Blind men & an elephant

Reactions to recent reports of the Com-ptroller and Audi-tor Gene-ral (CAG) of India on the allocation and pricing of coal-bearing areas and second-generation telecommunications spectrum are reminiscent of the well-known parable of the blind men and the elephant.

Depending on the political persuasion and ideological inclination of the person concerned, the reports are either futile exercises in exaggeration or an important endeavour to hold those in power and authority accountable for their actions.
The CAG’s reports are either consciously aimed at embarrassing the government using dubious data and specious assumptions or these are attempts to bring about greater transparency in public finance and curb corruption in high places. Everything depends on which side you are on.
Whether it is coal, spectrum or airport land, the story has unfortunately become rather familiar. The government is supposed to act as a custodian of resources that belong to the people of the country. What happens when it does not do its job in a fair and transparent manner and instead apportions these scarce resources to a favoured few? Answer: crony capitalism. This is the bigger picture that is often missed amidst the clamour that is deliberately created to obfuscate the real issues that are at stake.
It is appropriate that irrespective of the Jain, Buddhist, Muslim, Christian and Hindu versions of the tale of the elephant and the blind men — by Jalaluddin Rumi and Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, among others — the origin of this parable that has transcended cultural boundaries is firmly situated in this country from where it has diffused widely. Its relevance is universal and its tenets certainly applicable to contemporary India.
The online encyclopaedia, Wikipedia, appropriately sums up the significance of the tale in two sentences: “It has been used to illustrate a range of truths and fallacies. At various times, it has provided insight into the relativism, opaqueness or the inexpressible nature of truth, the behaviour of experts in fields where there is a deficit or inaccessibility of information, the need for communication, and respect for different perspectives.”
Like the elephant that seemed like a pillar, a pot, a ploughshare, a wall, a basket, a pestle or a brush to the different blind men who touched the pachyderm’s body parts, the CAG’s reports have been either furiously flayed or lavishly praised by politicians and so-called experts. Thus, government spokespersons have claimed that coal blocks were “subsidised” for private companies to help consumers get relatively inexpensive electricity, steel and cement, which, of course, hasn’t happened. In the same vein, they have argued that spectrum was deli-berately “undervalued”, ostensibly to help more people use mobile phones.
The logic sounds impeccable. If, in the process, the exchequer is deprived of huge sums of money and a privileged few businessmen manage to rake it in, so be it. This, after all, is what the brave new world of economic liberalisation is supposed to be all about. Growth has to take place at all
costs. Redistribution of the benefits can follow and if that does not happen, so be it.
The CAG has repeatedly talked about “presumptive” or “notional” losses. The government, in turn, argues that the losses are not real but hypothetical and that the auditors of the constitutional body need more than a few basic lessons in mathematics and economics. So what if the coal has not been mined?
The fact is simply that the coal acreages no longer belong to the government. Forget local inhabitants or indigenous communities, the coal blocks now belong to particular privately controlled companies, some of whose promoters and directors have rather close links with relatives of certain Congress leaders. Coal, incidentally, is a subject of the Union government.
In both the “Coalgate” and the 2G scam reports, what the CAG has stated is that there was inaction by those at the top, including Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and finance minister Palaniappan Chidambaram. Both predictably protest their innocence. Despite the clean chit given to the finance minister by the Supreme Court on August 24, what cannot be disputed is that he knew very well what the disgraced former communications minister Andimuthu Raja had been doing (he, in fact, says that he did not approve of some of his actions).
As for the Prime Minister, it was his own government’s ministers and bureaucrats (including those in his office) — and not just those representing the state governments of Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, West Bengal and Orissa — who ensured that his advice to have competitive bidding for coal blocks was not operationalised for more than six years.
Dr Singh, Mr Chidambaram and their supporters have provided long, detailed and convoluted explanations about why what should have happened — auction of coal blocks and spectrum — did not happen. In both instances, previous governments (especially those run by the NDA) have been blamed. Two wrongs do not make a right.
The justification for consciously following faulty policies was that such policies were followed in the past. In the case of 2G spectrum, a first-come, first-served policy was justified and in the case of coal blocks, it was a policy of allocation by “screening” committees of bureaucrats functioning behind closed doors and easily amenable to political “persuasion”.
Both sets of policies were terribly flawed, the government today acknowledges. Yet the CAG is being blamed by the ruling dispensation for over-stepping its mandate because it has attempted (however tenuously) to quantify the likely losses to the exchequer on account of following flawed policies.
The blame game goes on and will certainly continue for quite some time. The blind men may not have been able to see the elephant in the room, but there are none as blind as those who will not see. Each of the interested individuals (including this writer) will choose to highlight those bits of information that suit her or his political predilections and economic
ideology.

The writer is an educator and commentator