How Congress has patented the ‘zero’: No loss in 2G, no loss in coal scam, no loss in Vadra deals, no loss in National Herald!

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.

Though some scholars also give credit to ancient Babylonians and Mayans for the concept, it is not known if the Indian National Congress party is among the claimants.

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.

“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.

Sibal, who replaced the disgraced A Raja as Telecom minister in UPA 2, attempted to discredit the CAG at a news conference in January 2011 by insisting the government suffered “no loss” by giving away second generation or 2G telecom licences to new players on first-come-first-serve basis in 2008.

Sibal was roundly slammed by the media, analysts, the Opposition and even the Supreme Court for trying to discredit the CAG estimate which was later corroborated to be in tune with actual market potential. The 2015 spectrum auction, subsequently, fetched a record Rs 109,874 crore for the government.

In 2011, Time magazine listed the scam at No.2 on their “Top 10 Abuses of Power” list (just behind the Watergate scandal). Congress’s courtship of zero, however, continued unabated.

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 then Finance minister’s comments came in the wake of the Coalgate (also coal-block allocation scam), when the CAG, in a report tabled in the parliament in August 2012, estimated that private firms are likely to gain Rs 1.86 lakh crore from coal blocks that were allocated to them on nomination basis instead of competitive bidding.

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.

IAC alleged that Vadra’s wealth grew from Rs 50 lakh to over Rs 300 crore in three years. Subsequently, numerous reports have questioned the veracity of the balance-sheets of Vadra-owned companies.

Though the “zero loss” theory was invoked again, this time by Gurgaon district magistrate PC Meena who claimed the Haryana state government did not lose any revenue in the Vadra-DLF land deals, the Justice S N Dhingra Commission, probing alleged irregularities in grant of licences to developers in four villages of Gurgaon by the previous Congress government in Haryana, is set to summon Vadra early in 2016.

The “zero loss” theory has come full circle for Sibal as the Congress party now battles the National Herald case. With the Delhi High Court directing Congress president Sonia Gandhi and vice-president Rahul Gandhi to appear before a Delhi court on 19 December to face allegations that they illegally acquired property worth Rs 5,000 crore belonging to the National Herald newspaper, former Union minister and senior lawyer Sibal has again taken recourse to the “zero loss” to deflect mounting criticism.

Sibal 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. In an interview to The Times of India , Sibal says: “Who has been cheated? No shareholder of AJL has complained, no Congressman has either. Subramanian Swamy, the complainant, belongs to BJP. We would like to know who has been cheated, whose trust has been breached?”

Another Congress lawyer, Abhishek Manu Singhvi, said much the same thing. He told the Economic Times that no one ‘from the Congress or the company’ had complained of having been cheated and questioned why BJP leader Swamy, who had ’no locus standi’ was making the allegations.

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.

Taking on the Congress line that “no one has complained of being cheated”, former law minister Shanti Bhushan on Friday claimed to have been affected by the “wholly illegal” transfer of AJL shares to Sonia-Rahul Gandhi controlled YIL and vowed to challenge the move.

Bhushan said he has inherited 300 AJL shares from his father. “I have initiated the process for substitution of his legal heirs as owners of those shares,” Bhushan was quoted as saying, adding: “I will challenge it in court. This transfer of shares is wholly illegal.”

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.