So it is yet again a case of putting the cart before the horse — or so it seems — with India’s attempt at getting ahead of the curve in unearthing the ill-gotten gains of its citizens, stashed away in foreign shores. And in the maze of point-counter point over which government or party is more at fault for shielding whom, the larger issue of prosecuting those guilty of amassing untaxed wealth is being gradually overridden by a tawdry display of political one-upmanship.

Unearthing black money and naming and shaming those guilty of cheating the national exchequer of several trillions of rupees was one of the many electoral promises of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi. Even in his latest radio address to Indian audiences on Sunday, Prime Minister Modi reiterated his government’s resolve to bring “every penny” of untaxed money from secret foreign bank accounts back to India.

There can be nothing wrong with the intent of going ballistic over an issue that has always found immediate traction in a nation where 200 million people go to bed every night on an empty stomach and 836 million have to survive on less than Rs20 (Dh1.19) a day. But the problem lies elsewhere. In its bid to lambast the erstwhile Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) reign, BJP had probably bitten off more than it could chew. Making tall pre-poll claims to embellish a gung-ho election manifesto is one thing, but putting pen to paper to execute such political grandstanding in terms of a big push for substantive change is something else. That is why when Arun Jaitley, India’s Finance Minister, alludes to the Double Taxation Avoidance Treaties to try and draw a line between ‘authorised’ and ‘unauthorised’ disclosures of names of offenders, it smacks of the same old, hackneyed stories of “secrecy clauses” and “non-cooperative” foreign establishments that had been cited time and again by Congress-led governments in the past. In his signed article on the BJP’s official website on Sunday, Jaitley said, “confidentiality clauses make it incumbent that disclosures would be made only after prosecution is filed before a charging court. Thus the issue is not whether, but when the disclosure can be made”. He further said: “The debate is not between disclosure and non-disclosure of confidential information. It is between unauthorised disclosure in violation of tax treaties and disclosure as per tax treaties.”

That being the case, didn’t Jaitley realise the full import of making selective disclosures from the list of 627 names submitted to the Supreme Court of India-appointed Special Investigation Team, or going on air with a section of the electronic media with tangential references to some Congress bigwig featuring on that list? If indeed the legal obligations of Double Taxation Avoidance Treaties and confidentiality clauses were to be adhered to in letter and spirit, then Mr Jaitley, why did you have to name those three relatively low-profile businessmen from a long list of 624 other offenders? Was that disclosure ‘authorised’ or ‘unauthorised’? Come on Mr Finance Minister, one does not have to be a legal behemoth or a wily tax sleuth to realise the simple truth behind such a microcosmic attack: To keep the Congress party on tenterhooks. And if the current political order in New Delhi has allowed this serious issue to once again degenerate into a game of political vendetta, then it only goes to show that a change of government does not necessarily entail a change in governance.

The failed ‘VP’ promise

Hark back to 1989. Having caught the imagination of a vast section of voters, particularly in the Hindi heartland, with a potent “Rajiv hatao, desh bachao” (sack Rajiv, save India) slogan — in view of the kickbacks scandal allegedly involving former prime minister late Rajiv Gandhi over the Bofors Howitzer gun deal – Rajiv’s bete noire late Vishwanath Pratap Singh (‘VP’) would famously fish out a piece of paper from his pocket, at election rallies, that purportedly bore the number of the bank account to which money from the Bofors kickbacks had allegedly been stashed away in the cooler climes of Switzerland. The gimmick paid off. ‘VP’ won the polls and became prime minister, but that was the last one heard of that bank account. In no time, ‘VP’ was relegated to the archives of India’s political history by an unforgiving electorate that felt let-down by a band of opportunists whose anti-Congressism was a sham.

Where Jaitley is right — and that is something that really needs to be looked into from the point of view of jurisprudence and socio-economic pragmatism — is that India does need to take a conscious call on its stand on the confidentiality clause. Jaitley said: “In the recent meeting of about 50 countries in Berlin, which proposed automatic sharing of information, India could not participate since a prevalent view is that confidentiality clauses are unconstitutional under Indian law.” This, surely, needs a rethink.

In India, the entire gamut of this ‘black money’ and ‘Swiss bank accounts’ issue has acquired an almost folklorish proportion. The belief that the rich-and-famous routinely siphon off their untaxed wealth to offshore bank accounts is so rampant that it belies discretion – the result being that just about everyone who is a someone gets tarred with the same brush, almost like the archetypal Bollywood ‘baddy’ who ultimately must get the stick. And the political class resorting to cynicism and bravado has, to a large extent, trivialised a crisis that is by all means endemic.