Friday, December 09, 2016

A conspiracy theory or a dangerous conspiracy?

An article by Shelley Kasli in Great Game India says that Pakistan prints counterfeit Indian notes on paper supplied by a British firm known as De la Rue. Apparently, sometime in 2009-10 the CBI discovered counterfeit currency notes in banks along the India-Nepal border, which were said to have been supplied by the Reserve Bank of India. Following this the CBI raided vaults of the RBI. "What the CBI found in the vaults of RBI were huge cache of counterfeit Indian currency lying in the denomination of 500 and 1000, the same counterfeit currency smuggled by the Pakistan intelligence agency ISI into India," writes Ms Shelley. Asking why our banknotes were being printed abroad a parliamentary committee noted,"The Committee expresses its strong resentment over such an unprecedented, unconventional and uncalled for measure."   De la Rue and a German company, Louisenthal were blacklisted after this episode. This is unbelievable stuff. 1. India has a huge paper industry so why are we unable to manufacture our own paper 2. There should have been a binding contract with the companies not to supply similar paper to any other country and India should have bought the entire production and 3. It would have been much better to have gone through the respective governments who would make sure that the companies stuck to the contract. That De la Rue used be one of the Crown Agents during the British empire is not relevant. The owner of De la Rue, Roberto Giori was on Flight 814 which was hijacked by Islamic terrorists in 1999. As we know the response to the hijacking by the  BJP government of the time was shamefully shambolic. Former Chief of the Research and Analysis Wing, which passes for India's intelligence agency, AS Dulat, has written about the hijacking in his book but fails to explain the presence of RAW agent, SBS Tomar on board the hijacked plane. It is known that the plane could have been stopped at Amritsar Airport where commandos could have stormed the aircraft if negotiations failed. Was Tomar on the flight only to protect Roberto Giori, was that the reason why the plane was not stormed and did India pay a ransom for his release? We do not know. But we remember Warren Andersen and Union Carbide. De la Rue apparently supplied passports and currency to Chechen terrorists. Without giving any reason the ban on the company has been lifted. We could have dismissed the whole article as conspiracy theory but yesterday a Delhi politician, Dilip Pandey asked why De la Rue is supplying banknote paper again. When Union Finance Minister, Arun Jaitley labeled it a "false campaign" Pandey tweeted,"Please check your facts and go through RBI's BRBNMPL website first. Del la Rue is working with Mysore printing press" We are suffering note-ban while the government is printing banned notes. Charming.

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