Modi Fails, So Far, to Return Illicit Funds to India
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Version 0 of 1. NEW DELHI — Thousands of years ago in India, “a plastic surgeon, perhaps,” fixed an elephant’s head on a boy who had lost his, Prime Minister Narendra Modi revealed on Saturday in a Mumbai hospital, which does not offer such a service yet. He was not saying that ancient Indians were negligent when choosing head donors, but that Indians were once so great that the things they did were like magic. The prime minister need not have searched so far. Millions of modern Indians have the ability to make money invisible. A large part of the Indian economy, though nobody is sure just how large, officially does not exist, but it exerts an unmistakable influence on the visible world. Illicit money, which is income that has been earned through illegal means or evaded taxes, has a dual life in general Indian perceptions. Most of India’s middle class, especially entrepreneurs, deal in it in some form and view it as a practical necessity to make a profit in a country where the cost of doing business is high. But they view larger, more organized hoarders of illicit cash as criminals. There is a perception that the big fish smuggle the money out of India. There is no evidence to suggest that most of India’s illicit money is outside India rather than within, but Mr. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party exploited that perception when it campaigned on the promise that it would bring back all the money that Indians had squirrelled abroad as a part of its war against corruption. The party claimed that trillions of rupees were lying in foreign banks and that it would get the money back to India within 100 days of assuming power. More than 150 days have gone by, but Mr. Modi has yet to show Indians the money. What his government has instead is a list of Indians with foreign bank accounts, not all of them dubious. On Monday, it released the names of a few account holders whom it accused of hoarding illicit money abroad. The list was a disappointment, at least to those who had assumed that Mr. Modi was serious about his war on what Indians call “black money.” Mr. Modi and his party during campaigning had Indians believe that several prominent politicians, especially from the rival Indian National Congress party, had money stashed away in foreign banks. But the names that were released on Monday were of little-known businesspeople. Two of them had made donations to both the B.J.P. and the Congress party. The government indicated that it could not reveal all the names as it was constrained by the legal arrangements it has with the countries that shared the information. But, on Tuesday, the Supreme Court rebuked the government for protecting the shady, and gave it one day to submit the list of names to it in a sealed envelope, which the government has now done. This is the new government’s first fiasco, because it has come across as an ally of the big players in the shadow economy, exactly what it had accused the previous government of. If it is true that the government wants to protect some powerful Indians, then the Supreme Court intervention, though embarrassing, is in fact very convenient. The government has been relieved of the responsibility of revealing the names itself. Arvind Kejriwal of the Aam Aadmi Party, who ran for office against Mr. Modi in the general elections, implied in a written statement that the government was shielding those who had financed its expensive election campaigns while unleashing tax raids on the less useful. Two years ago, Mr. Kejriwal released a list of Indians who he claimed had suspect foreign bank accounts. The list included Mukesh Ambani, India’s richest man, who is believed to be very close to Mr. Modi. In fact, it was in a hospital run by Mr. Ambani that the prime minister fondly remembered the ancient plastic surgeon who had fixed an elephant’s head on a boy. Follow Manu Joseph, the author of the novel “The Illicit Happiness of Other People,” on Facebook. |