Like every scam, the ripoff by “diamantaire” Nirav Modi and his uncle Mehul Choksi, or as Narendra Modi affectionately calls him “Mehul bhai”, is following a familiar trajectory.
Upper-class chutzpah. Middle-class kvetching. World-class whataboutery. Third-class coverup. And Monday morning quarterbacking by the business media which, as usual, did not break this story.
Raids have taken place. Token arrests have now been made. Passports have been “suspended”. Ravi Shankar Prasad’s cavernous nostrils have enlarged. And Arun Jaitley’s know-it-all face has scowled, promising quick action.
Soon, it will all be forgotten—and we will have to return to the no-longer-mysterious “death” of Judge Loya. And the even more suspicious Rafale deal. 2019 is still some distance away; ‘bhakts’ can be assured of further discomfiture.
But we make it easier for the scamsters and their nationalist enablers by “moving on”.
Punjab National Bank is India’s second largest public sector bank after SBI. It received vigilance awards three years in a row. How could lowly clerks and managers have swung a scam of this scale without an OK from higher up?
My friend Lokesh of “Friends Men’s Parlour”—whose cricket insights beat Sunil Gavaskar, Ravi Shastri and Sanjay Manjrekar combined—took a Rs 10 lakh loan with an EMI of Rs 8,500.
He has a simple question for finance minister Arun Jaitley who is now vainly trying to pass the blame on to RBI and PNB’s top management: how come PNB starts calling me well before my EMI deadline?
Why didn’t they call ‘Chhota’ Modi?
Or Mehul bhai?
Moral of the story: You may deflect a bored middle-class’s attention but the salt of India’s earth, who have had their lives ruined by demonetisation and Aadhaar, won’t forget.
churumuri 
Rev
Humble Pranams
1 Banks do not give ack for Adhar
2 They do not inform charges for their services
3 Printing Machines with stickers on Passbooks have become white elliphants
ETC—— LPG subsidy goes to wrong accounts
Regards
Motwani 75+
Love All, Serve All
>
LikeLike
It is more than a week since we have come to know about this scandal. Still only few lower level officials have been caught. High level officials and leaders who must be behind this day light robbery have been untouched. Either they have been directly involved by giving their support or recommending the loans. Or they have been derelict in their duties of ensuring honest dealings by these public sector banks.
No one talks of the original sin of privatizing the banks by Indira Gandhi. Purpose of the privatization as claimed by her was to make it easier for poor to get loans and to have more control over the banking sector? When the original sin is pointed out there are some argue it is a knee jerk reaction.
How about the role of the media? Have they tried to find out how did Mehul Bhai succeed to be one of the billionaires? What lessons our MBA students can learn from his rise from such “rapid success’?
How diid Mehul Bhat and his family managed to escape from India like Mallya and the other Modi of Cricket club? With so many agencies supposed to be monitoring corruption, how did this happen?
When will we be able to get the real facts behind this latest sordid drama of the rich and the connected taking all of us for a ride? Will media be interested in exposing it?
LikeLike
Sir,
Addressing a person by his christened name and suffixing a “bhai” to it is a normal practice among Gujaratis. Even a youngster can do so to an elder without being seen as disrespectful. It signifies no special affinity or affection.
For women, it is “ben”.
Except that in some parts of Saurashtra, a surname is used and a bhai appended.
In Maharashtra, calling people by a surname, sans a honorific not disrespectful. You can get away without raising an eyebrow, were you to be 35, and Sharad Pawar twice that and a tad more, addressed him as Sharadrao regardless whether the christened name had a rao built into it.
Mahesh Vijapurkar
LikeLike
well Aadhaar Nilekani and Murthy have each a sea facing apartment ( atleast 20-25 Crores ) along with Vedanta Agarwal in the same Samudra where Nirav has 6.
LikeLike
Wonder whether NiMo, Mallya and a host of others ever filled ‘KYC’ ( Know your customer) forms or seen before they were granted thousands of crores by the bankers. There have been cases if the person who takes even much smaller loans in lakhs and defaults the guarantor is put in jail. This happened to one of the leading TV directors of Kannada serials who himself narrated this incident on TV. India is NPA- ridden while bankers and looters are in tango!
LikeLike