Before and beyond the Presidential reference

The Supreme Court (SC) clarified that policy making is an executive prerogative! How obvious answers to inane questions came centre stage, while dishonesty lost centre stage, is one revealing side-show.

The PIL petitioners pursuing the 2G case had no help on facts from those in the know. Well-intentioned but alone, they correctly inferred that the stampede for spectrum pointed to shocking hanky-panky. It is here they lost the plot, mistaken as the CAG (Comptroller and Auditor General of India) had been, in assuming that this was because spectrum is inherently priceless. Had they tested this hypothesis at the altar of facts, they would discover that the same spectrum at the same price went begging for years.

They would figure that in self-respecting scams, the scamming comes first and file records are created later. They would stumble upon the uncanny timings and findings of certain spectrum committees. And if they picked the right clues and dropped the red herrings, they might conclude very differently that the 2G case was really about snatching the spectrum of running businesses, and diverting to others, creating an artificial scarcity and price arbitrage.

Only then would they understand that spectrum is neither inherently worthless nor inherently priceless. When allocation was rule-based, spectrum was sufficient, affordable, productive, and the nation prospered. Deliberately mis-allocated, spectrum turned scarce, unaffordable, unproductive, and eventually the nation pays.

The SC this February came down upon wrong-doing. Mistakenly, in my opinion, based on the PIL line, the court attacked a symptom rather than the root cause, and cancelled all spectrum allocated on one particular day. The message was chilling! But the impact unwittingly was random. Some wrong-doers were untouched, some innocents got executed. Again, in my assessment, one carelessly worded sentence in the 2G judgment about the imperative of auction, robbed of its context, led to the wholly unnecessary first five questions of the Presidential reference.

Meanwhile, the government, in a volte face, is slashing the quantity of spectrum the court has asked to be auctioned, and erecting a reserve price barrier, which the court has never asked, all to somehow rig a staggering auction price.

Whether this is sensible, whether right, whether levelling the field across the sector will leave a standing sector, whether the national conscience sits easy with corporate citizen fall guys, are questions with no one to ask or to answer.

 

The author is an industry expert