Sunday, February 08, 2009

"Don't steal. Govt.hates competition"

By Manish Anand

In a parking lot, a sticker on the back screen of a Maruti Omni just stunned, as it made a too hard-hitting statement in just one sentence. It read "Dont steal; govt hates competition". Though born out of one fertile cynical mind, it captures the agony of the millions who have by now turned apathetic to the crass loot that government directly or indirectly indulges in.

The media has been maddened with the Satyam fraud for the last one month as if something alien happened to the country. The tainted Ramalinga Raju, erstwhile chairman of Satyam, is now every body's whipping boy. What did he do, by the way? Prima faci, Raju diverted Satyam's fund to lay down another empire in the real-estate sector, whose growth story had been only dizzying and mind boggling, making all other sector Pygmies in comparison to their exponential growth.

Now, the realty is busting, thanks to its illogical business model. But the real bolt from the blue is the stimulus package that the government is said to be bringing in soon to give a booster to this sector, which has largely been unregulated and had never been accountable to any.

Rajus and the realty sharks are the gifts that the governments of this country, and nonsense politicians who lead them, have handed over to the people of the country. The government is as good as the people and the politicians are as good as the mass have been the famous alibi that the textbook political scientists have dished out to the people to keep them brain-dead over the decades.

Raju diverted the fund of Ssatyam and is in jail now, though it's better to call him a state guest in the prison, otherwise he would have been twisting his nerves in one of the US jails. But the Central government too diverted Rs 60,000 crore of the tax-payers' money to waive off the farmers' loan, for which it had no mandate. What was this diversion for and who accounts for the money? Does the government tell the tax-payers that you timely pay your tax dues so that we can waive off farmers' loan? If the Congress was so peeved at the status of the farmers, it could have compensated for the farmers' bad loans from its party fund, which must be running into billions though unaccounted.

In the last decade or so billions of rupees have flown into land acquisition deals that the front companies of many individuals, including largely the politicians, have carried out across the country. The political class has been privy to the critical information which part of the country along with their precise location would thrive in the future due to the government initiatives. And they are all black money, mind you. Would there be any leader worth his salt who could get a result oriented and time bound investigation by an impartial agency, which unfortunately the country does not have, to tell the people that while 30 per cent of the people still do not meet their food needs but the money has been flowing in the country like the Ganges.

But the seething anger in the millions of the people die down over the period, as the system is so well organised in its murky deals that it could hardly be moved. Rajus are just tiny offshoots of the political class of the country, they come and go, while the system runs as usual despite the fact that the thousands of acrs of land that the former chairman of Satyam acquired in Andhra Pradesh could not have possible with mutual benefit of him and his political masters in the state.

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