Inquiries

Shekar Gupta in the Indian Express on

our continuing slide into this politics of inquiries, where governance takes the back-seat, political debate and discourse are forgotten and where acquisition of power is reduced primarily to an opportunity to fix your rivals.

He traces the beginnings of this kind of politics to the VP Singh government and its BJP backers in 1989. He notes a more recent instance in the revival of the Bofors story by the last government. According to him many in the Congress want to pay back their opponents for all these things.

I may be taking a simplistic view but I think the roots are more recent. The NDA wanted to paint the UPA government as corrupt - or at least associate it with corruption in the people's mind. After all, the Congress has been perceived for sometime as having a cosy relationship with corruption. What better time to bring the country's memory back - a bit of advanced electioneering shall we say? And the UPA wants to at least insinuate that the NDA government was not very saintly either. They don't want to lose the next elections on the issue of corruption neither. And so they come and go - the inquiries.

I also believe people who want to work in the government are quietly going on without letting this bother them. The inquiries are probably more of a sideshow to them. The bills are getting passed aren't they?

An editorial in IE itself calls for an end to the witch-hunt - referring to the inquiry into the Centaur deal.

By announcing an inquiry into the disinvestment of Mumbai’s Centaur hotels, the government has made short shrift of due process. The finance minister said in Parliament on Friday that the decision to order the probe is based on an examination of the Comptroller and Auditor General’s report. This is startling. The established procedure is for the CAG report to be first scrutinised by the Public Accounts Committee. After examining what it perceives to be “the most important paragraphs from the Audit Reports”, the PAC submits its findings to Parliament. The government is then required to act upon these recommendations and give an account of follow-up action.

Tavleen Singh of course prefers to shoot the messenger. After bashing the usual suspect (suspects rather - Sonia-Manmohan: another hyphenated relationship like India-Pakistan?) and the Left she writes:

Frankly, what is a huge disappointment is the CAG report’s comments on the sale of the Centaur Hotels. It shows a frightening lack of comprehension and the worrying thing is that if there is incomprehension in something as simple as the sale of a couple of hotels how much more incomprehension there must be when it comes to complicated defence deals.

In other words, shoot the CAG, off with his head. But one question is still bothering me: if there was only one bidder, why was the its offer "considerably more than the reserve price the hotel"?