New Delhi: The BJP government has fallen into the ditch it had painstakingly dug for the Congress on the issue of bringing black money from abroad.

After making the much publicised election promise of bringing black money from abroad and revealing the names of the culprits “within 100 days of coming to power”, the government is now running for cover, not knowing where to hide.

The Supreme Court has further embarrassed the government by rejecting the Attorney General’s argument that the full list of about 700 Indians with illegal foreign bank accounts cannot be disclosed until investigations are completed and charges framed. After the SC’s stern intervention, the government has had to submit the full list in a sealed cover to the apex court. The list will also be provided to the SC-directed SIT, formed recently to investigate all aspects of black money generation in India and abroad.

The SC order, deeply embarrassing for the government, has been publicly welcomed by BJP’s own senior party leaders like Subramaniam Swamy. Even Ram Jethmalani, who had campaigned on the black money issue, has said only the Supreme Court can be depended on to deliver justice.

Last week finance minister Arun Jaitley told a TV channel that some names would cause the Congress party embarrassment. As it turned out, one Goa mining company, whose name was made public, has funded the BJP nine times since 2004. It has given the BJP twice as much funding as the Congress. So was Jaitley aware of all the facts, one wonders!

This, in fact, is the crux of the whole black money issue. The Goa based mining company gave just over Rs.1 crore to the BJP.

But there are much bigger fish in this game who generate billions of dollars of black money every year and regularly fund the cash

component of election funding for the bigger national parties. Will the BJP government ever bring the big companies, which fund elections with pure cash, under investigation? Most unlikely.

Therefore, an elaborate charade of bringing back black money is being played by successive governments. These days a new mythology is being created– that of leaders who are “personally clean” even though they run organisations which get thousands of crores of slush funds.

This “personal cleanliness” of individual leaders is the most bogus narrative and this new theme being propagated by the faithful because there is a yearning for clean politics in a system which perpetrates its very opposite.

So where does the BJP-led crusade against black money go from here? It goes nowhere, really. For now the list of about 700 allegedly illegal account holders is lying in a sealed cover with the Supreme Court and the Special Investigation Team headed by a retired judge.

The SIT, under the apex court’s monitoring, will further probe the individuals named as owners of these accounts. Most of them are businessmen, and bit players at that. The SIT will have to establish the illegality of these accounts and frame charges over the next few months. The names cannot be revealed before that.

The government told the Supreme Court that it will become difficult for India to sigh future treaties on information sharing with other countries if the names are revealed before gathering evidence and making out a reasonably foolproof case.

Surely Arun Jaitley knew this legality when the BJP, as opposition, was screaming from the rooftops promising to publicly produce all the names and the money in their accounts within 100 days of coming to power.

For now, the BJP has got trapped in its own hyped-up rhetoric around black money. Its initial bravado about revealing some names was based on a list of account holders in HSBC, Switzerland. This list was stolen by an HSBC employee on a particular day in 2006. So the accounts reveal the status of funds on just that particular day. Not before or after that date. In a sense, this list has very sketchy and inadequate information.

There is no way the government can come up with anything substantive in the next one year. As for the much publicised $500 billion of black money allegedly lying in tax havens, even the Sangh Parivar faithfuls are becoming increasingly skeptical about it.

In effect ,the BJP has truly made a mockery of its much publicised election commitment that it will reveal the identities of all Indians who have black money stashed in illegal accounts abroad.

The ultimate irony,of course, is that finance minister Arun Jaitley’s position before the Supreme Court on black money is the same as that of UPA’s. Jaitley is now saying India can’t resort to any “adventurism” while dealing with international treaty obligations on information sharing. This is exactly what Pranab Mukherjee and P.Chidambaram had been repeating ad nauseam as finance ministers under the UPA regime.

Meanwhile, Arun Jaitley will now have to deal with another 1000 page report on black money brought out by the finance ministry’s think tank NIPFP.

This report had been submitted to Jaitley as well as the SIT on black money. Broadly the report says the black money generated in India for over two decades since 1980 ranges from 45% to 70% of GDP every year. That puts annual black money generation within India at over $ 1 trillion or close to $ 3 billion a day! The SITwill try to probe sectors where black money is being produced and report to SC. SC may in turn put pressure on the government, which will become a new headache for the NDA.

The best way out for Jaitley is to first attack domestic generation of black money so that the incremental bleeding is controlled.

Later India must try to do special agreements with foreign governments to get its legitimate share of tax on black money held by Indians abroad. Britain has done this with the Swiss government in the past.

Black money held by British citizens in foreign accounts were taxed at the current rate and handed over to the UK exchequer. India must decide whether it wants its share of tax from foreign havens which can then be distributed among the poor as promised by the BJP. That will be the most logical course to follow.