Why scams happen? Yechury has an answer

The Communist party of India (Marxist) on Friday warned that Parliament would continue to be engaged with the corruption scandals that have surfaced in the recent past, saying all these scams were a result of the neo-liberal economic reforms.

Referring to the alleged scams involving the 2G spectrum allocation, Commonwealth Games and Adarsh housing, senior party leader Sitaram Yechury said these scandals were due to the "vastly growing crony capitalism under the neo-liberal economic reforms dispensation."

"Nepotism in awarding contracts, sweet heart deals in cheaply disposing off public properties and creating illegal and new avenues for money laundering are some of the forms that crony capitalism takes," he said in an editorial in the forthcoming issue of CPI(M) organ 'People's Democracy'.

"The Prime Minister is, on record, to say that India can 'ill-afford' crony capitalism. Yet, his own cabinet has members against whom serious charges of corruption through crony capitalism remain," Yechury said.

On the 2G spectrum allocation scam, he said with evidence furnished by the Comptroller and Auditor General, "it is clear that the matter must be thoroughly investigated, if needed, through the constitution of a Joint Parliamentary Committee".

Telecom Minister A Raja "continues to hold office even after the CAG report revealed that a total sum of Rs 176,379 crore (Rs 1.76 trillion) was the loss to the government's exchequer due to his Ministry's decisions on the sale of the 2G spectrum.

The CPI(M) MPs who have been raising these issues since February 2008 had estimated a loss of Rs 190,000 crores (Rs 1.9 trillion) due to the manner in which the 2G spectrum was sold, he said.

Regarding the alleged irregularities in the Commonwealth Games preparations, he said the government had thought it would "take the steam out" of opposition protests over these scams by removing Maharashtra Chief Minister Ashok Chavan for housing scam and Suresh Kalmadi for his alleged role in the CWG. This was however "grossly misplaced".

"These are the latest entries in the volume of scams that has already been fattened by earlier ones like illegal mining and illegal exports of our mineral resources," he said.

Yechury quoted the corruption ranking by Transparency International for 2010 saying India's position was 3.3 on scale where the cleanliness index of 0 was 'highly corrupt' and 10 denoting 'very clean'.

"This state of affairs is simply impermissible. A vast majority of our people today suffer from malnutrition, hunger and deprivation.

"While the government invokes the inadequacy of resources excuse to meet the legitimate needs of our people, they nurture such expressions of crony capitalism where thousands of crores are being looted," the Marxist leader said.