Who will bell the cat?

Hardnews investigations reveal that most foreign bank accounts are of Indian companies and politicians. Will Advani have the courage to do an Obama on these banks?
Sanjay Kapoor Berne (Switzerland) / Delhi
    
It remains a touch intriguing why PM-in-Waiting LK Advani decided to hype the issue of bringing back Indian money stashed in tax havens. Advani had managed to wriggle out of an embarrassing hawala scandal in 1991 as the Delhi High Court refused to take cognisance of the details of the pay-offs made to him in a diary. Now, he claims that a mind-boggling Rs 25,00,000 crore is sitting in mysterious tax havens in different parts of the world and that he is determined to bring this money back to fund the country's development plans if his party is voted to power. Grand design - but will it work?

While the intentions of Advani and his band of chartered accountants and retired sleuths in tracing this dirty money are laudable, they would have to first come out in the open and state categorically that they are not using dubious funds to bankroll their campaign. Surely, you cannot criticise dirty money and thrive on it at the same time.

The communist parties who want the money back from tax havens, definitely have better credentials. Congress and other smaller parties have less hypocrisy on this issue. Even Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who took part in the G20 summit in London on April 2, did not really go endorsing French President Sarkozy or German Chancellor Angela Merkel's stand on regulating tax havens (read Hardnews - India's dirty money dilemma - http://www.hardnewsmedia.com/2009/04/2804)

In Bangalore, Hardnews was told by BJP insiders that "money was flowing like water" in this campaign. It does not require much imagination from where this money is coming from. Surely, it is not accounted money being withdrawn through cheques! As prime ministerial candidate of the BJP, Advani knows from where this money is coming from. If he has been denied this information, then he has to talk to either his consigliere, S Gurumurthy, or those who are managing the campaign in Karnataka or in other parts of the country.

In assembly elections last year, wanton display of wealth shocked everyone. Cars loaded with cash were criss-crossing the state. A few of them were intercepted, but many got away. Stories of the fortunes of Bellary miners/politicos and how they funded the BJP elections have now become part of our electoral folk lore. A former police officer who was involved in these interceptions revealed that mobilising these funds was such a sophisticated operation that banks stepped in to show that the seized funds were in reality inter-bank transfer of cash.

Similar display of dirty money in running election campaigns and buying votes is being reported from different parts of the country. The moot point is whether dirty money would pave the way for a government controlled by this kind of money?

As reported elsewhere in the magazine (see Largest Democracy! Cash for Votes), as a quid pro quo for the funds made available by miners and realtors of Karnataka, freedom was given by the state government to them to have bureaucrats of their choice. Premium government contracts were also handed over to them. Interestingly, these money-based relations are party neutral.

The interim recommendations given by the BJP's task force on the steps to be taken by the Indian government to bring back Indian funds illegally stashed away in secret Swiss bank accounts and other tax havens around the world does not take into cognisance how dirty money is used in elections. In all of its 20 pages of the report, it is silent about how money is brought back from the tax havens to fund elections. Why blame the BJP alone, nearly all the political parties get their money through hawala from tax havens.