for the first big scam of the 2 UPA regimes to come out into the open. But actually, those scams were in the making for much longer. The 2G scam actually had its genesis with Pramod Mahajans (NDA I) act of discretionary allocation of frequencies in 2002. It took a long 11 years for that decision and the acts following immediately afterwards to snowball into the gigantic loot that Raja of UPA II planned (but could not quite carry out).
An even larger scam has been in the making and actually been running for a very long time. This is the writing off of NPAs owed to public sector banks by big croxny capitalists that have been and are in a cozy give-some-and-take immensely-more relationship with the political party ruling at the centre !
But this scam is marked by two distinctive features that were absent in the 2G and the coal scams. These are
1. While the 2G and the coal scams are about 15 and 9 years old from conception, the ill secured loans (that led to the creation of NPAs) are much older. Such illegal advances from PSU banks to croxny capitalists started as a trickle during the days of Indira Gandhi as PM and grew steadily through Congress, UPA and NDA governments until they became essentially a massive flow of wealth from the commoners hands to those of croxny capitalists. Subsequently, NDA I under the now very benign looking Vajpayee began the actual transfer of such liabilities from the banks to the exchequer, thus completing the circle of loot.
2. The second difference between the NPA write off scam and the 2G/coal scams is that while the latter has a relatively clearer trail left behind by the facilitators of the loot (the ministers and other members of the executive), the NPA write offs can more easily be argued off with the excuse of having to recapitalise the banks for the sake of the deposit holders in those banks (the general public). The illegal advances of huge amounts of money made to croxny capitalists that end up as NPAs in the hands of the banks can also be explained more easily away before auditors as failures of perception and judgement of banking officials !
