Rotting activities of India and Dubai angle to it

Though this doesn't come as a surprise, it is saddening to know the amount of high-handed corruption prevalent in foreign policies of our country. None have the balls in this kaangress government to take up measures to clean the system and act truthfully in the interest of our countrymen. A spineless prime minister, an italian mafiosa filling her swiss accounts her mother-in-law left and bunch of criminals in the government. And they dare to portray India as an economic power.
http://rajeev2004.blogspot.com/2010/04/indian-politicians-and-gulf-money.html

The Telegraph, April 28, 2010

THE EDGE OF A PRECIPICE

Everything that is rotten in India has a Dubai angle

K.P. NAYAR

The sleaze from the Indian Premier League's gutter, which has significantly diminished the country's political class and others in authority — such as the chairman and managing director of Air India, Arvind Jadhav, who willingly converted the airline into a private carrier for the IPL — is a warning that for the Indian State, Dubai continues to be a curse.

My first direct exposure as a young journalist to the depth and range of corruption and wrong-doing in the Indian government was in Dubai, where I lived in the 1980s. I used to frequent the office of the owner of a big bank in Dubai. His chief hatchet man, his CEO of sorts — although such fancy corporate designations were unknown in Dubai then — was an Indian from Kerala, who constituted my access to the bank owner, a multi-billionaire businessman whose sprawling global business empire included everything from hotels and car dealerships to newspapers and real estate.

It is only an incidental aside to the main narrative of this column that at that time, the bank owner, whose family had huge business and personal stakes in Pakistan, was providing refuge to an exiled Benazir Bhutto in one of his three houses off London's Mayfair and simultaneously running businesses under various names for the head of one of the 22 families which controlled 66 per cent of Pakistani industry and owned 87 per cent of that country's banking and insurance prior to nationalization of those by Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. While Benazir was running her campaign against General Zia-ul-Haq from this Dubai businessman's London property — where I first met her — the irony is that the man for whom the same entrepreneur was running benami ventures was one of the most powerful ministers in General Zia's cabinet.

The general manager of the bank owned by the Dubai businessman was an amiable Scotsman, who was totally trusted by the owner to look after his wide-ranging interests. One day, the general manager was summoned by the owner and told that a fairly large sum of money needed to be withdrawn from the account of 'Mr Crow' and that the Scotsman should deliver the money to the owner. It would be collected by 'Mr Crow' whom the owner would be seeing in the next two days while he was visiting the Emirate.

I sat quietly in a corner of the room, sipping gahwa, a ritual coffee preparation in Arab communities, and wondering who 'Mr Crow' may be. I did not have to wait long to discover his identity: 'Mr Crow' was a very senior civil servant who later became India's foreign secretary.

__________________ read the original post

Shame on all of us for keeping this government alive.