Bonds Worth Rs 4,000 Crore
The three most important facets of the electoral bonds could be summarised as follows: a witch-hunt by central agencies, a quid pro quo, or, if not, subsequent rewards by the beneficiary. There are 43 companies which indulged in electoral bonds within a few months of their incorporation. Shell companies galore, existing solely for the sake of bonds. 19 companies, which were categorised as “high risk” due to potential money laundering by the finance ministry, collectively contributed a whopping Rs 2,717 crore. Curiously, 18 of them were later exonerated and got out of the said high risk bracket. In any other democracy, if such blatant transgressions had come to the fore, concerned agencies would have already stepped in on the bond trail to unearth the irregularities.
As rightly feared by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), electoral bonds could have changed hands before reaching the actual beneficiary. There is no guarantee that foreign companies didn’t meddle with these instruments having far reaching consequences for our democracy. Likewise, the abrogation of ceiling of 7.5% of three years’ average net profits of a company for political donations and the decision to insulate bonds from the provision of preventing foreign companies from political donations as per the FCRA have devastating ramifications.
The government’s brazen acts shouldn’t go unchallenged. Even in the United States, the biggest capitalist society in the world, political funding is far more transparent than it is in India, where the government knows who gives them money and who gives their political opponents the money, and where the ruling dispensation is found to unleash central agencies in a flagrant violation of all norms. These central agencies are put to good use by the ruling government with impunity in extracting consent from not only rivals but also corporations. It was independent media groups that brought to centre stage huge purchases of electoral bonds by a large number of companies that were raided by Enforcement Directorate officials. Governmental behaviour amounts to the economic espionage of the opposition parties. We cannot afford to assume that democracy is a winner-takes-all affair. Democracy is not an ancient Colosseum where gladiators spar to win and stay alive. It is much more sophisticated and nuanced than that. The opposition enjoys tremendous rights, and those are all enshrined in our Constitution.
Notably, the Left parties have emerged as a strong voice against such avaricious tendencies of the ruling dispensation. The Left is often the first to make the right noises against crony capitalism, as well as to file a petition against the electoral bond scheme. In line with its progressive politics, it had never shied away from opposing tooth and nail various moves by the current regime, including its moves to castrate the SBI. Some people are busy hanging a bad name on Communist parties and calling them anti-nationals. Let’s not forget that while other leaders of the national movement vacillated over the issue, it was a Communist who coined the slogan “Poorna Swaraj” in 1921. The undivided Communist Party of India was the only entity that backed the leaders of the Royal Naval Uprising of 1946 in Mumbai which made the British deeply insecure about continuing to rule India with disloyal armed forces. The Left continues to live up to those ideals although we are short in numbers in parliament. History will judge us rightly as people who dared and acted even in the most trying times.
This is why we would not condone anyone amplifying government propaganda and instead state that the emperor is naked!
John Brittas is a Rajya Sabha member belonging to CPI(M)
