Offstumped Community Portal

Its great to see Sunil Jain with more :

But there’s a far more serious problem the CBI has to deal with. Let’s assume the CBI gets all the proof it needs — where does it go after this to check how solid its legal case is? To Attorney General (AG) GE Vahanvati, India’s highest law officer. Well, when he was Solicitor General (SG), Vahanvati had opined in favour of much of what Raja’s done — how is the AG going to say that what he said as SG was incorrect?

Source : Can Manmohan ditch Raja

Why is the government of India risking becoming a laughing stock with the following defence of the billion dollar companies created ?

* As for the windfall profits made by companies like Swan, “this is a completely mistaken analysis”.

What they really mean is that the money paid by Telenor and Etisalat are only ‘capital infusion’ and not going directly to the bank accounts of the zoo creatures (zebra, swan, tiger, parrot, etc).

What is the difference, Sir ? The newly minted billionaires have many ways to achieve liquidity. Here is a quick list in the hope that the government will atleast drop this weak line of defence.

• In the long term : Selling their newly inflated holdings
• In the short term : Loans against their inflated holdings
• Any auditor will tell you dozens of more ways.

The question is not only whether someone became rich. The bigger question is : Did the actions of the government result in the Indian people losing about $10Bn ? I do not see anyone disputing this. So, address this first.

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In other news :

CBI in Chennai (Karunanidhi fumes at probe)

Prime Minister says nothing wrong when India’s poor lose $10 bn

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said on Sunday that allegations about a scam in the spectrum allocation were incorrect but refused to answer a question about the Opposition’s demand that Telecom Minister A. Raja resign following last week’s CBI raids on the offices of the Department of Telecom.

…

“It is normal in a democracy to have differences of opinion and arguments,” he said, using the Hindi word ‘naunk-jhaunk,’ when asked about the Opposition’s allegations against Mr. Raja. “But that doesn’t mean that what the Opposition says is always correct.”

Source : The Hindu

I have no idea what “Naunk – Jaunk” means, but no one is claiming the opposition is always correct. We only want to know if the opposition is correct in this specific instance.

Bonus :

There is a lot of blogtalk about Kashmiris and Naxals. For arguments sake consider the following. What really happens if scams of this size time and again go unsatisfactorily handled. At least in the past they took place in the darkness of government media.

What effect would it have on the legitimacy of their claims and their challenge to states claim over monopoly over violence. What if they say that ” We dont want our stuff to be looted, maybe the north Indian plains guys dont care, maybe the south Indians dont care, but we dont want to be looted.” Any group whether Naxals or Jihadis with military resources can point to such corruption and advance their own agenda as morally better.  The only response of the Indian state would have to be to increase the military force by y% to compensate for the decrease in its own moral legitimacy by the corresponding y%.

Such negative energy never leaves the system.