Finance Minister Arun Jaitley
says there are 16 cases pending against Lalit Modi, former chief of the
Indian Premier League (IPL), for violating the provisions of the Foreign
Exchange Management Act (FEMA) and its adjunct, the Anti-Money
Laundering Act. In 15 of them, show-cause notices have been issued by
the government.
This is the
nub of the issue in which External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj has
been under harsh media glare. What she did was let the UK government
give him travel papers to Portugal to be at the side of his wife, who
was being treated for cancer. If there was any money laundering by Lalit
Modi, it must have happened in cahoots with politicians across the
political spectrum.
Most of it may have happened during the 10-year UPA regime. Yet he was allowed to flee the country.
Modi,
who was extremely loquacious in a TV interview yesterday (16 June), has
given a lot of spin to his act of fleeing: that he was the target of
Islamic terrorists, a situation compounded by the withdrawal of his
security cover. What the UPA government seems to have done was warn the
British government that if Lalit Modi was given travel papers by it,
diplomatic relations with India would sour.
So,
effectively after allowing Modi to run, either deliberately or through
ineptitude, the UPA government wanted the UK government to do its job.
This was a bit better than how it handled the case of Sonia Gandhi's
friend Ottavio Quattrochi. The Bofors payoff money was traced to his
bank account, and the government not only allowed him to escape from
India to Malaysia, but later unfroze his money. Passive aiding of his
escape was compounded by the sin of commission in letting the middleman
get his ill-gotten payoff.
To
come back to Lalit Modi, after letting him slip through its fingers,
the UPA should ideally have launched a rearguard action to get him
extradited, but it did not do so. It is now taking the moral high ground
along with many other opposition parties and news channels that Sushma
Swaraj must resign for her role in enabling Lalit Modi to get travel
documents from the British government. The same chorus is now being sung
against Rajasthan Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje.
Swaraj and Raje may not have
covered themselves with glory by speaking up for a suspected fugitive,
but then most of the travel being done by Lalit Modi from his lair in
the UK must have been on the basis of his own passport which was
returned by the Delhi High Court a month after he was given a leg up by
Swaraj last year.
The media
is having a ball digging out salacious details about his traipsing
across various countries to buttress the charge that the supposed
humanitarian help given by Swaraj might have been for merry-making! The
known facts on the ground, however, show that she was moved by the
plight of his wife undergoing cancer treatment, as indeed she has been
on several occasions by the plight of lesser mortals stranded abroad,
whether in Iraq or Yemen.
In
this context, the impropriety of the External Affairs Minister may be
little more than a storm in a tea cup. She can be accused of being too
gullible in not gauging the intensity of the storm that was likely to
build up in a cacophonic democracy that revels in being judgmental
without looking at facts. The bottom line is Swaraj's action as External
Affairs Minister has not in any way diluted any of the charges against
Lalit Modi.
A section of the
media and participants in panel discussions have gone a step further and
pronounced gravely that this is NDA's 2G moment. 2G was about granting
spectrum at throwaway prices to a chosen few, possibly in return for
financial favours. Nothing of the sort has been alleged in l'affaire
Lalit Modi - at least as far as the Modi government at the centre is
concerned.
In the Bofors
case, everything possible was done by successive Congress governments
and dispensations sympathetic to the Congress to allow one beneficiary
of the payoff, Quattrochi, to get away with his loot. Nothing of that
sort has been alleged against the Modi government. On the contrary, a
huge embarrassment is in store for the UPA if the money laundering case
culminates in a conviction, given the fact that it happened under its
watch.
To wriggle out of the
embarrassing situation, the Modi government must swing into action and
carry the cases against Lalit Modi to their logical conclusion by
co-opting the G-20 and demonstrating its resolve to give no quarter to
crooks. That would effectively silence the criticism against Sushma
Swaraj besides stopping the puerile theory that one Modi is helping
another Modi.
To be sure, at
the end of the day, the case against Lalit Modi may or may not hold,
especially if the evidence against him does not add up or fails to stand
up in court, but the aggression over Swaraj is clearly overdone.
Surely, there was some impropriety, but nothing to justify the media and
political brouhaha. The Vasundhara Raje-Lalit Modi linkages may be more
worthy of fuss if something more meaty turns up in investigations.
Making matters worse for the
BJP, Rajasthan Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje has now been dragged into
the Lalit Modi-Sushma Swaraj controversy with documents showing that she
allegedly helped the former Indian Premier League chief get permit to
stay in the United Kingdom.
Speaking to news agency ANI,
Raje denied having any knowledge of the documents. "I know the family
(Lalit Modi) but I don't know what documents you are talking about."
India Today,
quoting sources in the BJP, claims that Raje has told the top brass of
the party that she has signed no such affidavit as a witness statement.
The
application backing Modi was reportedly filed in 2011 when she was the
leader of the opposition in the state Assembly. The document, however,
did not bear her signature and the authenticity of the document could
not be verified by Firstpost.
The
three-page document read, "I make this statement with support of any
immigration/application that Lalit Modi makes. But do so on the strict
condition that my assistance will not become known to the Indian
authority."
Moreover, CNN-IBN reports
that the Raje government signed an MoU with the Portugal hospital where
Modi's wife was treated. The government signed an MoU with Lisbon-based
Champalimaud Foundation and it was done in the presence of the Chief
Minister, the channel reports. The state government has allotted 35,000
square feet of land to the Portugal hospital.
The MoU was signed on 2 October, 2014, two months after Modi's wife underwent treatment for cancer.
"All allegations levelled are baseless. Her (Swaraj) statement and that of the party President (show) that whatever she did was with good intentions.
"She acted bona fide. The entire government and the party are one on the issue. There should be no doubt on this," Jaitley said at a joint press conference with Home Minister Rajnath Singh held in the Home Ministry.
Jaitley's defence of his cabinet colleague comes two days after party President Amit Shah and Rajnath Singh had asserted that Swaraj had acted on humanitarian considerations in the matter of helping former IPL boss Lalit Modi get travel documents from Britain.
Modi has taken refuge in London for over five years after the Enforcement Directorate levelled money laundering and other charges against him involving an amount of Rs. 1,700 crore and wants him for investigations in India.
Significantly, ahead of the press conference, Jaitley, Singh and Swaraj met at Singh's chamber in North Block and held discussions lasting an hour. Speculation has been rife over the "silence" of Jaitley after a raging controversy broke out on Sunday over Swaraj's help to Lalit Modi.
Asked whether Swaraj had acted on her own to help Modi, Jaitley said all ministers in charge of various departments were capable of taking decisions and in all decisions taken by the government there is a collective responsibility.
There have been insinuations by some party insiders suggesting that Jaitley could have a hand in Swaraj's troubles. Party MP Kirti Azad had tweeted about a "snake in the grass" suggesting an insider job.
Jaitley parried a question as to who was the "aasteen ka saanp" (snake in the grass) which Azad had tweeted about. "Ask the next question," was his repartee.
With additional inputs from PTI
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