Just when many citizens had starting wondering if the Office of the Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG) had been granted a decade long institutional sabbatical, Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) leaders – from Prime Minister Narendra Modi downward – have been flaunting a CAG report about what they call Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal’s “sheesh mahal”.
At least, we know that the CAG is still around and kicking and that its ‘reports’, once again, are providing ammunition to political parties. And, while the ‘sheesh mahal’ report did not cause any excitement, another CAG ‘report’ has found its way to some news outlets, suggesting a “loss” of more than Rs 2,000 crore from the Delhi government’s excise policy.
BJP president J.P. Nadda has promptly accused the Kejriwal regime of “intentional lapse”. The timing of the leak of the report is a bit too precise. The not-to-be-unnerved Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) has already called the report a “fake”, cooked up in the BJP’s offices. That is not the end of the matter. The BJP’s megaphones can nonetheless be relied upon to use the CAG report to tarnish the AAP.
Before this accusation of ‘intentional lapse’ is taken seriously, we ought to remind ourselves of another story of ‘notional loss’ peddled by another CAG, named Vinod Rai. His report, which contained the innovative theory of notional loss, running into a mind-boggling figure, conveniently found its way into the media, and then the ball was carried forward by political forces arrayed against the government of the day.
Before former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s flummoxed UPA could figure out Rai’s innovation, the principal opposition, the BJP, had adroitly used Rai’s calculations to incite and excite the ethically-inclined middle classes. For a while, Rai’s senior colleagues behaved as if they had joined the ranks of the opposition; as for Rai himself, he blithely allowed himself to be sucked into the intoxicating media adulation.
An internally divided UPA-2 regime simply could not get its act together to call Rai’s bluff. While the Singh government was politically inept, a super-surcharged BJP cleverly used CAG Rai’s report to destabilise a government that had been voted back to power only months earlier. A new anti-Congress national mood got crafted and the likes of Kejriwals and Modis got an entry into our collective imagination.
Now the two principal beneficiaries of Rai’s inspired folly have fallen apart; but, this time, the big winner is out to finish the junior winner. The same strategy – using a CAG ‘report’ – is now in place to alienate the AAP’s middle-class support-base. But the ‘junior Anna Hazare’ has given sufficient indication that he is not going to be easily intimidated by the BJP’s smear tactics.
CAG’s golden silence
That is between the AAP and the BJP. But the citizens at large want to ask the question, as famously framed by Sherlock Holmes: Why did the dog not bark? Why has the CAG – that constitutionally empowered institution of accountability – discovered the usefulness of golden silence? Why has CAG not found one single instance of “subjectivity, opaqueness and lack of transparency” in the last ten years of the Narendra Modi regime, the yardstick it had applied in the allocation of the coal blocks and 2G spectrum in its 2012 report to damn the UPA2 government?
The silence is deafening, given the massive and unprecedented outbreak of crony capitalism. The “Gujarat Model” is now practised on a national scale; as in Gujarat, all the policy breaks, all official discretion, all intentional or unintentional mistakes of defective administrative law, etc. are now designed to favour a handful of business houses. And these business houses now openly bankroll the Modi regime.
Why has the Vinod Rai theory of “notional loss” not kicked in? Could it be that in the post-Rai period, the CAG as an auditing institution found the very idea dangerously ridiculous? Could there be a realisation that if the bogus Rai test is applied to every single official decision, the entire economy would come to a grinding halt? There is total unanimity that subsequent developments in the coal sector thoroughly discredited the humongous ‘loss of revenue to the public exchequer’ that came out of Rai’s bag of tricks.
History books, of course, would consign Rai to a very low and unworthy place; yet, the CAG’s silence in the last ten years has taken a toll on our collective sense of moral and ethical values. The CAG’s silence ipso facto means the Modi regime has been given a clean chit. As if revulsed and disgusted by the Rai era CAG reports, we desperately wanted to shift our affection and votes to someone who promised “na khaunga, na khaane doonga,” and, now having performed this act of hope, our middle classes are reluctant to believe that we are back to the bad old days of quid pro quos.
How unwilling we have become to exercise our power of disapproval and indignation is evident in our reaction to the Adani indictment by US investigators. Men and women, otherwise no stranger to the ways of the world and in the fixability of the Indian system, have fallen for the conspiracy theory that the American probe is essentially a part of the war on a ‘rising India’. The middle classes that felt so outraged ten years ago are now inclined to view the Gujarat-centric businessman as ‘our man’. Sebi will not be moved to look at the Indian side of the allegations; and the CAG has systematically exorcised itself of the ‘Vinod Rai conscience’.
We have now reconciled ourselves to the use of coercive instruments – the Income-Tax department, Enforcement Directorate, CBI, IB, NIA and police – being employed against the Modi regime’s political rivals to keep reinforcing the ‘corruption’ narrative. On the other hand, the only office constitutionally empowered to look into the government’s accounts has fallen asleep at the wheel.
A new, officially instigated, amorality has seeped into our national consciousness and we are no longer able to make a distinction between ethical and unethical. We continue to delude ourselves that we have been blessed with a corruption-free India that is Bharat.
Harish Khare was editor of The Tribune.
This piece was first published on The India Cable – a premium newsletter from The Wire & Galileo Ideas – and has been updated and republished here. To subscribe to The India Cable, click here.