COBRAPOST, NEPOTISM, CBI - NOT DAAL MEIN KAALA, ENTIRE DAAL IS BLACK!
By Ruma Dubey
Fast and furious. That’s the pace of the worms coming out of the rotten can. It used to be one scam per week, then per day but now it looks like, its scam every hour!
The Railway Minister and his nepotism racket, the Coalgate scam and the law minister making ‘minor’ changes’ as admitted by the CBI in a 9-page affidavit today and yes, the Parliament getting into a gridlock; journalists are spoilt for choice now! What to choose, what to cover? Before one can finish even logically covering one scam, another one pops up and the process continues. On TV channels, “breaking news’ caption has become a permanent fixture.
Before the day began, all were waiting for the Cobrapost report, the Part II of Operation Red Spider, which was stated to be much bigger than their previous expose. But by the time it broke, within seconds it became old news and all attention was on the new story breaking - CBI affidavit and law minister. Even the business news channels hardly covered the Cobrapost news and if one had blinked, you could have actually even missed out the news completely.
The fact that the market has moved on means that it knew all along that these things happen, so what is the big deal? And that is exactly how we react to every scam today, “what’s the big deal?”
What will indeed get out attention? We all are busy living our life and want to just look at all these scams as fodder for ‘lunch room talk’ or something to watch on TV in the night while having dinner. Talking about dinner, the current drought is one of the worst to have hit Maharashtra with people and cattle not having water to drink. Ahmednagar district has put policemen to guard water to prevent theft. The media does not cover it, so it does not exist for us urbanites? In fact the drought news is graver than the CBI affidavit. But the only news on the drought - Salman Khan’s NGO is helping some drought hit areas; that’s about it.
Take the case of the Cobrapost expose. It has named SBI, LIC, BoB, Punjab National Bank, Canara Bank, Indian Bank, Oriental Bank of Commerce and many other institutions in converting black money (illegitimate money) into white (legitimate). It also includes other PSU banks like IDBI Bank, Dena Bank, Corporation Bank, Allahabad Bank and Central Bank of India.
In the private sector, it has named Yes Bank, Dhanlaxmi Bank, Federal Bank, DCB Bank, HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank and Axis Bank and private insurers like Birla SunLife, Reliance Life, Tata AIG. If one may recollect, it had put out its sensational first part, wherein it had named ICICI Bank, HDFC Bank and Axis Bank as money launderers. The report has stated that money laundering has become a part and parcel of banking and insurance practices. Some banks even offer it openly as a standard product across the board and walk-in customers can openly avail these laundering services and convert his black money into white.
This is like naming the entire banking sector in the money laundering scam. On the other hand, RBI, after its investigations in 34 banks, including these private banks, had denied instances of money laundering. So that’s that? Apparently yes because the market has moved on and the revelations of Cobrapost gets buried in the mounting scams rubble.
How have we learnt to turn a blind eye to everything and anything as long as it does not affect us? Maybe our sensitivities are dead due to the constant onslaught of scams. Or we know that nothing ever comes out of any scam getting unearthed. And yes, there is a standard helpless stance, “what can we do?” Everybody gets a ‘clean chit’ and no one in power ever gets prosecuted. But then again, if we get so desensitized, aren’t we numbing our conscience, throwing ethics and morality out of the window? And the same attitude will one day creep into our personal lives and we will not even know when we compromised on our basic human values.
It is time for India to have a change. No political party in India can claim to be above corruption. We as Indians have come to accept that. But can we have some party which takes money but also governs the country effectively? To think that we will have a corruption free party at power is being naïve but one can be an optimist and hope that we will have a Govt which will actually work.
The picture of India has never been so dark. There is no shine to India today, only a dark cloud. We need to let the sun in again and cleanse the air. Will we have to wait till 2014?