Zero sum game corruption cases don't seem to be cutting much ice

"Zero loss", Kapil Sibal had thundered when the CAG pegged the loss to Union exchequer at a staggering Rs 1.76 lakh crore due to the 2G scam In 2012, Sibal's fellow traveller in the Congress and another top lawyer, P Chidambaram, made a sensational claim that since coal remains buried under mother earth, there was "no loss" to exchequer if it isn't mined. The concept of zero (sūnya) as nothingness and also as a digit in the decimal place value notation, it is argued, originated in India, presumably in the 5th century.In 2012, Sibal's fellow traveller in the Congress and another top lawyer, P Chidambaram, made a sensational claim that since coal remains buried under mother earth, there was "no loss" to exchequer if it isn't mined. But the way Congress's legal eagles and spokespersons have, over the years, propounded the theory of 'zero' whenever allegations of corruption have surfaced (which is quite frequently), one could be forgiven for thinking that Congress party invented the figure. In a news conference held a week after the CAG report surfaced, Chidambaram said: "If coal is not mined, if it remains buried in mother earth, where is the loss? The loss can arise only once the coal is taken out of mother earth, mined and sold at unacceptable price or value. But if the coal is not mined, where is the loss?"Subsequently, the Supreme Court cancelled 214 out of 218 coal blocks allocated since 1993 and in 2015, state governments earned Rs 80000 crore after auctioning of 11 coal blocks. In October 2012, Arvind Kejriwal and Prashant Bhushan of India Against Corruption (IAC) released documents which showed how Congress president Sonia Gandhi's son-in-law Robert Vadra has acquired land assets in and around the National Capital Region worth hundreds of crores of rupees, sometimes at prices below market value — funded by interest-free loans disbursed to him by DLF and other companies for no apparent reason. ibal said nobody had claimed to have been cheated while nobody could gain from the change in shareholding from Associated Journals Limited (AJL) to Young Indian Limited (YIL) because it was a charitable company under the Companies Act. From the looks of it, the three-pronged Congress strategy of fighting the legal battle in court, holding the Parliament to ransom and turning an order passed in a court of law into a political blame game by alleging political vendetta against the Prime Minister is likely to result in the very thing it has courted so assiduously over the years and which ancient India may rightfully claim to have invented: Zero. Try as the Congress might though, "zero" has so far proven to be a rather tricky suitor. It ditched the Congress during 2G and Coalgate and indications are, it may do so again.

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