Sonia Gandhi's Fake Victimhood

The Congress has been badly dumped by the people in the last elections. There are chances they may be dumped from some states in the upcoming elections in a few months. Yet, our media still reports on their silly utterances as if Sonia Gandhi still rules the country. During the last few days Subramaniam Swamy has boldly said “Sonia Gandhi is a crook” and that “BJP is soft on the Gandhis”. Take a look at how Gandhi-slaves NDTV report on the sleeping beauty called Rahul Gandhi:

They show the video, they show RG yawning, they show RG falling off to a quick sleep and then they report “BJP alleging RG sleeping in parliament”. Even their tweet on July 9 says the same. What are these people, blind idiots? If the man is caught sleeping on video does it take for anyone to “allege”? Such are the slaves at NDTV who still twist ordinary news reports into an act against the Gandhis. Oh! You can’t do that! See the Gandhis are like “sacred monuments”. Having played the idiotic “alleged” tape the channel then goes to a Congi who goes one step better (I’m not sure but I think it was Rajiv Shukla but that doesn’t matter). The Congi says “It is inappropriate for LSTV to show such images”. Okay, so it’s not inappropriate for the bumbling Pappu to doze off but it’s the camera’s fault. It doesn’t even occur to the Congi that the camera is not focused on RG but on an MP who is speaking in parliament and RG just happened to be in Zombieland right behind him. That’s the lighter part though.

There are many misdeeds that the Nehru-Gandhi clan has to answer for. Our historians and media have conveniently washed off those sins. Recent revelations about the 1962 war appear to show Jawaharlal Nehru goofed up badly. Monuments are made for him. Indira Gandhi went unpunished for Emergency crimes. More monuments! Rajiv Gandhi had no accountability for 1984. Some more monuments! All three were happily awarded Bharat Ratna; two of them during their own tenures.  This fake greatness to the family now even extends to the Vadras. This is why, regardless of what one might think of Swamy, he is doing a monumental job in prosecuting the Gandhis for their crimes in the National Herald scam. Predictably SoniaG and Congress cry “vendetta”. It’s time people and GOI stopped listening to such nonsense. Courts don’t rule based on someone’s vendetta else Narendra Modi would be in jail instead of being the PM. The Congis who carried out the biggest witch-hunt India has ever known against Modi are now screaming “vindictiveness, vendetta”.

In bogus defence of the NH scam there is a lawyer called KTS Tulsi who even grandly claimed “Young India” (76% owned by the Gandhis) which scammed NH was formed to promote “democracy and secularism”. Really? And what’s the Congress supposed to promote? Minority appeasement? Even AK Antony has now rubbished the Congress’s “secular credentials”. The TOI report says: Congress president Sonia Gandhi on Wednesday said a court summoning Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi and herself in connection with the National Herald case, smacked of 'political vindictiveness' by the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance government… Sonia also confirmed that the income tax department has served her party notices in a case that alleges that she and other party leaders misappropriated funds of a company that used to publish the erstwhile National Herald newspaper. "This kind of political witch hunt will only help us and help us to come back faster (to power)," she said.

So Sonia Gandhi and her son will keep on committing misdeeds but no one should act against them? The woman is seriously hallucinating if she thinks the IT notice and imaginary “vindictiveness” will bring them back to power faster. She probably thinks she will be fortunate like IndiraG who could topple a “Khichdi” govt in 1980 and return to power. It appears that the pathetic number of 44 that Congress got hasn’t taught her any lessons. At the other end of this saga of misdeeds her “Damaad” quietly closes down six spurious companies he floated to carry out all kinds of dubious dealings. He is so brazen he doesn’t even file annual returns for these companies. Read this: Vadra, the husband of Priyanka Gandhi, is quietly closing down six companies set up just two years ago.The firms have never filed annual returns or balance sheets, an examination of company records by HT shows. Lifeline Agrotech, Greenwave Agro, Rightline Agriculture, Future Infra Agro, Best Seasons Agro and Prime Time Agro are all private limited companies established between June and August 2012, purportedly as agriculture or agro-processing firms. Vadra is named as managing director and promoter in company records.

Had it been you or me or any ordinary citizen we would be hounded by the authorities and made to pay heavy penalties for not complying with statutory requirements. Vadra quietly winds up companies but still retains his security and exemption from security checks. Who the hell are these people? And the BJP guys in GOI don’t have the courage to act on him? This is why Swamy makes sense when he says BJP is soft on them. For all the scams and misdeeds of the Congress, SoniaG and some ministers should be hounded the way Al Capone was hounded with a special task force. The new govt may be in its early days but if they let them off for their crimes against this country it will be one promise that Modi would seriously fail to keep. Following the court summons to the Gandhis in the NH scam the IT department was compelled to issue a notice on the tax exemption. If they hadn’t done that someone would have again gone to court and forced them to act.  

After SoniaG reacted with her statement about vindictiveness bringing her back to power soon, TimesNow ran a headline “Sonia warns BJP”. So for these media crooks she is so powerful? Rahul Kanwal on July 9 ran a poll on his nightly show on Headlines Today asking people if this was “vindictive politics”. Some 50% seem to have said “yes” to that stupid question and who knows who or how many vote on these silly polls. It’s a stupid question because it is not the right question. And these dumb morons pass off as journalists and editors to fool the viewers. The right question would be “Have Sonia and Rahul scammed NH”? The facts of the case clearly indicate they have indeed scammed NH along with others. They have also rented out properties of NH when they had no business to do so. Swamy has also written to the SIT on Black Money formed by the new govt asking for investigation into foreign bank accounts of the Gandhis. Is this all a figment of his imagination? Is all of it vendetta?

The NH scam broke sometime around November 2012. The media washed it off and would have liked it to be buried. If Sonia and Rahul actually have any high morals as they cry vendetta, why didn’t they act then? They could have reversed the transactions and sought a political closure to the case. They did not. They were brazen because they thought they could somehow still cobble up a “Coalition of the Corrupt” in 2014 and get away with the scams. Unfortunately, events did not turn out like that. Fake victimhood may have worked in the past when most people in the country did not have information. The South voted for IndiraG after Emergency because most states there didn’t experience the brutality of that period and because of censorship not much information travelled. It is not possible to escape now. Subramaniam Swamy is absolutely right in pursuing the cases against the Gandhis and the govt should actually back him. If corruption has to stop, the cleansing has to start from the top.  

 

The Political End Of The Gandhis

There’s something common about all corrupt leaders at the top. They manipulate systems, try and destroy democratic institutions and make every effort to destroy political opponents. They keep it at it till the end is inevitable. The most prominent one is the case of Richard Nixon. He and his loyal foot-soldiers manipulated every institution and destroyed many political opponents to ensure electoral success for his second term. Unfortunately for Nixon he kept tapes of the conversations at his office which eventually caused his downfall. Whenever in trouble, Nixon and his little coterie always managed to “get around” the hurdles. They somehow “managed” it; until the US Supreme Court ordered the tapes be surrendered as evidence. Here’s a little exchange between Alexander Haig (then White House Chief of Staff) and Nixon (from his bio-pic) during the last days of office:

That date being referred to, June 23, 1972, is the date of reports a few days after the Watergate burglary (June 17). The burglary itself didn’t cost Nixon all that much but it led to the discovery of a whole web of corrupt operations. Nixon wasn’t after any personal monetary gain or wealth. Alexander Haig tells him “It’s the SC, you don’t get around it”. In what Robert Vadra calls a “Banana republic” Nixon would have happily continued. In “Banana republics” even SC judges can be bought. You just have to hear Prabhu Chawla in the Radia tapes to understand that. The Congress and Sonia Gandhi have also manipulated and destroyed many democratic institutions. You just have to know the modus operandi. The National Herald scam involving the Gandhis is one such operation. It has even attracted an IT notice for a political party lending money to a commercial business house. There doesn’t seem to be a way to “get around it” as many of the Congress and alliance ministers have “got around it” in the last decade. The question is: why were these people so brazen?

Although they aren’t showing it, it must be the biggest heartache for Congress and their clones to find that the man they wanted to burn in hell is now the PM. It must hurt them that he has outsmarted all of them to secure a clear majority in the elections. Nothing explains how the Congress hoped to come back to power or support a “khichdi govt” formed with its support than Dileep Padgaonkar’s belated confession (Read here). Padgaonkar wrote: “The dread possibility of ‘communal’ forces coming to power, we believed, would override all other concerns of the electorate”. In other words, fear-mongering, fake secularism, Muslim-appeasement and tainting opponents would help the Congress somehow control power at the centre. Media crooks like Padgaonkar, Barkha Dutt, Rajdeep Sardesai, Arnab Goswami and Intellectual Morons like Amartya Sen, Ram Guha and others hoped and expected BJP would fail to get a clear majority. Here’s part of the coterie that Sonia Gandhi, Congress and media crooks hoped would see them through:

We all know how Mulayam and Maya were continuously hounded and manipulated through CBI. DMK was a partner in crime. The murderous CPM is an “ideological” spouse of the Congress. The JDU driven by one man’s lust for power that broke up with BJP. The step-child of Congress called the AAP. The NCP that has equal number of scams to its credit. And key media crooks cleverly campaigning for Congress-UPA to return. One can recall Arnab’s non-stop slavery of Priyanka Vadra as if she was the next queen of India. SoniaG and Congress had hoped that somehow these clones would garner enough seats to either support the Congress to form a govt or they would form a govt that also includes AIADMK, TMC, BJD etc which the Congress can prop up from outside to keep the evil “communal forces” out of power. In particular, they hoped that would stop the man they wanted dead from becoming PM.

The Congress knew the tide was against it but it was this hope that they can somehow cobble up a non-BJP govt that fuelled the belief that they can “get around it”. That even if court cases came up against the Gandhis, they would “get around it”. It is this brazenness that led to many scams, including the National Herald one. The magistrate who has summoned the Gandhis and others on August 7 has observed: “It appears that Young India was in fact created as a sham or a cloak to convert public money to personal use or as a special purpose vehicle for acquiring control over Associated Journals Ltd assets worth over Rs 2,000 crore”. The DNA article linked here adds “K Vikram Rao of Indian Federation of Working Journalists states that the alleged misappropriation of Rs 2,000 crore is ' the tip of the iceberg. We are planning to implead ourselves in the petition in the court. It is a huge scandal and needs to be probed by the premier investigators of the country. This scam is bigger than Sahara," said Rao, whose father was the founder editor of Associated Journals in 1938”. 

The case is not going to be concluded anytime soon and will drag on for some years as most Indian cases do. The unfortunate part about that, in this one, is that it may keep the Gandhis embroiled in a legal tangle. Years ago such a case would not have dented the Gandhis too much because of equity the Gandhi name had with people. After all, there are millions who believed these fake Gandhis are somehow related to MKGandhi. But the thrashing they got in the recent elections which resulted in a miserable 44 seats to the Congress is proof that Indians have finally woken up to the fake Gandhis. Time and technology dismantles many myths and lies. Leadership is often tested more in adverse situations than in good ones. Both Sonia and Rahul aren’t really great leaders in the first place. The latter is more a useless burden on the party. SoniaG could claim some credit for restoring the Congress party’s standing after the previous NDA govt but much of her political capital has eroded since then with the corruption taint. The third left-over Gandhi, Priyanka Vadra, has shown immaturity in her political campaigns and other than emotional and childish gibberish had nothing to offer. I therefore believe that this is the end of the Gandhis politically.

Historically, the only thing Congress knew when they were in opposition was how to manipulate, horse-trade, bribe, induce and bring down govts. Every non-Congress govt in our history has been brought down by the Congress except the last term of AB Vajpayee and it is not because Congress did not try. This time, the Congress is in no position to bring down the BJP govt which has a single-party majority. This is something no politician, no pundit and no media crook ever imagined would happen. That is one of SoniaG’s biggest hurdles for a return. In case of Indira Gandhi, the serious cases against her for the Emergency crimes got wiped out because she could bring down what she called the “Khichdi” govt and return to power. The NH case is not going to be wiped out. On the contrary, one can expect more cases to follow and there is every reason why even Robert and Priyanka Vadra may also face court cases for land deals. Also, Subramaniam Swamy who is following the Sunanda Pushkar murder case has alleged that the Kochi IPL scam money belongs to Robert Vadra. Things get even murkier.

They say it’s a serious mistake to write off politicians. Well, I have done that before and I am starting to enjoy it. I predicted in “Reincarnation of Arvind Kejriwal” that he is finished and AK helped himself to doom. AK even insisted on realising his last dream of ending up in jail as that post hoped he wouldn’t. His recent utterances do not indicate he has learned any lessons. AK, of course, has age on his side and can re-invent himself if he so chooses. But SoniaG doesn’t have that advantage. By 2019 SoniaG will be 72 and given Congress claims of her health it is unlikely she will be able to cope with anymore gruelling campaigns. Even in the 2014 LS campaign she had a much restricted campaign and the gaps were made by RahulG and Priyanka Vadra. Rahul and Mrs Vadra filled the gaps quite badly to leave no future expectations from them. A senior Congress leader in Kerala called Rahul a “joker”. Even the family poodle Digvijaya Singh now says RahulG lacks temperament and avoided leadership by not becoming head of the Congress LS group.

The worst truth was to come in the form of a belated confession by AK Antony who said “People have lost faith in the secular credentials of the party. They have a feeling that the Congress bats for a few communities, especially minorities”. The confession is half-hearted. He should have clearly said Congress bats for Muslims and Christians. Sonia’s inner coterie would reflect that kind of batting. The UP results have shown even Muslims aren’t buying the Congress “fake secularism” anymore. All the elderly Congis are suddenly finding the nerve to speak which they couldn’t when they were in power. There is good reason to believe this country has moved on from the dynasty. I see no way that the Gandhis will command the influence they did in the past. They will not disappear but the last elections and current events certainly signal the end of the Gandhis.  

Congress - A Profitable NGO

Gandhi Private Limited:

It was in the 1980s that Arun Shourie wrote a series on the scams by then Maharashtra CM AR Antulay. It was appropriately titled “Indira Gandhi as commerce”. Cut to 21st Century and we now have a company that can truly have the reputation of Gandhi Private Limited.  The long and short of the National Herald (NH) scam is as follows:

Congress gives a loan of 90 crores to owners of NH (Associated Journals Ltd) to pay off their debts worth that amount. The funds of Congress are from donations that are tax free and cannot be used for commercial funding as per law. The grateful NH then transfers shares worth that amount to Young India, a section-25 not-for-profit company, owned by the Gandhis and some others. Young India pays 50 lakhs to NH and buys off the company. In the process Young India and the Gandhi get realty worth 2000 crores. That is the Delhi property alone. If one adds up other properties of NH across the country the assets are reportedly around 5000 crores. So Young India got assets worth over 2000 crores for a paltry 50 lakhs (and the indirect transfer of 90 crores from Congress through NH in terms of shares).

Had these facts not come to light around November 2012 many of the real estate assets of NH would have already changed hands and sold to builders and property developers. It’s a lot like Robert Vadra buying land cheap with funds from a future buyer, getting it quickly regularised and then selling it off at a huge premium to that same buyer who funded him. Typically, when the scam did come to light our media was very scared as always to ask questions to the Gandhis and they still are. Instead they attacked Subramaniam Swamy who has been handling this case legally. The worst offender was none other than Sonia’s bootlicker Rajdeep Sardesai who held a sham debate (Read here) and asked the following question:

On June 26, 2014 a court in Delhi, after the first hearings, has found a prima-facie case of Criminal breach of trust and conspiracy to cheat and has summoned Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi an another four Congress members who are involved in executing the NH scam. The law will take its course, as they say but it’s what the spokies and other doormats of Congress responded with that is atrociously interesting. There was Kumar Ketkar and Congress spokie Randeep Surjewala. First on CNN-IBN and then on TimesNow. The most garbage naturally came from the moron called Kumar Ketkar (KK).

First KK claimed that he had not read the court order so he doesn’t know the facts. If you don’t even read the order and don’t know the facts why do you go on a TV panel? Then this moron carried on in TimesNow stating that takeover of NH is just another bigger organisation gobbling up a media house and all such takeovers should be debated. This is the childish nonsense that KK brings to the table. How this guy became an editor is a mystery. Mahesh Jethmalani had to explain to KK that it wasn’t a hostile takeover of a media house because the organisation had no plans to carry on any media business. The Congress party is also not a commercial organisation that should be in the business of takeovers. Obviously, stupid KK is hinting at the recent takeover of Network18 by Reliance. Is there any comparison between the two? Does Reliance need to takeover N18 to acquire some stupid assets of N18? This is as silly as our alleged editors in the media are. That moronery done, KK even made an alarming statement. Since he had not read the court order he screamed “how can we trust court orders”. Who should we trust then? Mahatma Sonia?

Then there was the “demented” Randeep Surjewala of Congress who went on a non-stop rant on Timesnow without allowing anyone else to talk or sticking to the case. Sujrewala claimed Swamy is nobody to interfere in the “private” matters of the Congress. Laughable! A political party scamming a commercial organisation fraudulently is the “private” matter of the Congress?  Worse, he went on to add that NH was founded by MK Gandhi and Nehru to further the ideals of “Secularism” among other things. Where the hell did secularism come into this scam? And I seriously doubt MKGandhi and Nehru were discussing secularism at all. And the third thing is the Congress cry of “vendetta” by BJP through Swamy. This case started during the Congress govt and naturally they wouldn’t want to act on it. Even so, why should the prosecution of an act of corruption and fraud be seen as vendetta? Not one media channel even demanded that Sonia or Rahul appear on their show and answer questions. But these same cowards have no problems hounding others, shoving mics into faces, way-laying people at their homes and vehicles like ordinary thugs. That’s our MSM for you. If this case had come up for hearing before the elections Congress would have got lesser than 44 seats.

The Congress and their members can scream all they want but they do know this is serious trouble for Sonia, Rahul and the other sidekicks involved in these transactions. Other corruption allegations involve ministers and alliance partners which enabled the Gandhis to present themselves as clean. Not so in this case. Besides, every aspect of this case is based on hard documents and not circumstantial evidence. Each transaction in the NH scam appears fraudulent and with an intent to scam. Young India was formed as a “not for profit” company but it hardly seems to be that. Appropriating assets worth 5000 crores of a company with no intention of carrying out its stated business and renting out the property is hardly a “not for profit” mission.

Feeding the NGO mafia:

We were just about getting a hang of some anti-national NGOs and we are surprised with yet another scam-like act of the previous Congress govt. It seems the Congress had realised they were going to lose power and were bent on leaving as much muck behind for the new govt as possible. Here’s a GOI press release from September 2013:

“The Union Cabinet today approved the proposal for setting up of the Bharat Rural Livelihood Foundation (BRLF) as an independent charitable society under the Societies Registration Act, 1860 to facilitate and upscale civil society action in partnership with Government for transforming livelihoods and lives of rural households, with an emphasis on women, particularly in the Central Indian Tribal Region. It will provide financial grants to Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) to meet their human resource and institutional costs for upscaling of proven interventions; invest in institutional strengthening of smaller CSOs and capacity building of professional resources working at the grassroots... Even though BRLF will have an India wide mandate, the initial focus of the organization will be on the Central Indian Tribal Region, centered on blocks having significant tribal population across 170 districts in the States of Odisha, Jharkhand, West Bengal, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Rajasthan and Gujarat. Rs 500 crore will be released for creating the corpus fund of the new Society, in two tranches. The society will be constituted as a partnership between Government on the one hand and private sector philanthropies, private and public sector undertakings (under Corporate Social Responsibility) on the other hand”.

What the hell is anyone to do if the govt itself goes around forming NGOs? Have they concluded all the State govts and Panchayats are useless bodies? Sonia Gandhi’s love for NGOs and activists seems unending. Most of the members of this Bharat Rural Livelihood Foundation (BRLF) are from her pet coterie called the NAC which is now dead. There’s some good advance planning it seems. To put it bluntly, the BRLF is nothing but a “broker” between NGOs and the GOI. It will “funnel” funds to NGOs of its choice (or Sonia’s choice?) across the country (I couldn’t find a website of theirs, if they have any). Who are these people accountable to? And what is the brokerage and other perks that members of this BRLF will enjoy? And under an MOU an amount of 500 crores has been pledged to this “Senior NGO”. Indian Express reports on it with additional information and about the founders of BRLF:

“Thanks to Jairam Ramesh, the Modi government will have to shell out Rs 300 crore — over the next two years — and deal with a society registered in the UPA regime packed with “eminent persons” which include members of Sonia Gandhi’s National Advisory Council. Barely two months before the 2014 Lok Sabha elections were announced, the UPA’s Rural Development Ministry under Ramesh signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Bharat Rural Livelihoods Foundation making it a funding agency for NGOs across the country. And released to it a first tranche of Rs 200 crore in January 2014…  this society was registered in December that year by members of the then National Advisory Council Mihir Shah, Virginius Xaxa and Mirai Chatterjee among others. The other founding signatories include: Nicholas Barla, a social activist associated with the Catholic Church in Odisha; Bihar cadre IAS officer AS Mathew; S Parasuraman, Director of Tata Institute of Social Sciences, and activist Pramathesh Ambastha… The BRLF’s Memorandum of Association allows it to “raise financial resources” even from “international agencies/organizations” apart from other sources like Central or state governments and private sources with the purpose to “provide financial grants to civil society organisations”.

200 crores already paid with great urgency and 300 crores to be paid over the next 2 years. Sounds like the govt created a Greenpeace for itself. It is worse than that if you consider that all the salaries and other expenses of this body will be borne out of public funds. There is only one way to see it. This BRLF is an immoral baby of an outgoing govt with no purpose but to favour the “pet” NGO operators of the Congress and Sonia Gandhi. This immoral act was carried out by none other than Jairam Ramesh who had interesting things to say about NGOs himself:

You can read the whole story about Jairam Ramesh calling many NGOs a “mafia” here. And here is what he exactly said in according to IE’s report of September 25, 2013:

“Our experience with NGOs in some states has not been good. In different states, we have seen that NGOs have become a racket. And this racket has been formed because politicians and NGOs have developed a close association," Ramesh said, adding that most NGOs are either in the name of one or the other politician's wife, son, daughter or some relative. "It has become a mafia," he said, adding that "there are some states like Maharashtra, Gujarat... where some NGOs are doing good work". Ramesh said that it was the strategy of the government to give less importance to NGOs than they used to get earlier. Elaborating further, he said that it was important to work with elected institutions like state governments and gram panchayats. He added that NGOs would be working in those places where the number of these (elected) institutions was less”.

Jairam Ramesh says the above after having formed the BRFL just a few days prior in the same month of September 2013. So it does appear that the BRFL was not created by Ramesh’s conviction but more out compulsion from other “clever” political superiors. If you look at the areas that BRLF has chosen to concentrate on, all of them have state govts and panchayats. So this farce was played out for the pleasure of someone it seems. There is only one way to reverse this. A govt cannot back out of an MOU but it must wind up the NGO (BRLF) itself or its partnership with it. Govt cannot become an NGO. The 200 crores already thrown away should best be accounted for properly and no further amounts should be paid to this “Broker NGO”. Whether it takes an ordinance or any other act there is no way the GOI should fund such NGOs of “fancy” of certain individuals.

Going by both, the National Herald scam and the formation of this NGO broker BRLF, there cannot be any doubt that the Congress party itself is a party of NGO for profits. The cases must be dealt with severely to set precedents so that other govts or parties do not indulge in such corrupt acts. There are many politicians in the ruling BJP also who are connected or involved with some spurious NGOs. They should declare it, withdraw from it or be investigated along with other fraudulent NGOs.