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Junketing at tax-payers' expense?

By Hasan Suroor

LONDON MAY 10. With temperatures soaring in India, Ministers, MPs and an assortment of VIPs and their families are headed for London for conveniently-timed conferences, seminars and round table meetings — all fully paid junkets, with publicity guaranteed, courtesy Indian journalists based here. The Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission, K.C. Pant — accompanied by his wife and son — has just finished co-chairing a three-day India-U.K. Round Table whose usefulness itself can be an interesting topic for a round table. And those waiting to catch a flight to London include some big-hitters in the Vajpayee Cabinet such as the Disinvestment Minister, Arun Shourie, the Law Minister, Arun Jaitley, the Foreign Minister, Yashwant Sinha, and the Information and Broadcasting Minister, Ravi Prasad.

Then there is a 12-member parliamentary delegation, led by Praful Patel, due next week; and, two days later, we will have Ashwini Kumar helpfully described by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office as a "senior advocate" of the Supreme Court.

They are all, of course, on official business: Mr. Patel and his fellow travellers to "strengthen parliamentary links between the parliamentary forums of India and Britain" and Mr. Kumar to "strengthen parliamentary, legal, business and cultural links" between the two countries.

Indeed, this was also the noble mission of Mr. Pant's round table: "to facilitate high-level civil society dialogue between India and the U.K. on issues of mutual interest and to suggest fresh measures to enrich and strengthen bilateral cooperation".

This was the sixth meeting of the round table and the recommendations and "communiqué" issued at the end of it had an uncanny resemblance to the ones we were treated last year. Mr. Pant, who came to the press conference without other delegates but with his wife and son in tow, spoke in officialese for most part — "multilateralism", India's "strong economic fundamentals", "mechanisms" to follow up previous recommendations and "bilateral'' relations. He was hard put to enumerate any concrete achievements of this bi-annual event, funded by the two countries' taxpayers. In coming weeks, there would be more of the same. No wonder, the one season that Indian diplomats in Western countries dread the most is summer.

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