 Hello and welcome to NewsClick. Today we have with us Paruja Gohadhakutta and we will be discussing the 2G judgment which has come very recently in which a Raja seems to have been exonerated. Paruja, the 2G judgment seems very strange because on a case where the Supreme Court has already opined that there was a violation of the basic principles of equity through which any government property should be alienated, namely in this case the spectrum. This judgment seems to say that not only that criminal intent was not proven or the crime evidence was not strong enough, but it seems almost to have given Raja a clean chit and blamed a whole bunch of people including lack of procedures in the department of telecom. You know and this excludes of course executives of the Reliance Anil Thuramayambani group, Gautam Doshi, Spinda Pippara, Hari Nayat. It includes the promoters of Sworn Telecom, Shahid Usman, Balwa, Vinod Koenka among others. You know and there is a sinister judgment. There has been so much noise. You know Congress has been vindicated. Mr. Raja says I was right. Everybody and his brother is talking about this judgment. I think it's quite important to demystify this judgment. And let's start from the very basics. What after all are we talking about? What is second generation electromagnetic telecom spectrum? It's thin air. You know that. At the end of the day it's a scarce resource. Why? Because it's a finite resource. Across the world and also in India it's allotted by the government. Two particular, four particular uses and my particular companies. In this case private mobile telecom communications companies. This is a public property in as much as it's a scarce resource. Correct. And therefore it has to be alienated with proper procedures for public good. Correct. So because it's a matter of basic issues. The policies. First come, first serve. Was this the appropriate? I would clearly say no. And this is where justice sign is a judgment. Just sort of covers up the issues. It doesn't get into the basic issue. Like why should the government allot a scarce national resource in this manner in the manner in which cinema tickets are sold. First in the queue. The next part of the story is how even the first come first serve process was subverted was manipulated was tweaked. And finally comes the question of criminality. So I think the first part that we need to look at is though justice has given has showered the phrase on the present principle secondary to the prime minister. Mr. Dupir Dhamishta. And Dupir Dhamishta at that point of time happened to be the chairman of the telecom regulatory authority of India. It's a very, very famous paper that he put out at that point of time. Which made things a little ambivalent as to whether certain kinds of spectrum bands should be auctioned and whether it was okay to allot other bands on a first come first serve basis. The ambivalence left a lot of scope for interpretation. Too subsequently. Mr. Mishra repeatedly told the court that no he was not in favour of the manner in which the allotment took place which is first come first serve. And whatever Mr. Rajami is saying. The then prime minister Dr. Manmohan Singh. The then finance minister, the then law minister, all the bureaucrats none of them approved this policy. It was his and he pushed it. So in other words in this intervening 7 year period the market was growing at a very, very rapid pace. Now under the circumstances I don't think it can be under any circumstance it be justified what Mr. Raja did. Today Mr. Raja may claim thanks to him that the price of telecom services to ordinary consumers was low but I think nothing can be justified. Because all this happened despite the fact that the Supreme Court as you rightly pointed out in February 2012 cancelled no less than 212 licences which were controlled by roughly 11 sorry 122 licences controlled by roughly 12 corporate groups. You know this is of course one could argue that the purpose of this two judgments are different. In the case of what the Supreme Court looked at it is a question of whether the licences had been issued on the principles of equity and so on. Let us come first serve system was not the way you should have allocated. Now come to the procedures. Having gone ahead with the procedure what did you do? Between March 2006 and the end of September 2007 in this period of time you had received somewhere in the region of about well 575 applications. Now clearly there was enough spectrum for everybody and everybody knew that you couldn't but how did you go about reducing the number of applicants? What you did you kept quiet and then on the 10th of January 2008 the Department of Telecommunications issues two press releases. The first press release advances the cut of date to 25th of September thereby eliminating many of the applications and reducing the number of applications to 122. What happened that same day was even more pernicious and terrible. You issued another press release at 2.30pm and what did you say? That you have time between 3.30 and 4.30 the same day to give in your pure bank drops running into literally thousands of crores which are materialized out of nowhere. Obviously it means people had prior knowledge but the short point is you had followed a system which was corrupt to the core and it doesn't require a particularly intelligent person policy. Now here is further evidence of what she was saying. They had four parallel counters in which people were given the letters of indent. They had to collect it and based on these letters they had to rush to another place where the sequence determined what was called first to comply. That means who gave in the bank guarantees in what order decide whether they would get the spectrum or not. Now the reggae example of the ADAG group headed by invested 992 crores in this company swan but through a con there by claiming it was not an equity share but the investment was an investor. Even the so-called inter say seniority was done away with two favour particular companies like swan, like your debt, like videocon and the expense of others including Spice Telecom. Now what was truly amazing was that this was not very dented. I mean as if this was not bad enough. What Mr. Raja did was that he bypassed the recommendation. He ignored the recommendation. Not only Manmohan Singh and Chidambaram and the then finance secretary, you know Subbar Rao and the then officer of the, of the, the prime minister's office, Pulok Chatterjee. Incidentally all of them have been castigated very strangely by Judge Saini. Also he's been very, very harsh on Mr. T.S. Mathur who was telecom secretary who retired on the 31st of December 2007, 10 days before the actual allocation took place by which time Mr. Siddharth Bahura had taken over Judge's telecom secretary, the same person who had been environment secretary under Mr. Raja. But the short point that I'm making here is that an important condition, the license condition, was that you could not resell your equity or your equity. This was overruled by Mr. Raja. The result of which Edgelesat paid swan 300, 3217 crore rupees for 44.7% shares. Telenoor paid Unitec 6,210 crore rupees for equity stake of 67.3%. Tata tele-services had a deal with Dokomo of Japan which later went unstuck for very, very different reasons. The short point is, here was procedures. Even if you assume that you go ahead with what I believe was a flawed first-come, first-serve system. You even messed around with those procedures. In fact, what happens is first-come, first-served becomes first to comply in terms of getting spectrum. And as we know, license is really not the issue. Spectrum is the core of the issue because spectrum was bundled with the license. And therefore, Raja's argument that license can be given on first-come, first-served, but spectrum should be given on first to comply. This is not a procedure which had never been followed. This was a big leap to cover up. The first one of which, which was somewhere not very close to what the CBI alleged, was a little over 30,000 crores. The CBI amount was 30,984 crores. The highest which attracted the media attention was 176,000 crores, which was like 30 million dollars. It attracted headlines. It was one of the world's biggest scams, if not the biggest scam, etc. But wait, Mr. Raja eventually was in jail. He was spent 15 months behind bars. Kanimoi, almost six months she spent behind bars. What was Vinod Rai's fault? That he said, this is a presumptive loss. What is a presumptive loss? A loss that is presumed. It is a notional loss. Money, this, that could have come to the government, but did not come to the government. So, he became the villain of the peace and he is still being made to be the villain of the peace. But what is exactly a presumptive loss? It is a notional loss. Yes, Mr. Kapil Simbal was the then minister. He is right. It is a zero loss. Of course there is zero loss, but this is money that could have come, but did not come. Now, why was Mr. Vinod Rai's position subsequently vindicated? After 2010, there have been no less than six rounds of auction of telecommunications spectrum. And the government has received commitments for 356,000 crore worth of funds in this period. So, then Mr. Vinod Rai is right. Maybe you don't agree with 176,000 crore, but certainly the government lost a lot of money. The argument that you are saying that, okay, if you hadn't given spectrum at a lower price, then you wouldn't have been able to give telecom services at a throw away price to everybody. Again, a volatilious argument. You can serve money. Despite all that, the prices continue to come down. And they still have been coming down. So, this is absolutely nothing with Mr. Raja's logic of giving away spectrum for a song for inducting outsiders, so to say, people who had no connection with telecom, ostensibly to break her cartel, all of these arguments. Well, honestly, we must also acknowledge that justice ID is held to be an honorable judge. And we really do not seem to find what is the logic with which he blames everybody else. As you have said, all the officials who tried to stop this policy are castigated in different parts of the judgment. But the ones who led to the loss, and there is no question, as you yourself pointed out, the auction led to huge accretion of money to the extricate by virtue of the licenses and spectrum being sold. And this loss, which is now not a presumptive loss, but a loss that can be seen, all of this is not considered as something for which Mr. Raja should be held accountable. Even if Mr. Saidi finds honorable justice, Saidi finds that he is not criminally accountable. And even if the CBI has done a lousy job, you know, there is one strange issue over here. Manmohan Singh, who certainly was, could be argued is above what happened in the 2G case, also didn't really stop it. He knew what was happening. He wrote various letters, but he didn't really stop this from happening, which he could have as Prime Minister. What explains this? You know, you could not do anything about Mr. Raja's re-appointment for the second term as telecom minister. You know, all the mark is there, thanks to the Radia Conversations, it leaked out. But this rule, yes, Nira-Radia, that's right, the Nira-Radia Conversations. But I want to make a point, which is important. The second UPA government was supported by 14 DMK MPs at one point in time. The number diminished later. So yes, it was a minority government. The Communist Party didn't have a majority. So yes, there were compulsions of coalition politics. But what people conveniently forget to mention is that during the period between May 2006 and May 2011, Mr. Karunanidhi's government, in Chennai, was also a coalition government. And there were no less than 34 members of the Legislative Assembly of Tamil Nadu belonging to the Congress Party, which extended support. In other words, the point I'm making, Dr. Manmohan Singh and Dr. Karunanidhi needed each other as much as each other. So this whole logic that, you know, Dr. Manmohan Singh told Raja to be fair, to be transparent. He couldn't do anything. He was helpless because he didn't listen to it. That's an argument that's not whole water as far as I'm concerned. This is all the time we have for Newsclick today. We'll probably be discussing the 2G case more because this is not going to end here. It's going to go into appeals. It's going to go into arbitration. It's going to be probably suits filed against the government in various places. So we'll be monitoring the 2G case further. Do keep watching Newsclick and do visit our website as well as our YouTube channel.