Largesse to Private Explorers

An audit of production-sharing contracts reveals violations that have hurt the interests of the public.

The Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG)’s draft performance audit report on petroleum/natural gas production-sharing contracts (PSCs) ­– the first of its kind by the audit officer on the petroleum sector – suggests favours by the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government to private players, especially Reliance Industries (RIL), and has expanded the ­already long list of “scams” associated with this government.

Well before the CAG’s audit, overpricing of natural gas produced by Reliance in the Krishna-Godavari (KG) basin had shown the UPA government in a poor light. In September 2007, an ­empowered group of ministers had recommended, against the advice of officials, that the sale price of natural gas from the KG basin be set at $4.2 per million British thermal unit (MBTU). This was despite estimates of Reliance’s production costs not ­exceeding $1.43 per MBTU. This very generous decision by the government allowed Reliance to garner super profits from the basin. Now, in 2011, the CAG has come up with more evidence which proves that large private players have violated the PSCs.

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Special Interest driven UPA resembles a sinking ship

A rudder-less United Progressive Alliance has convinced no one that it is acquiring some kind of anchor by shuffling its crew on a burning deck.

That certainly seems to be the most common reaction to the "ministerial reshuffle" enacted mid-term by UPA captains- prime minister Manmohan Singh and Congress president and UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi. UPA-sympathetic voices were happy that certain names that were no longer possible to be defended for their steering of various ministries have been finally asked to disembark.

Dayanidhi Maran - who was formally accused by the CBI for delaying licences for the Aircel group until it was bought off by a Malaysian firm which in turn allegedly repaid his favour in investing in the Sun Group's digital TV plans - has walked the plank and is out of the cabinet. Maran clearly worked for the interests of his family flagship Sun TV rather than that of the people who he was supposed to represent. Another person who was dropped was Murli Deora, whose petroleum ministry came under the CAG's scanner for the flawed manner in which its production sharing contract with Reliance for the exploration of gas in the KG basin was being implemented . Deora has however ensured that his son has taken a place in the list of ministers.

Siddharth Varadarajan in his normative piece about the UPA a couple of days ago, wrote that it needed the "mother of all reshuffles" to take it out of the morass that the government finds itself in. Even if many of his points were well taken, it was just "well-wishing" and many of the changes he had asked for (and to be fair, did not anticipate) never happened.

What is unsaid about how ministerial berths have been provided in the UPA is that they have got little to do with the merit of the person or his/her position on various policies. With the UPA in particular, the key to ministerial allocation generally is the ability to act for special interests. The stench of corruption and malfeasance that has pervaded the UPA has much to do with the fact that special interests - corporate mostly - have controlled policy making in the government. That is not going to change by the addition/subtraction of a few crew members in the UPA mother ship.

Consider the top four positions in the government - finance, defense, external affairs and home. Except for the defense ministry helmed by the "unimpeachably honest" AK Antony, the rest of the ministries cannot say that they had the best interests of their country's citizens in mind in the manner they implemented policy decisions. The finance minister Pranab Mukherjee has steadfastly refused to take on the most pressing problem in the country - inflation and has presented budget after corporate friendly budget. Mukherjee also has a finger in every policy pie, heading a slew of EGoMs, including the one that decided to hand over natural gas pricing on a platter to Reliance enabling them to garner a massive super profit. The home minister P.Chidambaram has been a disaster in handling issues that require high political awareness and sensitivity. His handling of the Maoist challenge, the Telangana issue, the Kashmir imbroglio last year suggest that his imperious ways of functioning have yielded little dividends in solving intractable problems of this nature.

The allies of the Congress are no better, in fact quite abject as in the case of the Trinamul Congress. Before the ascension of Dinesh Trivedi to the railways ministry of the cabinet, the senior-most minister at the helm was Mukul Roy of the same party. His predecessor, leader and current West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee was pathetic in her handling of the ministry presiding over numerous railway accidents and mishaps. With her attentions fixated at Writers' Buildings, she had little concern about passenger safety, train punctuality, and in her term, the Railways regressed as an institution. If she had shown the nadir of sensitivity blaming passengers for their own deaths because of a stampede in the New Delhi Railway Station last year, her junior party member and minister of state Mukul Roy emulated her by refusing to visit the site of accident in Fatehpur in Uttar Pradesh a couple of days ago. There is little confidence that Mamata Banerjee's successor, Dinesh Trivedi would be any better for the institution that still employs the largest number of workers in the country. If anything, one can expect a further movement towards greater privatisation and commercialisation of the institution to the detriment of the interests of the employees and passengers.

The DMK, of which much has been written and talked about, has always treated ministerial berths as avenues for crony capitalism, rent seeking and furthering ill gotten wealth for the first family of the party and their cohorts. The currently longest ruling political party at the centre - the DMK offers the worst example of caring little for concerns of malfeasance - notice the utter lack of compunction or remorse from the likes of DMK patriarch M.Karunanidhi, A.Raja, Dayanidhi Maran, Kanimozhi and the rest of the DMK "glitterati". The DMK still holds ministries where rent seeking is a lucrative exercise. And they have not been reshuffled in this latest cosmetic exercise enacted by the UPA.

The one minister who ruffled the feathers (relatively) of the widespread special interests with the UPA was former environment minister Jairam Ramesh. Exhibiting some spine in taking on vested interests who had always had it easy in circumventing and even formulating environmental norms and rules for their own benefits, Ramesh had earned the respect of grassroots organisers and people who had been affected by displacement and environmental degradation in various parts of the country. His "activist" presence - a derogatory reference to his methods of consulting stakeholders and environmental groups while deciding upon clearances - miffed no less than the "ace reformer" prime minister Manmohan Singh. And it is no wonder that he has been promptly removed from the post and shifted to rural development. One hopes (against hope) that his successor would show the same gumption to take on special interests - especially large real estate groups, mining companies and other assorted conglomerates willing to partake into the yields of primitive accumulation - but the peremptory shift does not yield confidence.

A few demotions and new sinecures for other ministers have not been received well by them. Mumbai based legislator Gurudas Kamat formally handed over his resignation unwilling to take on the important water resources and sanitation affairs ministry, apparently miffed at its "low profile". But that is no surprise. It is not the "low profile", but the low or practically little "rent seeking ability" in the ministry that miffs the likes of Kamat and company.

The continuation of a minister who has been expressly questioned for continuation in power by no less than the Supreme Court - Vilasrao Deshmukh also adds substance to the "special interests" theory vis-a-vis the UPA. Deshmukh, who was ludicrously in the helm of "rural development" despite having been indicted by the Supreme Court for having protected a private moneylender against accusations of torture and ill-treatment of villagers, has been shunted out to the science and technology ministry. He continues his naked quest for rent-seeking by this time trying to win the post for the presidency of the Mumbai Cricket Association with full support of the ace real estate businessman masquerading as a politician - Sharad Pawar. And that leads us to Sharad Pawar, who continues to wreak havoc on the agrarian sector in the country through sheer negligence as agriculture minister. Pawar has himself wanted to concentrate on the "very important" matters related to cricket in the role of the ICC president that he holds, but the prime minister continues to thrust the unwilling businessman onto the country.

No less than the cleaning of the Augean stables could have brought about a sea-change in the attitudes and functioning of the UPA government. But the essence of the actions by those at the helm has been to resist, deflect and parry widespread allegations of misgovernance, corruption, and malfeasance. That explains the continued presence of Kapil Sibal in the telecommunications ministry. Sibal in his role has done precisely what the corporate sector would have wanted him to do vis-a-vis the 2G scam - limit the damage to blaming a select set of individuals, deflect criticisms of widespread loss to the public exchequer by simply denying that there is a loss and parry attempts at forcing crony corporates which made the most out of the flawed 2G allocation process to pay the requisite costs of spectrum or cancel their licences. It is too bad that the Supreme Court has not bought into Sibal's methods and logic and have doggedly taken on the job of bringing the matter to justice. That Sibal's methods have alienated no less than the government's own solicitor general is testament to the extent of the role that special interests are playing themselves out in the matter.

All in all, there is no recognition by the government that it is policy that is skewed towards special interests that has generated the morass in the first place. And that is deliberate for the UPA is itself run by special interests.

"Indian Media - Politically Free, Prisoners of Profit" - P.Sainath

Eminent commentator and rural affairs editor of The Hindu newspaper, P.Sainath speaks to Newsclick on media discourse and other issues related to the "Fourth Estate".

A Duplicitous Godman and a double dealing Government

Just as one thought that “silly season” was never ending in India's capital, the Indian central government engaged in some acrobatics, shifting suddenly from being supine and stumbling to ballistic and bellicose within a few days. Nothing else could describe the way the Indian government handled the “baba” Ramdev threat of agitating over the “black money” issue.

Indeed the issue of repatriating “black money” stashed in offshore banks is an important one and something that has added to the government's already burgeoning embarrassment of corruption charges. Yet the agitation threatened by the televangelist yoga practitioner – one among many “parvenu godmen” as Prabhat Patnaik calls them – was never more than a half-serious attempt at re-enacting the Anna Hazare moment against corruption. Instead, the government, alarmed and conditioned by the response to the Anna Hazare led civil society movement thought it necessary to engage with Ramdev in the most flattering manner possible. No less than four cabinet ministers were dispatched to pay obeisance and persuade the “baba” to give up his call for a fast to force the government into repatriating the “black money”.

That a government which paid little heed or bother to a large rally of working class protesters – cutting across political boundaries and over a lakh– who had assembled some months ago in the capital to protest inflation and the lack of government response to it, took to literally prostrating in front of a “godman” showed up its muddle headed priorities. Perhaps understanding the ridicule that it was being subject to, the government decided to swing to the other extreme after it found that Ramdev was being recalcitrant and unwilling to honor a secret pact that could have brought an end to the proposed agitation. It decided to let loose its law and order machinery, attacking gathered protesters at the wee hours of the night and in the process, invited a suo moto scrutiny call by the Supreme Court.

If the UPA had already played up the televangelist's nuisance value by paying obeisance in the first place, it had suddenly transformed him into a crusader-martyr by taking violent recourse to clearing up his rally. Incompetence is now writ large on the UPA adding fuel to the fire of resentment against it caused by the plethora of scandals pervading its existence in government.

And the embers of anger that is now raging against the government is being fanned by all kinds of recidivist forces – the RSS is actively playing a “behind-the-scenes” role in guiding Ramdev's “movement”; even the vastly discreditedKhap panchayats' representatives are trying to make hay while this fire burns. “Black money” is now merely a staging point for dark forces to pitch in their own agendas in the garb of opposing the “corrupt” government. And who else but the government is to be blamed for all this?

The shoddy defense of the 2G licensing scam offered by the government's spokespersons, the belated actions in the Commonwealth Games organisation scam, the continued nexus with big business pervading its governance, and the ongoing inaction on issues confronting the people – inflation in particular have all resulted in where the UPA finds itself – between a rock and a hard place.

What of the “civil society” that sees in the idea of an all powerful Lok Pal, a panacea of all ills that constitute corruption? Leave alone the fact that this institution targets only malfeasance and does not even tread into addressing the roots of the phenomena of “corruption”, there remain severe lacunae in the proposals emanating from the civil society representatives. The institution envisaged is suggested to have extra-constitutional powers, going against the “separation of powers” logic inherent in the representative democracy that is the republic of India. Surely a lot of perspective is required – both in the ideation of the “Lok Pal” and also, in the understanding of how much the battle against corruption is linked to the larger war against neoliberalism and crony-capitalism.

That war and the battles to be fought in the interim cannot be won if it relies upon weapons of irrationality as embodied by the likes of the “parvenu” godmen like the Ramdevs or the “Sri Sri”s whose projects go against the larger grains of civic organisation and secularism. Irrational demands and pronouncements -such as those among others made by Ramdev in the course of his agitation– trivialise the issue of corruption and the matter of hoarding unpaid taxes in offshore accounts. They also paper over the very manner and means that sustain the lives of these “godmen” who wish to perpetuate their already dubiously earned “messiah” statuses by partaking into issues of politics that is constitutionally supposed to be the arena of the secular. It is indeed farcical to therefore see a yoga guru who has built an empire out of a televangelist business that claims that “cancer can be cured via yoga”, runs a quackish ayurveda “pharmacy” that produces medicines of dubious value and content, is accused of anti-labour acts, is someone who owns an entire island overseas, leading the moral ground(swell) against “corruption”.

The government though, by its high-handed actions going against the letter of the law, has ceded whatever moral ground it had vis-a-vis the dubious “babas”, in effect, making heroes out of them. Indeed, as a double dealing government tries to outdo a duplicitous (and cross-dressing) “godman”, the real issue of corruption has been given the go-by.

Money and Power Binds Parties Post-Liberalisation

Shankar Raghuraman, Associate Editor of the Times of India comments on the humongous scams associated with parties like the DMK post liberalisation. A Newsclick interview.

Vindication and Indignation - the Nuclear Deal Trust vote in retrospect

Two and a half years ago, I wrote this on the Nuclear Deal trust vote - "Nuclear Deal and Dealing Leaders" -

"In essence, everything about the manner the Manmohan Singh government went ahead with getting legislative approval for the deal, was dubious. An opera that begin with a slew of lies made by the representatives of the government to its erstwhile left allies, continued with the addition of new partners (Amar Singh, Mulayam Yadav and his cohorts) who had their own shady self serving agenda. It has now culminated with a dark flourish as nearly 11 members of parliament went “Aya Ram, Gaya Ram” and endorsed the government, while at the same time, ensuring that their wallets were sure to be bursting out of the seams with hard money. Others took the “higher road” to patronage by negotiating ministries (the JMM for example).

In the midst of it all, the sutradar and the opera conductor, the United States administration was laughing all the way to the bank. Here was the Indian government, which had now forsworn its commitment to a better, progressive and a multipolar world, to embark upon a notorious nuclear deal with the unilaterist Americans and heck, they had even gone one step ahead of the guru of graft and chicanery, George Bush, in getting the all powerful legislative approval for the deal."

Today, as I read this from a wikileaks cable, paraphrased and commented upon by the diligent Siddharth Varadarajan in The Hindu -

[Satish] Sharma's political aide Nachiketa Kapur mentioned to an Embassy staff member in an aside on July 16 that Ajit Singh's RLD had been paid Rupees 10 crore (about $2.5 million) for each of their four MPs to support the government. Kapur mentioned that money was not an issue at all, but the crucial thing was to ensure that those who took the money would vote for the government.

...

Independently, Mr. Sharma told the Political Counselor “that PM Singh and others were trying to work on the Akali Dal (8 votes) through financier Sant Chatwal and others, but unfortunately it did not work out.” He said “the Prime Minister, Sonia Gandhi, and Rahul Gandhi were committed to the nuclear initiative and had conveyed this message clearly to the party.” Efforts were also on to try and get the Shiv Sena to abstain. Further, “Sharma mentioned that he was also exploring the possibility of trying to get former Prime Minister Vajpayee's son-in-law Ranjan Bhattacharya to speak to BJP representatives to try to divide the BJP ranks.

The cable makes it clear the Congress campaign to buy votes was not confined to the cash-filled war chests that Nachiketa Kapur and Satish Sharma had gathered.

“Another Congress Party insider told PolCouns that Minister of Commerce and Industry Kamal Nath is also helping to spread largesse. ‘Formerly he could only offer small planes as bribes,'” according to this interlocutor, ‘now he can pay for votes with jets.'”

Despite these efforts, the U.S. Embassy concluded that the UPA maintained only a “precarious lead” in the forthcoming confidence vote. “Our best guess at this time show the government maintaining its slim majority with the anticipated vote count at about 273 in favor, 251 opposed, and 19 abstentions.”

The prediction was impressively close to the mark. Prime Minister Singh got 275 votes in favour with 256 against and 10 abstentions.

...

The fact that Congress politicians could speak so freely to American diplomats about their bribing spree during the run up to the confidence vote — and that the latter could be so blasé about the subversion of democracy — underlines the all-encompassing but ultimately corrosive nature of the “strategic partnership” the two governments were trying to build.

As for Mr. Kapur, his candid display of crores of rupees to be used by the Congress as “pay offs” for the trust vote was not seen by the U.S. Embassy as compromising his democratic credentials in any way. In November 2008, he was sent to the U.S. under the State Department's I-Vote 2008 programme as an observer for that year's presidential election. “The move to invite international observers”, he wrote in a blog post, “reflects the open and democratic nature of the American society.

I feel vindicated and so would the rest of the Left and progressive minded sections of the country –from the intelligentsia, the sympathizers, and the polity. But of what avail? The very set of crooked politicians, which include the PM Manmohan Singh who should drop any more pretense of being a honest former academic after these leaks, are now continuing in power. The shady and murky dealing, the bribing, the American influence in all this and shameless resort to the most unethical of practices in getting through a dubious nuclear deal were only the precursor to an unprecedented show of malfeasance, corruption as seen in UPA-II. With the leak of the Radia tapes and this tranche of Wikileaks cables (thanks to The Hindu), the story is far, far more clear.

Manmohan Singh has no more moral right to continue as the country's prime minister and so do the rest of the pack of thieves masquerading as cabinet ministers and political leaders in the Congress and the UPA. Much more has to be said, but this blogger leaves this for now for the reader's digestion.

'Needed - a commission for judicial accountability' - Interview with Adv. R.Vaigai

Shankar Raghuraman on the Koda and the mining lobby

Interview with Times of India senior journalist Shankar Raghuraman on the influence of the mining lobby in Karnataka and the Madhu Koda affair in Jharkhand.

More on Satyam-Maytas

(More is promised)...

For now...

Praful Bidwai on the Satyam affair. ....

CP Chandrashekar on the same...

Sitaram Yechury on the same.. (forthcoming article in the People's Democracy)

Some sensible opinion on the same..

More articles later..

Cash for Votes Sham

The cash for votes scam has turned into a cash for votes sham of an investigation.

The display of wads of cash by opposition members of Parliament (MPs) during the trust vote on 22 July was a shameful moment for India’s parliamentary democracy. The findings of an in-house committee, chaired by Congress MP Kishore Chandra Deo, set up to investigate the allegations of payment of bribes are so poorly constructed and the conclusions so perfunctorily drawn that the dishonour of Parliament remains intact.

The allegation of the MPs from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), who produced the cash notes in the Lok Sabha, was that they were paid by emissaries of wheeler-dealers from the ruling coalition. Much of the bribe-giving business was caught on tape in a sting operation, televised, albeit belatedly (which is another issue for exploration), by the news channel CNN-IBN. The MPS alleged that the bribes were given by Rajya Sabha member Amar Singh of the Samajwadi Party through intermediaries and that Ahmad Patel of the Congress was also involved. The parliamentary committee gave a clean chit to Amar Singh, and Ahmad Patel was also exonerated for want of evidence. The committee recommended investigation by “appropriate investigating agencies” of three (non-MP) individuals associated with the sting. The Lok Sabha Speaker, in turn, has referred the report to the Ministry of Home Affairs for action.

The prima facie conclusion that one can draw from the “sting video” carried out by a news channel on the allegations is that legislators and associated fellow-travellers belonging to the BJP were trying to set a trap for those willing to pay bribes – one of whom, a Sanjeev Saxena, is caught red-handed in the act. The committee saw it fit to recommend further investigation on the role of operators of the sting while showing little inclination to pursue those who were alleged to have used Saxena as the go-between – on the ground that the allegations on bribe payments could not be established.

That a technicality – a member of the Rajya Sabha cannot be summoned for questioning by a Lok Sabha committee – can excuse one of the prime accused, Amar Singh, from being interrogated by the panel points to the casual arguments used to build a case for eventual exoneration. Due diligence in examining the allegations through a study of phone records, investigation of the cash trail and perusal of other evidence has not been carried out. Surely a case can be made that the allegations of bribe-giving could have been better investigated through the aegis of an independent investigating agency, say, the Central Bureau of Investigation, rather than with the process followed and by the reasoning eventually offered by the parliamentary committee.

Two dissent notes were appended to the findings. Mohammad Salim representing the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and Vijay Kumar Malhotra of the BJP pointed out the flaws in the proceedings and the partial nature of the process adopted by the committee. The reasoning that a committee of this nature was not empowered to launch a full investigation into the scandal then calls into question the very purpose of the constitution of this parliamentary committee.

The “cash for votes” scam is one of the many scandals that have shown Parliament in a very poor light. The working of this particular committee will only add to the growing cynicism over the parliamentary system. Graft, corruption, and abuse of public office are serious offences. That the parliamentary committee was so casual in its investigations and showed no serious interest in getting to the nub of the allegations and finding the real culprits brings out the level of nonchalance among those in positions of power towards issues such as corruption.

Only a truly independent investigation that covers all those allegedly involved in the scam/sting will assure a cynical public that Parliament will not brook such dishonour.

Editorial written for the Economic and Political Weekly

Nuclear deal and dealing leaders

In perhaps the darkest day in Indian parliamentary “democracy”, the UPA government used the maxim, “if not by hook, we will win by crook” to win a trust vote that was necessitated owing to the withdrawal of left support to the government. Allegations were already flowing thick and fast about how the support was won off certain legislators in the opposition through the means of graft and bribery, even as crony capitalist manoeuvring and naked dispersal of pelf and patronage in the form of ministries was indulged in, in the open by the government, just to get a dubious nuclear deal with the United States passed through. In the end of it all, the “technocrat prime minister” Dr. Manmohan Singh was beaming unabashedly, shedding no sense of remorse over the sheer duplicity of the Pyrrhic victory won by his ruling party and its coalition allies, even as the bourgeois press went gaga over the Machiavellian triumph.

The image of the day from the Lok Sabha was that of three BJP legislators pouring out wads of thousand rupee notes and alleging that they had been paid to vote against the government by representatives of the Samajwadi Party, whose sudden volte-face in supporting the nuclear deal was itself dubious. The BJP legislators had named Amar Singh, the voluble general secretary of the Samajwadi Party and Ahmed Patel, the behind-the-scenes political secretary of the Congress party as the lynchpins in the entire bribery scandal.

Even more damning was the fact that there existed video footage (a sting operation done by the private channel CNN-IBN) which insinuated in clear as to what was transpiring beyond the public eye in the way legislators were being bought for their votes. But the channel, perhaps wishing not to embarrass the government and thereby jeopardise the nuclear deal, thought it wise not to air the contents to the public.

In essence, everything about the manner the Manmohan Singh government went ahead with getting legislative approval for the deal, was dubious. An opera that begin with a slew of lies made by the representatives of the government to its erstwhile left allies, continued with the addition of new partners (Amar Singh, Mulayam Yadav and his cohorts) who had their own shady self serving agenda. It has now culminated with a dark flourish as nearly 11 members of parliament went “Aya Ram, Gaya Ram” and endorsed the government, while at the same time, ensuring that their wallets were sure to be bursting out of the seams with hard money. Others took the “higher road” to patronage by negotiating ministries (the JMM for example).

In the midst of it all, the sutradar and the opera conductor, the United States administration was laughing all the way to the bank. Here was the Indian government, which had now forsworn its commitment to a better, progressive and a multipolar world, to embark upon a notorious nuclear deal with the unilaterist Americans and heck, they had even gone one step ahead of the guru of graft and chicanery, George Bush, in getting the all powerful legislative approval for the deal.

The nuclear deal has still some steps to be negotiated. The IAEA board of governors meets in a while to signal its decision on the initialled safeguards agreement negotiated by the Indians. What follows is then the deliberations by the representatives of the Nuclear Suppliers Group cartel to give a clean chit to the Indian government, which will then in turn take up the deal to be endorsed in the American legislature through an up-down vote.

Thus the genie is now out of the India's legislature's bottle. The deal is on autopilot. The dealers however, will not be spared. They have shamelessly justified their means by pointing out to their utilitarian understanding of the benefits of the ends met by the deal. The public will not be convinced. As the shameful image of legislators pouring out 1000 Rs notes with Mahatma Gandhi's face etched on it, onto the well of the parliament, is painted on the television day in and day out, so much will the anger with the charade, followed by the Manmohan Singh government in getting a dubious deal passed, pour out eventually into the ballot boxes. The Congress(I) and the Samajwadi Party are thereby served notice. The people might have forgotten the earlier pathetic episode of graft in the JMM parliamentarians' bribery scandal involving the Narasimha Rao led Congress government (of which Manmohan Singh was the finance minister). But this memory would last till at least March 2009. The dealers will be dealt appropriately.

Cash-on-camera scam

The Cash-on-camera-scam involving 10+7 MPs, was a disgrace. The funny part was that the majority of the MPs involved were from the BJP, the rightist party which claimed to be a "party with a difference".

For all those libertarians who excoriate the Left , including Shri Shekhar Gupta of the Indian Express, its time to remind them that in an event where MPs across political spectrum were seem involved, there was no MP named from the Left.

A peep into the assets of the MPs in Parliament would show how the average wealth of the MPs belonging to the rightist parties in our country (read the Congress and the BJP) towers over the average wealth of the Left parties.

Today, after the investigation by an independent committee of members from all sections of the political spectrum, which included the BJP Deputy Leader of the Opposition, Prof Vijay Malhotra, parliament discussed the issue and decided to expel all the 10 MPs from Lok Sabha. One Rajya Sabha MP, also from the BJP was expelled too.

The BJP did a volte face and voted against the motion to expel the members involved in the scam. They even boycotted the decision and called for yet another Privileges motion committee to look into the issue. The funny part is that no committee can be empowered to take any action, it can only recommend it to the House, this being the highest decision making forum. Only the House can decide upon executive action!. The BJP has yet again betrayed its chameleon like attitude. Filled as it is with unscrupulous semi-fascists, one need not be surprised by its volte face.

Even with regards to the issue of MPLADS being scrapped, except for the CPI(M) and a few other parties, none are willing to scrap the controversial scheme. It is high time that the public realized this folly on the part of the Rightist parties in India and give them yet another decisive blows in the forthcoming State Assembly elections throughout India.