What A Way To Help Uti

The storm over the Unit Trust of India broke when the Union finance minister was out of the country attending the Fund-Bank annual meeting. So, in a way, everyone has been waiting for him to get back and provide a detailed and definitive explanation of what has been happening and hopefully some solace for the future. In the event, it is questionable as to which is the greater setback, the UTI fiasco or the finance minister's reaction to it.

Yashwant Sinha could have legitimately blamed today's developments on the policies of his predecessors. He could have drawn attention to how successive Congress governments had helped their cronies in business through the vehicle of the enormous corpus of Unit-64 and added how the matters were not set right even during United Front rule. And he could have ended by dramatically declaring how he proposed to clean up the Augean stable -- put Unit-64 on a transparent and viable footing. Instead, he has quite unbelievably blamed it on foreign conspiracy, of how selected foreign institutional investors sold the stock market short and brought down equity prices, the same way in which these gnomes of the West had sold the Southeast Asian countries down the drain. But have no fear, he added. UTI or Unit-64, its flagship scheme, cannot fail. How can it? Can the Reserve Bank fail, can the State Bank of India fail? No they cannot, ergo neither can UTI.

The illogicality and naivet