Loot, Khasoot and Jhoot

[Raman K]

Ishrat Jahan, Karti Chidambaram and the UPA loot is causing a Congress implosion

 

 

In his brilliant speech at the Lok Sabha, Prime Minister Modi questioned what the Congress party had achieved during its almost 60 years in power. The fact that there are still farmers committing suicide; rampant poverty; a huge illiterate population; thousands of UN-electrified villages; lack of toilets and sanitation; and millions of malnourished children proves that whatever the Congress did it was either not enough or badly mismanaged and corrupt. As it turns out the UPA rule from 2005 to 2014, was one of the most corrupt that this country has ever seen.

According to a US based think tank, Global Financial Integrity (GFI), $505 billion went out of India from 2004 to 2013 when the UPA was in power. Is it any wonder then that people are still mired in poverty?

 

The Sunday Guardian reported that a 16 member team has been set up by the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence (DRI) to verify this report. The fact that the annual illicit outflow was, on an average, $51 billion is mind blowing. This is more than the $40 billion annual defense budget of India. How many miles of roads could have been built with this money? How many irrigation projects undertaken for farmers? How many children could have been saved from malnutrition? How many more schools and hospitals built? Is there no end to greed? What about India—does she not deserve better leaders?

 

I hope the DRI can give us names of who took the loot out because India cannot afford to let the rogues go free. In a press release the GFI claimed it “analyzed discrepancies in balance of payments data and direction of trade statistics (DOTS), as reported to the IMF, in order to detect flows of capital that are illegally earned, transferred, and/or utilized.”

My readers have asked me whether Karti Chidambaram was also part of the massive outflows. Imagine the son of a former Finance minister building a huge empire for himself in cities across the world including London, Dubai, South Africa, Philippines, Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, The British Virgin Islands, France, USA, Switzerland, Greece and Spain.

Apart from vast real estate holdings he is supposed to own football teams, luxury resorts and many businesses and illegal bank accounts.  All this has come to light due to documents obtained in the joint raids by the Enforcement Directorate and Investigation Wing of Income Tax in the Aircel-Maxis scam. But Karti says it is all accounted for and taxes have been paid. But one wonders where he got the millions from even if we were to consider for a moment that everything he touched turned into gold.

 

The timing is curious.  Officials have found that all these deals were executed in 2006 after the Aircel- Maxis deal. It seems Karti made a huge amount of money from 2006 to 2014 when his father was Finance Minister, except for a three year break in 2008 when he took over the Home Ministry. Maybe it is all a happy coincidence!  For him not for India.

 

Now other revelations have come to the fore that would have kept Mr. Chidambaram very busy as Home Minister in 2009—such as the so called false encounter in the Ishrat Jahan case. Ishrat Jahan was a 19-year-old, Lashkar-e-Taiba(LeT) operative who was killed in an police encounter along with two other Pakistani operatives and another accomplice, in Gujarat in 2004. How do we know she was with the LeT? David Headley, as well as the LeT’s own newspaper and Facebook site confirmed this. She was called a martyr by the organization.

 

In addition, our Intelligence Bureau had enough evidence about this to be really worried as the foursome had been given orders to take out Chief Minister Modi and Amit Shah. This in itself would be enough for any country in the world to gun down potential assassins but for the UPA government it seems Modi was more of a threat then a suicide bomber.  He was too powerful and doing too well in Gujarat and could be the front runner for the 2014 elections.

 

So The Congress party went into overdrive in 2009 to try and bring down the Gujarat government by implying that Ishrat was innocent and it was a fake encounter.  Apart from all the evidence, I am simply not ready to believe that an innocent 19- year- old girl would travel with three men, two of them Pakistani’s all over India. I wonder why her mother would allow it.

 

In my earlier blog I had written about Rajendra Kumar, a former Special Director of the Intelligence Bureau who had broken his silence after 12 long years. In an explosive interview to Times Now, he claimed he was victimized as he refused to do the bidding of the CBI—to implicate the chief minister of Gujarat, who the Congress felt had become too powerful and had to be brought down.

 

Kumar’s interview on television is mind blowing and brings to light the conspiracy that was hatched to bring Modi down while he was Chief Minister of Gujarat. He said that senior most officers became pawns in the Congress game. They were lured by good retirement posts and other such benefits.

 

He clarified that as late as 2013, a senior cabinet minister of the Congress party told the second in command of the CBI to arrest him and give him a thrashing to make him say what they wanted him to say. He said that the CBI official refused to arrest him but said he would charge sheet him. Imagine the CBI trying to bring down the IB. What was the UPA up to? They were ready to compromise our best officers, who keep us safe from terrorism, in order to win an election. Is this the mandate of the Congress Party? Nixon was impeached for less.

 

Kumar said not only he but several junior officers also suffered and were falsely implicated. Institutions were degraded and police officers who had arrested several terrorists were put under a cloud—their reputations and careers ruined. Kumar says his father has been in depression and his family had to bear the brunt of a political conspiracy.

 

He was blunt about how this kind of degradation not only ruined the morale of the police force but questioned “Why would anyone want to get into such a career when they could be ruined by powerful political forces.”

 

G K Pillai, home secretary also confirmed that the affidavit in the Ishrat Jahan case was reworded by then home minister P Chidambaram, even though he knew full well that the evidence given by the intelligence agencies and the L-e-t among others could not have been wrong.

 

But perhaps the saddest interview I saw was of RVS Mani.  Mani, in an interview to Times Now, seemed a broken man. He was the Under Secretary of Home at the time and alleged he was tortured with cigarette butts to implicate senior IB officials to make the Ishrat Jahan encounter look like a fake one. Mani said that the order came from the very top and that then Union Home Minister P Chidambaram was behind the decision to file the second affidavit.  To what lengths would the UPA government go to get at Narendra Modi? It seems they would even sell out to the LeT.

 

As the evidence comes in and the story unfolds I do hope the mainstream media will not take this lightly, because if they do they will be letting down the nation and over a billion people who want the truth to come out.

 

The fact that institutions were degraded under the UPA regime we know from Vinod Rai’s CAG report. But the extent to which they were degraded is now coming out. This as they say is just the tip of the iceberg.  I wonder what Rahul Gandhi has to say about all this. I guess he is worried about the National Herald Case and mourns for the ache din that was had by many in power looting the country.

 

Ashali Varma

Freelance journalist Ashali Varma has authored the biography of her father, late Lt. Gen. PS Bhagat — ‘The Victoria Cross: A Love Story’.

She was executive producer with the International Commentary Service Inc, New York in 1990. She was the executive publisher of The Earth Times, New York (1992- 98). She has also worked as the editor of Choices Magazine, United Nations Development Programme.

She writes on various issues including human rights, population and sustainable development.