POLITICS-INDIA: No End in Sight Yet to Corruption Standoff

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Apr 16 2001 (IPS) - India’s ruling and opposition parties continued their war of words Monday, trading charges of corruption in high places.

Caught by a sensational hidden camera expose, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has struck back at the main opposition Congress party, which is out of office for the last five years.

Earlier on Sunday, Vajpayee reminded the Congress, which has ruled India for most of the 54 years since independence from colonial British rule, that its leaders were involved in deeper corruption.

The prime minister said the Congress could soon find itself in the dock over a 15-year-old deal to buy Swedish arms.

India’s most famous corruption scandal involving allegations of kickbacks paid by Swedish arms maker Bofors to clinch the deal, led to the Congress rout in the November 1989 national election.

At the centre of the scandal was then premier Rajiv Gandhi, whose widow, Italian born Sonia Gandhi now heads the Congress.

“In true fascist style, the BJP has engineered totally motivated, frivolous, false and unsubstantiated allegations against the Congress president and the Opposition leader in Parliament,” said senior Congress leader Arjun Singh.

The Congress responded by boycotting an all-party meeting convened at Vajpayee’s residence. The meeting was called to find a way out of the current standoff in parliament over the corruption allegations against the BJP.

Opposition parties have prevented parliament from transacting business ever since the March expose by media website Tehelka (sensation).com.

Tehelka journalists posing as arms dealers for a foreign company, used hidden cameras to film former BJP chief Bangaru Laxman accepting money from them to help fix a defence deal.

Laxman, who was forced to step down from office, said he took the money on behalf of his party. He tried to blame a system, which forces political parties to collect cash by underhand means for their expenses.

The ruling party hit back with Vajpayee, addressing a political rally in his parliamentary constituency of Lucknow, the capital city of BJP-ruled northern Uttar Pradesh state, warning the Congress about the Bofors investigation.

The premier said that while his government was not doing anything to push the Bofors probe, “it was just a coincidence that some corruption cases have started progressing.”

Earlier, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), the main official sleuthing agency, reopened long dormant cases of “disproportionate assets” against Congress chief Gandhi’s personal secretary Vincent George.

The government also “routinely forwarded” to the CBI, allegations of corruption against members of the Gandhi political family.

So far, the Congress has refused to discuss the Tehelka expose either in Parliament or outside. The opposition party insists the evidence is explicit enough for Vajpayee to quit.

The main opposition party also gave no assurance that it would cooperate in parliamentary work. The house reopens Tuesday for the crucial budget session after a three-week recess.

As the two main parties continued their mud-slinging match, independent commentators advised the country’s ruling class to tackle the main cause of corruption in high places.

According to former top Indian poll official T.N. Seshan, election candidates routinely flout ceilings on poll expenses by claiming to be using party rather than personal funds.

“Candidates get money for election use and then find it useful to keep some of the money for personal expenses,” said Seshan, who made a name for himself trying to clean up the electoral system.

Seshan believes that everyone is to blame for the corruption and no one can claim to be clean.

“Not the politicians, not the bureaucrats, not the industry and not even the public because people are willing to go back and vote the same politicians back to power without asking any questions,” he said.

Seshan thinks that state-funding of elections is not the way out because this alone will not stop candidates from accepting illegal funds.

Ashok Mitra, who heads India’s main industry chamber, the Confederation of Indian Industry, thinks corruption is rooted in the “paper socialism” adopted by India soon after independence.

This put enormous powers in the hands of bureaucrats, without accountability, he says.

Even after a decade of economic liberalisation, new forms of government control are being devised to control areas like disinvestment, he points out.

“There would be no problem if the process is open and transparent,” says Mitra.