2G scam: Indecision & inaction

India’s biggest scandal relating to undervaluation and deliberate misallocation of a finite and scarce resource that belongs to the people of the country — that is, electromagnetic spectrum used for mobile telecommunications — is careening out of control as far as the Union government is concerned. Faced with a proactive

Supreme Court and a belligerent Opposition, the ruling United Progressive Alliance (UPA) is licking its wounds and desperately trying to devise strategies to contain the damage.
From now on, it can be safely conjectured that the second Manmohan Singh regime will be a lame-duck government, fighting with its back to the wall, busy warding off allegations of inaction and worse, complicity in the scam, for the better part of the rest of its term. The analogy between this scam and the political impact of the Bofors scandal on the Rajiv Gandhi government is too close for comfort, certainly for the Indian National Congress and its supporters.
One is not suggesting here that a mid-term poll is imminent. Nor is one arguing that the Prime Minister will soon be discovered to have had his hands in the till. His personal integrity will remain intact. Still, what has become evident is that the spectrum scam has gone way beyond the sacking of former minister for communications and information technology Andimuthu Raja and has reached the doorsteps of 7 Race Course Road. A series of important questions remain unanswered.
If Dr Singh was indeed aware of what was going on (and there is considerable evidence to indicate that he did), why did he not take any action against Mr Raja for nearly three years? Why did the PM remain silent when the former minister claimed that he had his tacit (if not explicit) approval and consent while allotting licences in January 2008 whereas the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) of India has categorically stated that Mr Raja had blatantly flouted his advice and recommendations?
Why did Dr Singh have to wait for the Supreme Court to start asking uncomfortable questions about the scam or, for that matter, the CAG to come out with its damning indictment of the way the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) functioned under Mr Raja — who cocked a snook not just at his own officials but also at those in the ministries of finance and law and even the PM himself — before arm-twisting Muthuvel Karunanidhi in Chennai to ensure that the former minister put in his papers late on a Sunday night?
Would it be correct to state that the real reason why Solicitor General Gopal Subramanian is not arguing the government’s case in the Supreme Court — he has been replaced by his “boss”, the Attorney General of India, Goolam E. Vahanvati — is on account of his approval of a rejoinder in court wherein it was claimed that the DoT and the Prime Minister’s Office had identical views on licence allocation and pricing of spectrum?
The argument that the “compulsions of coalition politics” dictated Dr Singh’s responses is a rather weak one. The Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) has 18 MPs in the Lok Sabha. The UPA government would survive even without their support. The story is, however, quite different in the Tamil Nadu Legislative Assembly. Without the support of the 34 MLAs belonging to the Congress, Mr Karunanidhi’s government would collapse. Few will today be surprised if the Congress and the DMK part ways in the run-up to the Assembly elections scheduled for April.
Where will the government go from here? It is not enough to argue that the licences that were issued to firms (which were not eligible to receive these in the first place) should now be revoked as has been recommended by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India. These licences should now be auctioned — since these were issued using the dubious first-come-first-served system — to ensure that the national exchequer is at least partly compensated for the huge losses that have been incurred.
But the story does not end here. On Monday, without looking at the file relating to the appointment of Central Vigilance Commissioner (CVC) P.J. Thomas, the Supreme Court expressed concern as to how a person “who is an accused in a criminal case” could act as the country’s CVC. At the time of writing this column on Monday evening, the Trinamul Congress, the second largest constituent of the UPA after the Congress, had reportedly endorsed the Opposition demand to constitute a Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) to inquire into the scandal.
Can a JPC ask the PM to depose before it? There is no such precedent. In 1992, the JPC that inquired into the stockmarket scam masterminded by Harshad Mehta did not summon Dr Singh who was then the finance minister. Nor was Yashwant Sinha questioned by the JPC that was set up nine years later to look into another stockmarket scam piloted by Ketan Parekh. Will things be different this time round? Probably not.
But one thing is certain: even if the illegally issued telecom licences are revoked and auctioned, even if Mr Raja is placed behind bars, even if the Congress-DMK alliance falls apart, the last has not been heard about the ugly underbelly of the Great Indian Telecom Revolution and its consequence on the Indian polity.

Paranjoy Guha Thakurta is an educator and commentator