{"id":848,"date":"2012-09-04T15:16:02","date_gmt":"2012-09-04T15:16:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/teekhapan.wordpress.com\/?p=848"},"modified":"2012-09-04T15:16:02","modified_gmt":"2012-09-04T15:16:02","slug":"one-bofors-got-rajiv-gandhi-will-all-the-scams-get-upa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vivekkaul.com\/2012\/09\/04\/one-bofors-got-rajiv-gandhi-will-all-the-scams-get-upa\/","title":{"rendered":"One Bofors got Rajiv. But will UPA\u2019s bag of scams hurt Cong?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>
\nVivek Kaul
\n<\/strong>
\nIt was May 22, 1991. My summer holidays were on. And I was at my grandfather\u2019s duplex flat in South Delhi. I had woken up very late. It must have been around 10.30am. As soon as I came down to the lower level, an uncle who has since become an Art of Living guru, told me that Rajiv Gandhi had been killed late last night( he didn\u2019t use the word assassinated, that I remember very clearly).
\nGiven his penchant for practical jokes, I thought that he was pulling a fast one on me, early in the morning. Those were the days before cable television became a part of our everyday lives, and so I picked up the Hindustan Times newspaper, my grandfather used to subscribe to, in order to verify whether he was really speaking the truth.
\nAnd as it turned out my uncle wasn\u2019t lying. He wasn\u2019t playing a practical joke. Rajiv Gandhi had been assassinated by a human bomb at 10.10pm on May 21. \u201cBofors killed him,\u201d was a random remark I heard during the course of that day. But since summer holidays were on I had better things to think about than Bofors and how it killed Rajiv Gandhi.
\nThis entire incident came back to me while reading an excerpt of an upcoming book titled Decoding Rahul Gandhi<\/em> written by Aarthi Ramachandran. As she writes \u201cSonia writes in Rajiv that Rahul would telephone from America, \u201cconsumed with anxiety\u201d about his father\u2019s security arrangements. She says Rajiv\u2019s specialised security cover was withdrawn after he became leader of the opposition and it was replaced with a force not trained for this specific task. Rahul, who had gone to the US in June 1990 to start his undergraduate studies at Harvard University, insisted on coming back to India at the end of March 1991 for his Easter break. He accompanied his father on a tour of Bihar and was \u201cappalled to witness the lack of elementary security around his father\u201d. Sonia says that before going back to the US, Rahul had told her that if something was not done about it, he knew he would soon come home for his father\u2019s funeral.\u201d
\nSomething did happen to Rajiv Gandhi a couple of months later and Rahul had to comeback from Harvard for the funeral.
\nRajiv Gandhi had taken over as the Prime Minister of India after the assassination of his mother Indira by her bodyguards. Riding on his honest image and sympathy for his mother the Congress party got around half the votes polled and more than 400 seats of the total 515 seats in the Lok Sabha.
\nIn 1987, the Bofors scandal came into light and tarred the honest image of Rajiv Gandhi. Bofors AB, a Swedish company, had supposedly paid kickbacks to top Indian politicians of around Rs64 crore to swing around a $285million contracts for Howitzer field guns in its favour.
\nThe impact of this on the Congress party was huge. It lost the 1989 election to an alliance of Janta Dal and Bhartiya Janta Party. Rajiv Gandhi had to become the leader of opposition. His security was downgraded and he was assassinated two years later. So in a way Bofors killed Rajiv Gandhi.
\nBut if one takes into account the size of the scam at Rs 64 crore it was hardly anything in size to the scams that have come into light over the last few years. The coal scam. The telecom scam. The commonwealth games scam. The Adarsh Housing Society scam. The Devas Antrix scam. And so on.
\nEach one of these scams has been monstrous in proportion to the Rs 64 crore Bofors scam. There has been a surfeit of scams coming to light since in the second tenure of the Congress led United Progressive Alliance started. These scams would have been on for a while but they have been coming to light only over the last couple of years.
\nThe Canadian American Economist John Kenneth Galbraith has an explanation for this phenomenon in his book The Great Crash 1929<\/em>. \u201cAt any given time there exists an inventory of undisclosed embezzlement. This inventory – it should perhaps be called the bezzle \u2013 amounts at any moment to many millions of dollars. In good times people are relaxed ,trusting, and money is plentiful. … Under these circumstances the rate of embezzlement grows, the rate of discovery falls o , and the bezzle increases rapidly. In depression all this is reversed. … Just as the (stock market boom) accelerated the rate of growth (of embezzlement), so the crash enormously advanced the rate of discovery.\u201d
\nIn an Indian context the economy and the stock market were booming between 2004 and 2008. 2009 was a bad year. Things recovered a bit in 2010. And have been looking bleak since the middle of 2011. And it is since then when all these scams have been coming to light. Galbraith\u2019s explanation clearly works here. When things were good the scams were being created and as things turned around, all the scams have been coming to light.
\nBut the bigger question here is will the people of this country remember about all these scams (and more that may be highlighted in the days to come) by the time the 2014 Lok Sabha elections come around? One Bofors scandal running into a few million dollars was enough to put Rajiv Gandhi out of power and even take his life in the end. But will all these billion dollar scandals carry enough weight in the days to come? Or will they just become background noise, leading to people not bothering about them, while deciding who to vote for in 2014?
\nAs Umberto Eco (an Italian author) and Jean Claude Carriere (a french scriptwriter) write in This is Not the End of the Book<\/em>: \u201cBut an abundance of witnesses isn’t necessarily enough. We witnessed the violence inflicted on Tibetan monks by the Chinese police. It provoked international outrage. But if your screens kept showing monks being beaten by police for months on end, even the most concerned and active audience would lose interest. There is therefore a level below which, news pieces do not penetrate and above which they become nothing but background noise.\u201d
\nIsn\u2019t India going through the same situation right now when it comes to scams? There is a race on among various sections of the media to highlight more and more scams (and rightly so). News channels talk about scams all day long. The front pages of newspapers are full of it. And so is the social media. So will a surfeit of scams make us immune to them?
\nI don\u2019t have hard and fast answers to the questions that I have raised here. But I do have this lurking feeling that all this scam talk everywhere might just end up benefitting the Congress led UPA government, rather than hurting it. Or to put it in a better way it might not hurt the Congress led UPA as much as it should.
\n(The article originally appeared on www.firstpost.com on September 4,2012. http:\/\/www.firstpost.com\/india\/one-bofors-got-rajiv-but-will-upas-bag-of-scams-hurt-cong-443064.html<\/a>)
\n(Vivek Kaul is a writer and can be reached at vivek.kaul@gmail.com)
\n<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Vivek Kaul It was May 22, 1991. My summer holidays were on. And I was at my grandfather\u2019s duplex flat in South Delhi. I had woken up very late. It must have been around 10.30am. As soon as I came down to the lower level, an uncle who has since become an Art of Living … <\/p>\n

Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"qubely_global_settings":"","qubely_interactions":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,33,59],"tags":[141,319,1888,1922,2913,2937,3409,3680,3760,3835],"qubely_featured_image_url":null,"qubely_author":{"display_name":"Vivek Kaul","author_link":"https:\/\/vivekkaul.com\/author\/vivekkaul\/"},"qubely_comment":0,"qubely_category":"Analysis<\/a> Firstpost<\/a> Politics<\/a>","qubely_excerpt":"Vivek Kaul It was May 22, 1991. My summer holidays were on. And I was at my grandfather\u2019s duplex flat in South Delhi. I had woken up very late. It must have been around 10.30am. As soon as I came down to the lower level, an uncle who has since become an Art of Living…","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vivekkaul.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/848"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vivekkaul.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vivekkaul.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vivekkaul.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vivekkaul.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=848"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vivekkaul.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/848\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vivekkaul.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=848"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vivekkaul.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=848"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vivekkaul.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=848"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}