From remote villages to the halls of power, corruption cripples India-October 17, 2011

From remote villages to the halls of power, corruption cripples India

Ben Doherty

October 17, 2011


Andimuthu Raja, Inia's minister for computer and telecoms, attends the swearing in ceremony for new ministers at the presidential palace in New Delhi, India, on Thursday, May 28, 2009. Prime Minister Singh's re-election victory saw his Congress party getting 206 lawmakers of its own. That's the most since 1991, when Singh as finance minister abandoned Soviet-style state planning and introduced free-market policies that helped India's economy quadruple in size. Photographer: Pankaj Nangia/Bloomberg News

A. Raja, the telecoms minister who in 2008 allegedly sold 122 mobile frequency licenses at a fraction of their market value in exchange for tens of millions of dollars in kickbacks. Photo: Bloomberg

THE truck was not overloaded, but that hardly mattered. On a Monday last month, the road transport officers who had pulled over driver Anant Lal Gupta on highway two in Chandauli in northern India wanted a bribe, 5000 rupees ($A97), for the imagined offence. Gupta knew the drill, that these bribes were commonplace, an unavoidable cost of doing business.

But he would pay only 500, what he believed to be the going rate. In front of his 28-year-old son, the officers dragged him from his truck and beat him to death with sticks and iron rods.

On the same day, 800 kilometres west in the capital New Delhi, the third most powerful man in the Indian government, the Home Minister P. Chidambaram, was being accused of complicity in one of India's largest frauds.
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Already, the former telecoms minister A. Raja, had been jailed over the so-called 2G scandal, in which mobile phone licences were sold below market value in exchange for massive kickbacks.

The scandal cost India an estimated $US40 billion and rolled on for two years, claiming scalps and ruining reputations. Now it was stalking the very highest levels of government. Mr Chidambaram offered his resignation but accusers were already looking beyond him. Now they were - and still are - asking: ''Did the prime minister know?''

The two unrelated incidents represent the breadth of the greatest crisis facing the world's largest democracy: corruption.

Whether it is an on-the-quiet couple of hundred rupees to avoid a fine or have the electricity turned on or a multibillion-dollar fraud of breathtaking audacity, graft and greed are crippling India. Now, after years of passive acceptance of their country's endemic venality, Indians are having their Network moment: they are mad as hell and they're not gonna take it any more. In August, their anger found voice.

Dressed in Gandhian topis, their faces daubed in the national colours of green, white and orange, waving flags, the massed marchers across the country could have been displaying a triumphant nationalism. They were doing anything but.

This was fury at Mother India, frustration with the direction they saw their country headed, but specifically the corruption they were witnessing infect every element of their society.

In Delhi they came in their tens of thousands to the Ramlila Maidan meeting ground in support of former soldier Anna Hazare, the latest and most popular figurehead articulating their disenchantment.

Mr Hazare was leading a hunger strike, the centrepiece of a campaign to force the government to bring a strong, wide-ranging anti-corruption bill before parliament.

Critics accused Mr Hazare of subverting the democratic process, but supporters, and they are legion, countered that there was no faith left in that process, that India's broken democratic institutions could not, or would not, fix themselves.

The protesters' fiercest attack was reserved for the leaders of India's polity.

Once regarded as above criticism, the Gandhi family and Manmohan Singh, once a brilliant finance minister but now a hapless Prime Minister, bore the brunt of their opprobrium. ''With a mother like Sonia and an uncle like Manmohan Singh, this government is for sale,'' they chanted.

A recent survey by India Today magazine found only 47 per cent of young people in India's cities were proud to be Indian. They felt their country's reputation had been blackened by criminal scandals and disastrous international ventures such as the Commonwealth Games.

About 65 per cent of 18- to 25-year-olds believe corruption is the greatest danger facing India, well ahead of terrorism (16 per cent) and poverty (13 per cent). Asked who was most trusted, on a scale of one to 10, politicians came last, scoring 1.86. Bureaucrats scored little better, at 3.43. Even judges couldn't muster a pass mark, scoring 4.56.

The Congress party - which led the movement to free India from British rule - has lost its credibility in young India's eyes. It was ranked India's most corrupt political organisation.

The massive scandals dominate. The 2G affair still makes near-daily headlines; the 2008 cash-for-votes scandal, when Congress, facing a vote of no-confidence in Parliament, offered briefcases full of cash to opposition MPs in return for their votes, is still being investigated by police; while still more scandal pours out of last year's disastrous Commonwealth Games, which cost $US4.1 billion, 15 times the initial budget. But beyond the large-scale criminality - much of it of a magnitude beyond the imaginings of most in a country where 645 million people live on less than $1.25 a day - lies the grinding frustration of the constant graft that infects every layer of life.

In India, almost every transaction with someone in authority requires a bribe, from getting electricity connected, to getting a pension or a favourable verdict in court from a judge. A state-run survey found 54 per cent of Indians had paid a bribe for a government service in the past year.

Subhash Kashyap, now retired, is a former secretary-general of India's lower house of parliament and has been intimately involved in the workings of India's democracy since it began in 1947. He said many in India had lost faith, not only in their elected representatives, but also in the country's democracy.

''The basic fact is that corruption has become too widespread, too pervasive, it has entered all walks of life, and the people are fed up,'' he said. ''Our democracy, instead of being of the people, for the people, by the people, has become a government of the corrupt, for the corrupt, by the corrupt.''

Self-interest, not service, now dominates public life in India, Mr Kashyap says, and the whole country suffers for it.