A political charade

The attempt by Union minister for communications and information technology Kapil Sibal to trash the findings of the Comptroller and Auditor General of India (cag) in the scam relating to under-valuation and misallocation of second generation (2G) electromagnetic spectrum used for telecommunications has been clearly crafted by the Congress party to protect Prime Minister Manmohan Singh who is being accused of maintaining a stony silence as the national exchequer was being ripped off. This strategy may, however, backfire on Dr Singh and the ruling United Progressive Alliance (UPA) coalition by hardening the position of their political opponents, consequently paralysing the forthcoming budget session of Parliament.
Why is the government adamant about not acceding to the demand of the Opposition to constitute a Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) to investigate the spectrum scandal? Why has this become such a prestige issue for the incumbent regime? Is it merely to shield the Prime Minister? Or to accede to the wishes of a section of the Congress that is keen on the party continuing its association with the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) in the run-up to the Assembly elections in Tamil Nadu that are scheduled for April-May?
Or is there another, more conspiratorial, aspect to the government refusing to set up a JPC? As long as the Opposition keeps shouting about the JPC and does not allow Parliament to function, the government does not have to respond to another issue on which it is finding it even more difficult to justify its inaction — namely, its utter failure to control food inflation. In other words, what the conspiracy theorists are arguing is that the ruling coalition is keen on keeping the spectrum pot boiling because it diverts attention from a bigger problem, that is, the government’s inability to control food prices.
When the alleged kickbacks on the sale of howitzers by Bofors to the Indian Army blew up into a major political scandal in 1987, the entire controversy had been kicked off by a report of the CAG (then headed by T.N. Chaturvedi who went on to join the Bharatiya Janata Party). On that occasion, the Congress vehemently denied that bribes had been received by the then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and his associates but the party never attacked the institution of the CAG. This time round, why has Mr Sibal chosen to attack a constitutional authority that audits the accounts of the government and its various departments and agencies?
The answer is that the only way Dr Singh can be cleared of the accusation that he was a helpless spectator while the department of telecommunications (DoT), then headed by DMK minister Andimuthu Raja, allocated spectrum to a clutch of private companies — at prices that were one-seventh to one-tenth the market value of this scarce, and hence, precious, resource that belongs to the people of the country — is to contend that the government was not interested in maximising revenue from the allotment of spectrum. This is exactly the position that Mr Raja has held, who has further argued that he did what he did with the full knowledge and consent of Dr Singh.
A number of obvious questions arise. If indeed, Mr Raja was right all along, why then did Dr Singh go through the charade of asking him to put in his papers? Why did the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) raid Mr Raja’s offices in Sanchar Bhavan and his residences, not to mention the premises of a number of telecom companies as well as former DoT officials who were close to the former minister, if the government had not lost even a single paisa, as Mr Sibal now claims? Why did the officials of the DoT not defend this position when they were given at least three opportunities — the last in October 2010 — by the CAG to do so?
Even as Mr Sibal now contends that the “presumptive” loss to the exchequer of `1,76,000 crore that has been calculated by the CAG (on the basis of certain assumptions) was “utterly erroneous”, why is he silent on the procedural irregularities (including the first-come-first-served system) in the manner in which licences were issued in January 2008? Is Mr Sibal so confident that the Supreme Court is barking up the wrong tree since it is monitoring the CBI investigation into the spectrum scam?
The CAG’s calculation of the “notional” loss incurred by the exchequer is based on prices the government obtained by publicly auctioning third generation (3G) spectrum in 2010. Mr Sibal is treading on rather thin ice when he repeats Mr Raja’s claim that comparing 2G and 3G spectrum is like comparing basmati rice with rice from the public distribution system (PDS). This argument is completely flawed.
The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India has clearly stated that the two kinds of spectrum are indeed comparable. Spectrum is nothing but thin air. It is the technology deployed by a telecom service provider that determines its value. To use an analogy, the value of a prime piece of land is determined by the number of stories of the building that is permitted to be constructed on that land. The minister is seeking to obfuscate the real issue when he attempts to justify the allocation of spectrum in January 2008 at a price that was discovered through a public auction seven years earlier, when the market was a fraction of what it became.
The Congress has taken umbrage at the CAG’s contention that Parliamentary norms suggest that nobody (including members of Parliament) should comment on the CAG’s findings when these are being deliberated upon by the Public Accounts Committee of Parliament. Party spokespersons have said that this is tantamount to gagging MPs and has also criticized the CAG for remaining silent when its draft report was leaked before it was tabled in Parliament on November 16, 2010. These are, at best, peripheral issues.
The danger in the line of attack adopted by the Congress is that, in the process, the party and the government is demeaning an institution which is supposed to act as a watchdog of public finances. That is a rather stiff price to pay to protect a Prime Minister who, his critics allege, was sleeping on the job.

Paranjoy Guha Thakurta is an educator and commentator