The Bank Debtor and Lawbreaker Vijay Mallya Affair

Events relating to Vijay Mallya, Rajya Sabha MP and criminal rolled into one, that go back to the first few days of March 2016 have acquired special significance now because of revelations of departure from the truth as well as the extent of assistance he was able to get in order to flee India. What really constitutes a crime and who can be called a criminal and who cannot have long remained controversial matters in India. But things are changing towards more egalitarian and just attitudes, and it has become fairly common for even lawmakers to be hauled up for wrongdoing and for their unlawful actions to be bluntly called crimes. Vijay Mallya got to be better known as a bank debtor and lawbreaker than as an MP ever since he managed to wheedle a consortium of banks to lend him Rs 9,000 crore which he had no intentions of repaying. The common man in India will find no justification for a consortium of banks to lend such a huge sum of money to someone whose credentials as a defaulter had become fairly well known after the collapse of his Kingfisher Airlines. But huge loans that make repayment seem impossible to have become far more common than one might have expected. Not very long ago there was another massive bank loan of over Rs 12,000 crore paid to one Nirav Modi and his uncle. Not surprisingly, these huge loans given from public money are seen as favours done by senior bank officials who are apparently immune from the fears of responsibility and punishment.

The loan of Rs 9,000 crore paid to Vijay Mallya has acquired some significance at this point of time because of the inconsistencies about a meeting between Vijay Mallya and Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley that took place on March 1, 2016. Finance Minister Arun Jaitley has done everything possible to give the impression that the meeting between him and Vijay Mallya took place in the corridors of Parliament and it was a brief one-sentence interaction where Mallya had apparently said, “I am making an offer of settlement,” to which Arun Jaitley’s curt reply was that there was no point talking to him and that he must make offers to his bankers. In a statement refuting Mallya’s claim that he was making an offer of settlement, Arun Jaitley said, “The statement is factually false in as much as it does not reflect truth.” Jaitley also referred to Vijay Mallya’s earlier “bluff offers” of settlement. However, Jaitley has two far more pressing responsibilities just now. One is the need to convincingly rebut the statement made by P. L. Punia, a Congress MP of the Rajya Sabha and former principal secretary to the Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister on Thursday to the effect that he saw the Finance Minister and the liquor baron together for 15 to 20 minutes in a corner of the Central Hall of Parliament a day before Mallya fled the country. The other is to explain to the nation how a criminal like Mallya who has defaulted on repayment of a loan of Rs 9,000 crore to a consortium of banks is allowed to leave the country at his own sweet will. On March 2, 2016, banks to which Mallya owed Rs 9,000 crore moved a tribunal in Bangalore for recovering the dues. On the same day, Mallya left for London without any indication that any serious effort had been made to prevent him from leaving India. Earlier, Mallya had been unable to leave the country because of a strong Look Out Notice for him at airports. Mallya then went to New Delhi and apparently met someone powerful enough to change the Notice from blocking his departure to merely reporting his departure. This will continue to happen with a whole lot of criminals with connections in high places making a mockery of the laws of the land, that become totally ineffectual with lawbreaking lawmakers. We, therefore, demand that the present dispensation of making no separate provisions for lawbreaking lawmakers be strictly followed so that lawmakers are constantly reminded that they are no different from common citizens when it comes to abiding by the laws that they make for others.