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corporate control met with innumerable resistances; and the engineers often had to yield in the teeth of stout opposition. By the mid-2000s, the Internets architecture had been shaped by the whims and obsessions of powerful governments in the United States, China, and Europe they write. Recognising the commercial potential of this technology, as well as the risk of contending with the anarchy of information in the public domain, governments stepped in to assert their power legally, administratively, politically and culturally. As we are currently witnessing in the case of Assange, the governments legal p owers of coercion their way of punishing subversion remain formidable. Equally important, even if they are unable to exert direct control over internet companies, governments are adept at arm-twisting l ocal internet service providers the intermediaries or target consumers, in order to drive information, inimical to their i nterests, out of the public domain. Governments, democratic and totalitarian, have put in place different tools to

draw maximum mileage political, economic and strategic out of cyber techno logy, as well as to filter out information that can potentially hurt them on all these counts. The Chinese government, for instance, has created one of the most sophisticated systems of information barriers, which filter out information (ibid: 92-93). In addition, the government also frequently cracks down on subversive bloggers, closely policing internet cafes. The Chinese government has shown a keen interest to stay ahead in technological innovations; in fact, it is now using the medium to promote an aggressive nationalism and an equally aggressive campaign against the United States and Japan. This latest round of bitter strife between WikiLeaks and governments across the world has underlined the multiple complexities inherent in issues of turf/content in the new media. Notwithstanding their uneasiness over large chunks of infor mation put out in the alternative media, governments as well as economic entities, including corporations are maximising the

benefits of rapidly expanding new media. In the days to come the new media will be an even more contested terrain, caught between the tugs and pulls of territoriality and an imagined borderless cyberspace, between control by governments and corporations and autonomy of expression.
References
Goldsmith, Jack and Tim Wu (2006): Who Controls the Internet? Illusions of a Borderless World (New York: Oxford University Press). Hassan, Robert and Julian Thomas (2006): Introduction in Robert Hassan and Julian Thomas (ed.), The New Media Theory Reader (England: Open University Press), p xvii-xxvii. Hurwitz, Roger (2003): Who Needs Politics? Who Needs People? The Ironies of Democracy in Cyberspace in Henry Jenkins and David T horburn (ed.), Democracy and New Media (Cam bridge: MIT Press), 101-12. Jenkins, Henry and David Thorburn (2003): Introduction: The Digital Revolution, The Informed Citizen, and the Culture of Democracy in Henry Jenkins and David Thorburn (ed.), Democracy and New Media (Cambridge: MIT Press), pp 1-17. Khatchadourian, Raffi (2010): No Secrets: Julian A ssanges Mission for Total Transparency in The New Yorker [available at: http://www.newyorker. com/reporting/2010/06/07/100607fa_fact_ khatchadourian] Sturken, Marita (1997): Reenactment, Fantasy, and the Paranoia of History: Oliver Stones Docudramas in History and Theory, Vol 36:4:36, December.

CAG: A Parliamentary Institution

B P Mathur

The Comptroller and Auditor General has been called the most important officer of the Constitution. But now as before on Bofors in 1989 and in the states as well the executive loses no opportunity to denigrate the office for its inconvenient findings.

B P Mathur (drbpmathur@gmail.com) is a former Deputy Comptroller and Auditor General and the author of Government Accountability and Public Audit.

nion Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal in a press conference on 7 January said that the loss on 2G spectrum calculated by the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG), is utterly erroneous and without any basis, and denigrated the i nstitution of the CAG, which amounts to constitutional impropriety. Under the Constitution, the CAG has been given an independent status, equi valent to that of a Supreme Court judge, so that he/she can work without fear or f avour. The CAGs responsibility is to see that money voted by Parliament is spent according to its wishes and with due r egard to wisdom, faithfulness and eco nomy and a high degree of probity is maintained by public officials while handling state money and property. B R Ambedkar called the CAG the most important officer of the

Constitution and Rajendra Prasad said, he has (the) power to call to account any officer, however highly placed, so far as state moneys are concerned. The main thrust of the CAGs 2G report is that a huge loss to exchequer was caused by the fact that, issuance of licences in 2008 along with allocation of spectrum has been done by DOT at prices determined in 2001 which were based on (a) totally nascent market, despite the sector witnessing substantial transformation and manifold growth, bypassing advice given by the Telecom Commission, the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Law and the Prime Ministers Office. Regarding the quantum of loss, the report says,
any loss ascertained while attempting to value the 2G spectrum allocation to 122 licenses in 2008 can only be presumptive, given the fact that there are varied determinants like its scarcity value, the nature of competition, business plan envisaged, number of operators, growth of sector, etc, which depending on market situation, would throw up the price at a given time.

The CAG has worked out the presum ptive loss under three different scenarios, and the estimates range from Rs 57,000

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crore to Rs 1,76,000 crore. The telecom minister would not be unaware of the aforesaid details when he made his allegations. It seems the attack on the institution of the CAG is politically motivated as the government is in a fix due to the opposition demand for a joint parliamentary committee on 2G and other scams and Parliaments working has been stalled. At the time of presentation of the Bofors report, the institution of the CAG was pilloried and a union minister called the CAG that Charlie and questioned his jurisdiction to conduct audit. When the report of the Bihar fodder scandal was presented to the legislature, Lalu Prasad Yadav, the then chief minister is reported to have said that the states Accountant General the CAGs representative should be answerable for not detecting the fraud earlier and should be jailed. It is unfortunate that derisive references are made against the institution of the CAG when the government in power finds the audit obser vations uncomfortable. For healthy development of the democratic polity, the political executive should respect constitutional offices and the checks and balances envisaged in the Constitution. The CAG works on behalf of

the legislature to enforce the accounta bility of the executive. In India we follow the British parliamentary traditions. When the Constitution was framed in 1950, an independent office of CAG was established, whose reports are required to be submitted to Parliament/state legislature.

History of Parliamentary Control

Parliamentary control over the executive has a long and chequered history. In B ritain, thanks to the missionary zeal of W E Gladstone, an Exchequer and Audit Department Act was promulgated in 1866, which created the office of the CAG, whose reports were required to be submitted to Parliament and examined by a select committee of its members, called the Committee on Public Accounts. This solved the d ilemma which had baffled Parliament for centuries, whether expenditure should be controlled by inexpert parliamentarians or expert non-parliamentarians. In order to strengthen parliamentary control in Britain and raise his status, the CAG has been made an officer of the House of Commons, through an amendment of the N ational Audit Act in 1983. The British lead was followed by other Commonwealth countries,

such as Australia, Canada and New Zealand and by amendment of res pective Acts, the auditor generals in these countries have been made officers of the Parliament. In the United States the Supreme Audit Institution (Government Accountability Office) since its inception is recognised as a legislative branch agency and enjoys a special working relationship with the Congress. For all practical purposes the position is similar in India. The CAG works on behalf of Parliament and is regarded as a friend, philosopher and guide of the Public Accounts Committee (PAC). The chairman of the PAC, Murli Manohar Joshi, has termed the telecom ministers remarks as improper and inappropriate, but it seems that the ruling Congress has taken this as an issue of a conflict between the ruling party and the opposition, rather than the undermining of a constitutional office. It is time that Parliament treats denigration of the institution of the CAG as an affront to Parliament and breach of its privilege and takes appropriate steps to maintain the dignity and independence of the institution of the CAG, so that he/she is able to perform his duties e ffectively, in larger interests of the people of the country.

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