India’s Baba Ramdev gives sketchy account of his assets
Medical doctors examine Indian yoga guru Baba Ramdev during his hunger strike against corruption at his ashram Pitanjali Yogpeeth in Haridwar, some 240 kms from New Delhi on June 9, 2011. To most of his devoted followers, Swami Ramdev is not an anti-corruption campaigner but a yoga teacher blessed with the power to cure disease and offer a better way to live your life.
Baba Ramdev, self-appointed crusader against "black money" (aka hidden income) provided only the barest details in his declaration of the assets and finances of his four (charitable?) trusts, reports the Indian Express.
Clearly, you don't have to be honest to speak the truth. But it's nonetheless significant if Baba is a black sheep. The anti-corruption wave argues that it cannot find an honest man in the judiciary, the legislature or the prime minister's office, yet the cure for all that ails India is a superpowerful and incorruptible ombudsman (to be found on the moon?).
Manmohan Singh has been saying it again and again (though nobody has been convinced). To make a mark against corruption, you not only have to be clean, you have to appear to be clean, and, my own addition, everybody has to believe that you're clean.
Ramdev has not met that standard.
According to the information Ramdev revealed, his four trusts have 4.3 billion rupees in capital from donations and sales of traditional medicines, and they have spent some 7.9 billion rupees on business costs and social service. However, Ramdev's representative gave no details about the companies being run by these trusts or the source of their funds. He said details about the companies can be obtained from the Registrar of Companies, while other details including the Income-Tax returns filed by the trusts could be extracted using the Right to Information Act. “Anybody can seek details from the ROC or through the RTI route,” he said.
Sounds like Ramdev is just as "transparent" as the Central Bureau of Investigation, the judiciary, and all the other branches of government that have resisted calls to open their finances to scrutiny and submit to investigations by the proposed ombudsman's office.