Black Money conundrum

Black money – wads of high value currency notes stashed in the unlikeliest of places in ultra luxury homes or packed in gunny bags a la Sukh Ram-style – has always held the imagination of middle class folks. Then there are ideas of numbered Swiss bank accounts that contain millions of dollars of illegally earned money via drug trafficking, defence deals, kick-backs or plain money laundering. No one really knows how much of it is there. But then everyone has fancy figures. Yoga guru Ramdev places it as something above 400 lakh crores. Well, true or not, we all know that loud cheers went up at campaign meetings when the then prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi promised that within 100 days of his forming the government, the cash stashed abroad would be back, and every one of us would be richer by a few lakhs of rupees deposited in our bank accounts. We know that when it is campaign time, voters we are promised the moon. But when it is governance time, we are realistic enough to temper our expectations.

In this case this amounts to accepting that we do not get any cash in our accounts, but at least the government exposes the big names that have stashed money abroad. So, the least that was expected of the Modi government was that it would not use the same UPA approach when it comes to catching the big fish. But it did precisely the same thing and the disappointment was accurately summed up by the maverick 92-year-old lawyer Ram Jethamalani who is the petitioner in the case that has seen a Supreme Court-monitored Special Investigation Team set-up for the purpose. He blamed the government for shielding the culprits as like the UPA, the NDA took shelter under international treaties for not disclosing the names of the account holders abroad. At this stage, the government has in its possession about 800 names from a HSBC list, and instead of handing over these names to the SIT as demanded by Jethamalani, the government has taken a stand that after investigations the names would be handed over to the Swiss authorities who will then decide whether to release the names or give reasons for not releasing them. This is the same thing that the UPA was doing when in the past. Politics is never far away from black money and the learned Finance Minister Arun Jaitley has promised that the Congress would be embarrassed when the names would be released and hinted that the list contains one former UPA minister. The Congress has retaliated by demanding the entire black money list, sans black mail. The game has been on for years, accusations have been flying thick and fast. But neither has the cash come home, nor has any notable been penalised. The debate, however, continues to grab headlines.