Yoga guru Ramdev, who shot into the news in recent days due to his aggressive challenge to the government to bring back unaccounted money held by Indian nationals in banks abroad, ended his nine-day protest fast on Sunday at the instance of the top RSS leadership, and sundry well-marketed putatively spiritual gurus. Janata Party president Subramanian Swamy was also at hand in Hardwar to urge the “Baba” to end his hungerstrike.
A few days earlier Ramdev was visited by BJP leaders Sushma Swaraj and Uma Bharti to show their solidarity. Those speaking on behalf of the agitating yoga instructor have told the media the agitation will continue. This is a good thing. The nation is keen to know how much black money emanating from India lies abroad and what might be the best way to ensure its repatriation. Indeed, concern had been voiced over black money many times before Ramdev took up the issue recently.
Experts and those with high-level government experience as well as knowledge of the international environment are aware that getting the Swiss banks to reveal secrets is easier said than done. (Indeed, successive Swiss governments have made a living out of the funds of foreigners and place a high premium on banking secrecy.) Arm-twisting Americans have had some success with the Swiss when in certain cases they could establish that money parked in banks there was from narcotics and similar tainted sources, or had fed terrorism. But in the case of Indians who have deposited black money (unaccounted funds) overseas for about half a century, it is a safe bet that the vast majority are what might be considered respectable people — well-known businessmen, for instance, who resisted complying with the very high tax regimes that once prevailed in this country. There would also, of course, be others, including politicians who have stolen money from the treasury. To get to the bottom of this, a concerted campaign must be mounted even if success is not immediately in sight, given the self-serving reticence of the Swiss. However, the government would do well to keep the public informed at every stage of the process when the effort is mounted — a running commentary of sorts. Without that, an impression spreads that the authorities are not really serious.
Many believe that governments over the years have not exerted themselves much to collar Swiss banks and other tax havens into giving us a peep into the secret accounts of Indians. This of course includes non-Congress governments as well, although the impression generally left dangling is that it is typically the Congress in power that pussyfoots over the black money issue because only top leaders of this party have a lot to hide. No stone is left unturned by its opponents, especially those from the Hindu right-wing, to mount a campaign on black money when the Congress is in office. It is hard to recall public agitations — especially by social or quasi-religious outfits such as Ramdev’s, or bodies such as the RSS — to unearth black money when non-Congress parties are in government. Typically, the political campaigns of parties on the right tend to place a premium on corruption and black money, as these find it hard to spell out a sharply right-wing economic agenda in a poor country. Today those seeking to paint “Baba” Ramdev in glorious colours, especially as one employing the idiom of the era when sadhus and “sants” guided rajas in running the affairs of state, as Dr Swamy said in Hardwar, are representatives of the political and economic right-wing. The discourse is likely to be less politically skewed, more informed, and more realistic, if others too entered upon it with vigour.