Geneva/New Delhi: you work for hard money for 10 hours a day, but it evaporates into rolls of printed paper, not worth its weight in gold and silver. Then you transfer it to Swiss banks, Bermuda, Mauritius, St.Kitt’s, Liechtenstein, or Timbuktu.
Are you happy now? You have evaded a national Govt., its Tax department, and cheated millions (of rupees) in shares, stocks, sale of companies, any sale for profits, and you go out to hide that rare income, running into billions of rupees.
You cannot have or build underground treasury vaults, so you transfer the excess earnings selfishly, to foreign hideout, country clubs and safe deposit lockers in ‘yes’ bank, or ‘no’ Bank, for fun, to evade taxes, cuts, inflation or loot.
It is your own loot, but you do not want others. to loot you. You end up in a melt-down, economic recession, inflation and price crashes.
The money you had saved for monsoon days, does not help you when you need it in winter, because you cannot do anything openly.
And, one day you are caught like Rupert Murdoch hacking at other people’s private lives, or end up as Suresh Kalmadi losing his memory in Tihar jail. Is it worth the trouble?
Indians, a report says, may have 2.5 billion US dollars or Rs11,000 crores abroad, in Swiss banks. Sounds like too small an amount, when you discover Jayalalithaa’s hidden boxes of treasures, or the six vaults of Lord Anantha Padmanabha Swami in that southern most city of Kerala, or the valuables found in Yajur Mandir/Whitefield and other residences of late Satya Saibaba recently, or in Tirupathi temple coffers.
Here, the mighty strength of economic India lies in its religious muscles, developed at the cost of millions of hankering devotees of God or God men.
Chandra swami does not mind paying a penalty of Rs.9 crores! We do not know what Ratan Tata, or Mukesh/Anil Ambani, are doing to hide their wealth, and how they will use what is theirs.
The Swiss National Bank in its first disclosure over 60 years, has stated last week in Geneva, that the quantum of unaccounted (black) money held in various Swiss banks by patriotic, god-fearing, nationally proud rotten Indians at heart of 21st century, as deposits, stood at about 2.50 billion (Rs11,000 crores) at the end of 2010, with interest counted on them.
2.10 billion dollars stood as savings and institutional deposits. It does not fill the belly’s of over 60 crores of Indians who are hungry and who face depression daily incites and small towns.
Drinking liquor or taking drugs and cigars does not cure this disease. What we are at, is Adharma, that which cannot be sustained or maintained.
All the wealth will come crashing down in heaps, like landslides of coastal monsoon in India, or as Tsunami effects felt in eastern Japan in 2011.