INSIDER VULTURE CABAL UNHARMED, MOBILISES FOR JAN 2019 KNOCKOUT

The former Union Minister is anticipating a ‘blowout’ for the BJP in the polls, and is entertaining hopes of being called upon to follow in Manmohan Singh’s footsteps by being nominated as PM by Sonia Gandhi.

The “insider vulture cabal” led by a former senior minister from the UPA, is readying for the delivery of a “knockout blow” to short-term economic prospects by 20 January 2019. Their expectation is for Prime Minister Narendra Modi to call for Lok Sabha elections that would be held in the third week of April 2019, and that a major economic shock would reduce, if not eliminate altogether, the BJP’s chances in the urban constituencies the party must win in order to return to power, even as the leader of a coalition. Ironically, this very politiciancum-cabal leader had been frantically seeking to join the BJP in 2002, but was blocked from doing so by party functionaries in his home state, who were unanimous that he would be totally unwelcome in the saffron party. The former Union Minister is now anticipating a “blowout” for the BJP in the 2019 polls, and is known to be entertaining hopes of being called upon to “follow in Manmohan Singh’s footsteps” by being nominated as Prime Minister by the Supreme Margdarshak of the Congress Party, Sonia Gandhi, who, the former minister’s acolytes claim, wanted to see him in the Prime Minister’s chair from 2012 onwards, but refrained out of regard for a “visibly faltering” Manmohan Singh. Such talk is being spread these days, in order to scare and to de-motivate officials looking into the former minister and his family’s financial transactions, as he is known to be “exceptionally generous to those who obey him and cruelly vindictive to those who ignore his commands and needs”. Although The Sunday Guardian had more than once warned of the activities of this cabal, those within the ruling establishment who are linked to the cabal, through fiduciary and personal bonds, dismissed such warnings as “conspiracy theories” deserving of no attention, an explanation that seems to have been accepted by the government, as substantive action against the insider vulture cabal ap- pears to be non-existent for the eight months since such warnings were first aired in this newspaper ( Cabal plans October meltdown in share prices to rout BJP, The Sunday Guardian, 4 February) Indeed, to both North Block as well as Mint Road, India is a country where under-invoicing of exports and over-invoicing of imports is negligible; where insider trading and manipulation of share prices hardly takes place; where the currency remains outside the zone of fire of international predators out to “short” an increasingly pathetic rupee; and that economic difficulties are related to “global cues” rather than government policies. If this “purely global” talk were true, the question would come up as to why the economic team within government should not all be removed, so as to lower government expenditure, given that whatever happens does so (according to them) because of global factors outside their control. The reality is that domestic policy makes all the difference in India’s nearly $ 3 trillion economy, for better or for worse, depending on what basket of measures gets worked out and implemented. Recently, RBI Governor Urjit Patel seemed wholly unconcerned about the consistently declining value of the rupee, while other policymakers dealing with economic policy waxed complacent about job growth. Whether voters agree with such stands will become clear in forthcoming state and national polls. Looking at such an attitude of “not my business” and of course, “not my fault”, it is unsurprising