Just when the world has been seismically shaken by the Enron mega-scandal, we are being treated to sermons on the virtues of boundless privatisation and deregulation. As globalising corporates drool at the mouth, the government has announced the first real ‘big-ticket’ sale — not just of public sector hotels, but of perfectly well-managed, robustly healthy, ‘core’ infrastructure companies.

Enron isn’t just the greatest bankruptcy in American history. It concentrates all that is sleazy, greedy and unethical in the business world. Potentially, it is global capital’s Watergate. As MIT economist Paul Krugman says, “Enron, not September 11, will come to be seen as the greater turning point in US society.”

Enron flourished on the deregulation of the energy sector, bribed its way to dizzying heights, cooked its books to pump up its image, and yet failed disastrously. Enron wasn’t just No. 7 in the Fortune-500 list, with a turnover equalling almost a third of India’s GDP. It became a global ‘New Economy’ icon, its managers glorified as “magicians of the free-market age”.

Enron isn’t just there. It is here too, the promoter and 65 per cent shareholder of Dabhol Power Company, our largest foreign-investment project, our own electrical White Elephant which has all but bankrupted one of our richest electricity boards.

DPC’s gold-plated power, blessed by an obnoxious purchase agreement violative of ‘market principles’, and by the Centre’s ‘sovereign guarantee’, is also a story of corporate greed, shameless bribery, and years of lobbying by the White House and the National Security Council — reduced at one point, says The Washington Post, to a “concierge service” between Kenneth Lay and Brajesh Mishra.

More than 15 different committees in the US are investigating Enron. Many of the 250-plus Senators and Congressmen, who received Enron’s ‘donations’, are returning them. Surely, we need at least one Parliamentary Committee to investigate just how the DPC contract was signed, and guaranteed — during the 1996 13-day Vajpayee government — without competitive bidding, in violation of statutory clearances, and with an unconscionable (31 to 52 per cent) rate of return mocking at all norms of ‘efficiency’.

Our policy-shaping elite, with its ostrich-like attitude, just won’t admit that the public has been defrauded by Enron and DPC; that accountability, even market logic, has been violated; that the DPC power purchase contract is bad in law and must be thoroughly, radically renegotiated. This attitude, coupled with deviousness and duplicity, is now evolving into the Great Indian Ostrich Trick.

Take the issue of extradition of wanted criminals. To have 20 of them handed over by Pakistan, India has prepared massively for war, mobilising seven lakh troops at a cost that will total Rs 4,000 crore in three weeks. But the principal accused wanted for 18 years in the world’s worst case of corporate negligence, Warren Anderson, hasn’t even been served a warrant. The Bhopal gas disaster has killed some 12,000 innocent people, and maimed 100,000 for life — numbers that bear comparison with terrorism’s toll.

The government has failed to honour the Supreme Court’s directive to bring Anderson to trial. But it has honoured Keshub Mahindra, ‘Accused Number Two’ in the Bhopal criminal case, with a Padma Bhushan. Mahindra, chairman of Union Carbide’s Indian subsidiary, was charged with culpable homicide not amounting to murder. The Padma Bhushan grievously insults public decency.

The Ostrich Trick allows our elite to censor whatever is unpalatable, so long as it concerns them — people whose homes are demolished to build shopping malls and McDonald’s, who are displaced for ‘development’ — a total of 35 million since Independence — and who are forced to sell their kidneys or eat mango-kernels to survive.

Take the Narmada Sardar Sarovar dam, whose once-frozen construction was permitted by the Supreme Court beyond the height of 90 metres. The court’s judgment has been widely criticised for evading key issues: human rights of the displaced, and the environment. But it at least mandates strict adherence to the rehabilitation and resettlement norms of the Narmada Tribunal award: further construction can take place only after the R&R is complete six months prior to the raising of the height and submergence.

Now Madhya Pradesh, where the oustees would be settled, has repeatedly sworn affidavits that there’s no land for R&R; it doesn’t exist.

But suddenly, Chief Minister Digvijay Singh on January 24 assured Vajpayee and Gujarat’s Narendra Modi that enough land would be made available.

The land hasn’t materialised. A political deal has. Modi must contest a byelection to remain CM. Raising the dam’s height to 95 and then 100 metres will be declared a ‘triumph’ for his rich farmer constituency which has been misled into believing that Sardar Sarovar is a magic wand, the key to unbounded prosperity. Singh will take 35,000 vulnerable people in the Narmada Valley for a rough ride. Meanwhile, 3,200 families, already displaced at 90 m height, are yet to be resettled.

In return for the non-existent land, Singh will receive Gujarat’s clearance for a pipeline to the Bina refinery, which passes through a wildlife sanctuary. So much for the environment — and the people! Yet the Narmada Control Authority’s R&R and environment sub-groups are set to approve the displacement.

This kind of ‘development’, like Enron’s Dabhol, or Argentina’s ‘free market’ paradigm, spells destruction, destitution and economic servitude for vast numbers. Whatever it might do for the top one-twentieth of the population, it is incompatible with political democracy and public welfare.