CLAIMS

‘Na khaaoonga, na khaane doonga’ (I will not ‘eat’ i.e. be corrupt, nor will I allow anyone else to eat) – Narendra Modi

TRUTH

Ten years of Modi rule have shown that this was the most hollow and false of all his claims. The truth seems to be ‘Khaoonga, Aur kisi ko khaane naheen doonga’ (I will alone ‘eat’ and not allow anyone else to eat).

In the decade since that boast, there have been scams galore by BJP governments. There is a consistent pattern of cronyism. There are brazen examples of the quid pro quo offered to opposition leaders facing corruption charges – switch sides and the charges will go into limbo. And finally, laws have been amended to protect the corrupt and watchdog bodies have been defanged.

No Lokpal was appointed till March 2019 and the rules were notified only in March 2020. A Parliamentary standing committee report submitted in March 2023 stated that: “Lokpal has submitted to the Committee that it has not prosecuted even a single person accused of graft till date.”

All investigative agencies like the CBI, CVC, Enforcement Directorate and Income Tax department have been weakened and used almost exclusively for the BJP’s political purposes – launching cases against those opposed to it and using that as pressure to persuade some to switch.

The Prevention of Corruption Act was amended to dilute it and similarly, the Whistle Blowers Protection Act (WBPA) that was passed in 2014 to protect those who expose corruption in high office was amended by the BJP government to effectively discourage anyone from reporting corruption.

Electoral Bonds

The BJP got more money through the electoral bonds than all other parties put together. Reports in various media outlets have also established patterns of firms rushing to buy bonds days after being raided by central agencies.

Dozens of companies that donated through electoral bonds came into existence only after the scheme was put in place and  many of the biggest donors have contributed amounts that are several times the profits they have earned. There are even cases of loss-making companies donating funds!

Many amendments were made in several laws to enable the implementation of the scheme. Earlier, no company could donate more than 7.5 per cent of its average net profits over the previous three years. By removing these restrictions, the Modi government deliberately opened the floodgates of unlimited shady money flowing into the coffers of the ruling party.

The Megha Engineering and Infrastructures Limited (MEIL) paid a large sum as electoral bonds before it got the contract for the Thane-Borivali tunnel project.

35 pharma companies contributed around Rs 1,000 crores through bonds. Among these companies, seven have been identified and investigated for producing poor quality drugs when the purchased the bonds.

Had the Supreme Court not ruled that the entire scheme was violative of transparency and had it not forced the SBI and EC to reveal details of the donors and amounts received by parties, this scam would be continuing even now.

The CPI(M) opposed the scheme at the very outset in 2017 and warned that it was a recipe for corrupt practices in electoral funding and for skewing the playing field in favour of the ruling dispensation. It therefore refused to accept any funding through the bonds.

Demonetization

Demonetization failed to eliminate black money from the economy. On the contrary it paved way for converting crores of black money into white.

The much-publicized promise to bring back black money from tax havens in foreign countries has gone nowhere. National Security Adviser Ajit Doval’s son was revealed to be running a hedge fund from the Cayman Islands, a notorious tax haven.

No longer does anybody in the government talk of depositing Rs 15 lakh in every person’s account from money recovered from accounts abroad.

The Modi government, while pretending to fight corruption, has actually proved to be arguably the most corrupt by institutionalizing a means of paying money to political parties under the table.

Rafale Scam

The Modi government’s decision to scrap the nearly complete deal for acquiring 126 Rafale aircraft in favour of a direct purchase of 36 Rafale aircrafts in fly-away condition has been the biggest and most brazen defence scandal in India’s history. Instead of 126 Rafale aircrafts being negotiated by India with Dassault Aviation, Indian Air Force got only 36, leaving the country short of over 90 crucial aircrafts!

The 36 aircraft cost India 27.01 million Euros more per aircraft than the price negotiated in the earlier deal. The most bizarre thing was that India waived off the anti-corruption clause, standard in all defence contracts, in the Rafale deal. The new deal gifted the offset contract (worth Rs 21,000 crore of business) to Anil Ambani, instead of HAL, India’s premiere public sector defence company.

Incriminating Papers and Diaries

Papers, emails, SMS’s and handwritten notes seized by the IT department during the course of raids on Birla group of companies showed entries that suggested large pay-offs to politicians as well as to officials of the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence to scuttle ongoing investigations. Among them was the then Gujarat CM, the man who is now the prime minister.

Similarly, raids on the Sahara group also led to the seizure of documents detailing what appeared to be payments to several political leaders from more than one party, with the same Gujarat CM being mentioned here too.

The Birla-Sahara papers, as they came to be known, were given a quiet burial on the plea that loose sheets did not merit any investigation.

Similarly, when the former Arunachal Pradesh chief minister Khaliko Pul committed suicide in August 2016, he left behind a suicide note. The note made serious allegations of Supreme Court judges being bribed to dismiss his government. There was no investigation of these extremely serious charges despite the fact that one of the judges whose name figured in it had subsequently become the Chief Justice of India, whose son had approached Pul with an offer of fixing the decision in his favour for Rs 49 crore.

Yet another diary that escaped investigation is the one allegedly written by former Karnataka chief minister B S Yeddyurappa. Like the other papers, this one too on the face of it details payments of crores to senior national BJP leaders sometime around 2009. The total sum runs into Rs 1,800 crore. There has been no probe to determine the veracity of these entries.

Amit Shah’s Son’s Company and Other Cases

The turnover of a little-known company, Temple Enterprises Pvt Ltd, owned by Jay Shah, the son of Amit Shah, jumped from a mere Rs 50,000 in 2014-15 to Rs 80.5 crore – a 16,000-fold jump – in 2015-16.

Interestingly, in the same period, a financial firm owned by Rajesh Khandwal, brother-in-law of Parimal Nathwani, a senior Reliance Industries executive, advanced Shah’s company an unsecured loan of Rs 15.78 crore!

The Ahmedabad district cooperative bank, in which Amit Shah was the director got Rs 745.59 crores in deposits of demonetized notes within five days of the demonetization. No other district cooperative bank in India got as much in deposits of scrapped notes.

Piyush Goyal, a cabinet minister in Modi government, sold all shares in a company owned by him and his wife to a company from the Ajay Piramal group at nearly 1,000 times the face value of the shares. The sale took place after Goyal became a minister, but neither his earlier ownership of the company, nor the sale found mention in Goyal’s declarations of assets as a minister in 2014 or 2015.

Cronyism

Rules in the telecom sector have been repeatedly tweaked to favour Mukesh Ambani-controlled Reliance Industries (RIL). Even more blatant was the human resources ministry giving a university being set up by the Reliance group the “institute of eminence” tag at a time when it existed only on paper.

The Adani group has been another major beneficiary of this government’s generosity. Its name has cropped up repeatedly in one scam after the other but to little avail. The Hindenburg report, laid bare the manner in which the Adani group used front companies registered in tax havens to manipulate the share prices of its companies. The Adani, Essar and Anil Ambani groups are among those charged by investigating agencies with making an extra Rs 50,000 crore by over-invoicing imports of coal for their power projects and then pressing for higher tariffs on the basis of these inflated costs.

The Adanis have also been major beneficiaries as coal mining contractors for a Rajasthan PSU that has been allowed open cast mining in some of the densest forest areas in Chhattisgarh in violation of environmental norms and Supreme Court orders.

Bank Fraud and Escape of Mallya, Nirav Modi, et al.

The manner in which Vijay Mallya, Nirav Modi, Mehul Choksi and many others managed to flee abroad after fleecing public sector banks for tens of thousands of crores – through loan defaults or just plain fraud – is well known. The public outrage forced the government to go through the motions of bringing them back to justice, but due to lack of serious efforts they did not succeed.

The PDS scam in Chhattisgarh, the Vyapam scam in Madhya Pradesh or the mining scam in Karnataka have not led to the CMs under whose watch these scams thrived facing any CBI or ED raids – the reason, all of them are from the BJP.

The level of corruption and scams that have been witnessed during the Modi regime are unprecedented. They are corrupting the entire system and destroying democratic institutions.

FIGHT UNPRECEDENTED CORRUPTION!  DEFEAT BJP!

Published by Communist Party of India (Marxist)