BOOK REVIEW. A tedious exercise in grandstanding

Now that it is fashionable and, more importantly, profitable to rat on your bosses à la Sanjaya Baru and Natwar Singh, one cannot blame former Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) Vinod Rai for joining the pack.

And to be fair to someone appointing himself the “nation’s conscience keeper”, the unwavering self-righteousness of this tome is only to be expected.

It is also presumably healthy for accountants to believe they are cleansing the system.

These few noteworthy motives perhaps support the publication of this otherwise inexplicable book. Throughout its excruciating 276-page length, it is difficult to fathom what purpose it serves besides, of course, to amplify the obvious conceit of its author. And settle scores with former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and his council of ministers, especially Kapil Sibal and Manish Tiwari, people he was clearly not inclined to cross before the Congress got wiped out in elections.

But that is nothing new. Natwar Singh did it in One Life Is Not Enough to some entertaining effect.

If it was to be a stab in the back of his bosses, Manmohan Singh and Congress president Sonia Gandhi, the former foreign minister attempted it with undisguised glee. The result was, at least in parts, an almost inadvertently amusing account.

In the case of former Prime Minister’s media advisor, Sanjaya Baru,’ he wrote The Accidental Prime Minister with a professional hack’s eye for detail and lucid prose which accounted for the book’s rip-roaring success.

Admittedly, Rai’s repertoire is limited and his knowledge of the tools of the writing trade “minimal”. But indifference to language alone cannot explain Rai’s barely concealed meanness that is only offset by the egotism natural to his ilk.

All of it made even more agonising by the tone of piety in his harangue.

Hopeless harangue Sample him playing judge, jury and executioner to the embattled Manmohan Singh: “Mr Prime Minister, people wonder, if you were indeed convinced that spectrum allocation should be transparent, what prevented you from executing your wishes? Had you, in fact, stood steadfastly by your beliefs, the fate of the UPA II might have been different. In fact, the fate of the Indian economy itself might have been different... Instead, you engaged in a routine and ‘distanced’ handling of the entire allocation process, in spite of the fact that the then communications minister, A. Raja, had indicated to you, in writing, the action he proposed to take…”

After A Raja has repeated similar claims ad nauseam , in court and before the media, is any of this news to anyone?

That also brings me to the more serious question of Rai’s “revelations” which seem to have excited no one except the perennially excitable television anchors and the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

The only novelty The BJP has since prompted its various ministers to declare that the book confirms everything they ever said about “Air India, coal blocks, 2G, CWG and Jeejaji (son-in-law, a reference to Priyanka Gandhi’s husband Robert Vadra)”.

The only novelty in Rai’s account of 2G, “the biggest scam in the history of Independent India”, besides attacks on the former Prime Minister and his various ministers, is his exhaustive defence of the staggering sum of ₹1.76 crore he computed to be the presumptive loss to the exchequer in the allocation of 2G Spectrum.

This is the figure that stuck, defined the dominant political discourse, and is generally believed to have caused the political downturn of the Congress-led UPA II.

Rai is at pains to explain his computations, albeit without much success as his own conclusions show.

“In computing presumptive losses, we have clearly stated that while the fact of loss to the national exchequer can hardly be denied, the quantum of loss can be debated. We sincerely believe that the government itself validated our computations by debating the loss – from the now famous ‘zero loss hypothesis’ to the Rs 32,000 crore mentioned by the CBI,” he says.

The spice route So, was the figure of ₹1.76 crore valid? Anyone?

After wading aimlessly through the 2G quagmire, Rai decides to spice up the narrative somewhat. Chapter VII is titled ‘The Punjabi Wedding: Commonwealth Games 2010’. Here, Rai turns to philosophy and the question of truth and justice: “It will be a great travesty of justice if the big fish get away and only some lowly engineers and officers land up in the CBI net…”

The theme of learning from past experiences runs through coal block allotment scam, the gas exploration deals and describing the civil aviation ministry’s role in running Air India to the ground. The problem is that besides the author’s self-righteous indignation, there’s nothing in the book that his target audience doesn’t already know.

But Rai clearly wants to convince a wider audience about his crusader status, a role he has taken to playing with regularity on TV and newspapers.

It also helps to have an easy mark if one is playing the sharp-shooter.

Admittedly, Manmohan Singh and his former team are eminently deserving of such target practice.

But given that this follows a spate of better written and more insightful attacks at the former regime, the law of diminishing returns blunts the edge of this particular offensive.

The cause of the ‘conscience keeper’ would have been better served if he had restricted his literary ambitions to account books.

MEET THE AUTHOR

Vinod Rai was the Comptroller and Auditor General of India who has brought about a paradigm change in the institution. He has served over 34 years in various capacities at the State and Central levels. Rai lives in New Delh

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