Tuesday, February 8, 2011

Editorial: "BRING BACK THE BLACK MONEYS" in LAW ANIMATED WORLD, 31 January 2011 issue (Vol. 7, Part 1, No. 2)

BRING BACK THE BLACK MONEYS
stashed away in umpteen foreign banks by corrupt scoundrels of all hues from our country – ought to be, and perhaps is going to be, the main demand, the fiery slogan, of all democrats in the country. We have just seen the Tunisian people rising up and showing their tyrants the door and now the Egyptians are chanting: “One, two, three, four… kick the tyrant out of the door!” Who knows tomorrow it may not be our turn to besiege the national capital and other cities in millions demanding settlement of accounts of all the huge wealth the corrupt rulers, politicians, bureaucrats and all other types of rascals made subverting the letter and spirit of our constitution, especially the dictâts in the Directive Principles that ‘the State shall strive to promote the welfare of the people by securing and protecting … a social order in which justice, social, economic and political, shall inform all the institutions of the national life’ and that it should direct its policy towards securing “that the ownership and control of the material resources of the community are so distributed as best to sub-serve the common good … [and] that the operation of the economic system does not result in the concentration of wealth and means of production to the common detriment.” But, sadly, we find everything going the wrong way and not only immense concentration of wealth and disgusting conspicuous consumption we see around us but also trillions of rupees of unjust gains – amounts which could have easily paid for the entire infrastructure and all the poverty alleviation and public health programmes so direly needed – ‘outsourced’ to safe havens in different countries – a new sort of ‘colonial’ plunder by our own ‘indigenous’ satraps! The PIL by Senior Advocate and former Union Law Minister, Mr. Ram Jethmalani, has brought this ugly quagmire to the focus of the country with certain Supreme Court Judges also seeming to have been incensed by the awful loot. We have already alerted several times in this journal about this rape of the motherland by her own spoilt children and the urgent need to stop all that, and, emphatically reiterating the same, appeal to the people to rise to the occasion now §§§