New skeletons are tumbling out of the Narenda Modi-led central government’s cupboard. If the CAG’s finding of huge financial mismanagement in the highways development sector sent shock waves a few weeks ago, another startling revelation is about the ongoing loot in the banking sector. Information gathered via an RTI reply from RBI, by a rights activist in Surat, showed that the two terms of the NDA government saw the writing off of bank loans of around 25 lakh crore. Note the fact that the NPAs were of the order of 10 lakh crore in 2014. Granted that this was a mind-boggling sum, the Modi government has, through its drift, ‘managed’ to build hugely on this. In a nation where the ordinary man’s home and hearth would be auctioned off if he or she fails to repay a couple of lakhs to a bank, the high and mighty with political patronage laugh their way through wilful defaults in repayment of their hefty loans.
Banks that were nationalised by Indira Gandhi in 1969 are simply turning into sitting ducks for financial fraudsters. So much so, rather than entrepreneurs making money through their business units, several sharks have made an alternative ‘enterprise’ out of ‘robbing’ the banks by taking huge loans and refusing to repay even as they have the ways and means to do so. Termed as Non-Performing Assets (NPAs), these are eventually written off by banks through exertion of political influence.
Narendra Modi had, during his jet-set election campaign in 2014, used NPAs as his main campaign plank and promised the nation he would get back the money looted by businessmen from banks, bring back fugitives like Vijay Mallya who took shelter in foreign countries, and would distribute the money to the ‘poor’ here. His establishment could not move a finger yet, other than some minor ‘seizures’ of property of Mallya or Nirav Modi. All of Modi’s “friendships” with global leaders proved to be of no help. Even the top investigating agencies of his government utterly failed in their “attempts” to get the extradition of these “looters” ultimately harming the national exchequer. These agencies, perhaps motivately, failed to act with any seriousness of purpose. This is a challenge to the self-respect of law-abiding citizens in this country, whose sweat transformed into taxes to the exchequer is looted outright when successive governments played flute to such action. The failure on the part of the media to highlight the harm that the nation is faced with — in terms of a likely collapse of the banking system and resultant devastation of the national economy itself – is also a matter of serious worry.
