Anything that fugitive and defaulter Vijay Mallya does and says is subjected to intense scrutiny. He may not be the Indian banking system's biggest defaulter but he is one of them. He is certainly one of the most flamboyant and unrepentant of them. So when he said something outside a London court, everyone's interest was piqued. When that something involved Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, that interest became positively avid!
When questioned by media persons outside a London court, Mallya said that he had met the finance minister before he left or rather absconded from India. He also said that he had told the FM about his plans to leave for London.
According to Jaitley, there was no formal meeting except for the one time when Mallya approached him in parliament. He clarified that there was no offer or document received; that he had dismissed Mallya’s supposed offer as being empty words.
So clearly here are two men telling a story very differently. Whom should we believe? One view is that the choice is clear: the word of the nation's finance minister is far more credible and trustworthy than a fraud. Mallya is a man who defrauded his own employees, decamped while owing thousands of crores and is currently thumbing his nose at the Indian authorities, living a life of luxury while safely ensconced abroad; therefore his word can have no credibility.
This tweet seems to indicate a certain reluctance to repose faith in the utterances of a government that has faced several accusations in the recent past and has refused to respond satisfactorily to those accusations.
Since the ‘meeting’ between Jaitley and Mallya was in full public view; possibly captured on CCTV, there is no dispute on this front from either side. However, Congress’s P L Punia has this to say; that the meeting was a long one, not just some passing thing.
Now if this didn’t make it all complicated enough this tweet from June was dug up and gained currency suddenly, thickening the plot further. This tweet by a member of the ruling BJP indicates that the lookout notice issued for Mallya was downgraded at some point. The tweet indicates that this is what make it possible for Mallya to flash his diplomatic passport (then a sitting BJP Rajya Sabha MP) and escape abroad.
Of course the opposition lost no time in calling for the FM to explain the situation or to step down. Soon this hashtag was trending too.
It was only a matter of time before the memes started. Rab ne bana di Jodi, says this one!
This one alludes to another popular Bollywood movie. So the meme-meisters will have their fun for a while, we shall all outrage and take sides for a brief moment. Will anything come out of this? Will Mallya and the other absconders ever be brought to book? I have little hope of that happening. In India, the rich and the powerful always manage to get away…literally with murder... no matter what the ruling dispensation.
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