The Nirav Modi malfeasance

Five days after the PNB scam broke, all that we have now are frantic stabs by all the singed parties to disown responsibility.  The Central Vigilance Commission (CVC), with a hand-picked chief and a former bank chairman as a member, should have ideally doubled down to uncover how a whistleblower’s plaint against a massive fraud by the Nirav Modi-Choksi duo was permitted to languish uninvestigated. Instead, the CVC has adopted a two-pronged strategy to wriggle out of the tight spot: turnaround to ask PNB what it was doing all these years and second, clarify to anyone who pays heed, that it had not feted the bank repeatedly for surpassing any matrix for watchfulness but to simply raise public awareness against corruption. 

The Reserve Bank also has a lot of explaining to do, especially when it had the institutional memory of Harshad Mehta having similarly exploited banking loopholes and employee greed for personal aggrandisement. The minions are taking their cues from South Block where a similar attempt is underway to whitewash any association with Modi-Choksi. Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley has disowned the till-then uncontroverted reports about his leading an India Inc delegation to the Davos jamboree that featured Nirav Modi. The PMO’s spin managers too had first tried to talk off Nirav Modi’s inclusion in a Davos group photo with the PM by suggesting that his was an accidental walk-in.

As the high and mighty airbrush all association and culpability, the government’s political machinery is attempting an extremely dangerous diversion by manufacturing a clamour for banks privatisation. The subtext is clear: inept government management of banks led to the scandal and it is time they were handed over to, presumably, more conscientious private bankers. The suggestion is as brazen as it is untrue. The pinning of responsibility this time, especially under a government self-avowedly fixated on rooting out corruption, must begin right from the top, instead of the clutch of clerks currently arraigned. The suggestion to privatise banks to check embezzlement simply flies in the face of the responsibility that devolves on the government as the custodian of a public good and citizen’s interests.