By Ranjit Devraj
NEW DELHI, May 31 2003 (IPS)

Bribing the taxman is not unknown in India, but the arrest of a senior income tax official this month on charges that he had bribed a federal minister, to secure a plum posting, showed the depths to which institutionalised corruption has sunk.

”Now we have seen it all – even the finance ministry has been exposed collecting money for parcelling out lucrative postings,” said Vineet Narain, a well-known crusader and public interest litigant against a culture of bribery and corruption in India.

In an interview, Narain said that bribery and corruption were too deep-rooted – and backed by silent political approval of it – for any quick or easy solution to the problem. ”There is no political will to weed out corruption simply because the political system is funded entirely by the proceeds of kickbacks and percentages on official deals,” he said.

Narain pointed to how successive prime ministers have come to power vowing to clean up politics but have balked at the thought of sanctioning legal process against political bigwigs, bureaucrats and businessmen once they are in office. Many, he added, have been content with ordering fruitless enquiries and temporary suspensions from office to save face.

After last week’s sensational bribes-for-posting case surfaced, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and leaders of his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) quickly distanced themselves from the case by sacking Gingee Ramachandran, the union minister of state for finance whose personal assistant allegedly sold lucrative postings and transfers within the income tax department for large sums of money.

The BJP cannot afford any more scandals. Vajpayee himself was on the verge of resignation in July 2001 after a spate of scams rocked his one government, including one in which party president Bangaru Laxman was filmed on a web camera accepting bribe money from a journalist posing as an arms dealer. Laxman was sacked but never faced prosecution.

While government transactions are popularly believed to be ridden with kickbacks and percentages, the sting operation by journalists from the web portal ‘Tehelka’ provided the first irrefutable proof to ordinary citizens of what goes on behind the well-guarded doors of high office.

Defence Minister George Fernandes resigned in the wake of the Tehelka scam because the president of his Samata (equality) Party, Jaya Jaitly, was seen on film agreeing to help along defence deals in return for cash payments. Jaitly defended herself by saying she collected the money not for personal purposes but for the party – a plea often made by politicians when caught red-handed taking bribe money.

Politicians and policymakers trace the roots of India’s corruption to an ill-conceived 1970 law, which banned private corporations from making donations to political parties. This starved them of legal funds for the expensive business of organising political meetings, rallies and electioneering. According to Nagarajan Vittal, former chief vigilance commissioner, the bulk of political funds in India comes from ‘black money’ (money out of the reach of the state) and likely to be gained through earlier corrupt deals made at public expense.

Vittal believes that at least 40 percent of India’s real GDP is in the form of black money. ”There is no transparency in political fundraising and corrupt money begets corrupt money.”

The system has become so entrenched that, last year, politicians across party lines closed ranks to resist recommendations made by the Supreme Court and endorsed by the Election Commission that aspirants to elected office must first disclose their assets and criminal records, if any.

Said Narayan: ”The real reason why politicians do not want to disclose their assets, often vast, is that they fear they cannot account for the origin of that money and the chances are that these were acquired through bribes during earlier terms in office.”

Fernandes himself was reinstated within months, while the investigation of a special enquiry commission dragged on interminably.

By early 2002, the defence ministry was embroiled in another fraud that involved the importation of coffins for soldiers who died in the 1999 border war with Pakistan at Kargil in Kashmir. Auditors discovered that the ministry had imported coffins at 2,500 U.S. dollars per piece when the actual price was around 175 dollars per casket.

The irony is that Vajpayee’s BJP-led coalition government came to power five years ago, pledging clean, transparent government to a citizenry fed up with the opposition Congress party, whose last prime minister, Narasimha Rao, was convicted on corruption charges.

Another Congress Party prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, was indicted posthumously for his role in a corruption-tainted deal to buy Swedish Bofors artillery.

Bribery touches the lives of ordinary people. Last year, the Berlin-based non-government organisation Transparency International estimated, on the basis of a survey, that Indians spend more than five billion dollars in bribe money annually to gain access to public services they are entitled to – especially in the health and education sectors.

This month, the Central Bureau of Intelligence (CBI), the federal government’s premier sleuthing agency, arrested a judge of the Delhi High Court for accepting money and other favours from a hotelier to legalise encroachments on public property.

In Chandigarh, the joint capital of northern Punjab and Haryana states, the CBI arrested one of two judges who took money from a doctor to fix police cases against him. The other judge evaded arrest by climbing out of a bedroom window and absconding.

”It is common knowledge that large sections of the judiciary are corrupt and not averse to bailing out politicians in trouble in return for all kinds of favours and post-retirement appointments,” said Narain, who spent fruitless years trying to nail down through litigation top politicians who had received large payments from abroad through ‘havala’ or unofficial channels.

Vittal notes that the ‘havala’ case, which came to light when police were looking for the funding sources of militant groups fighting for the secession of Kashmir, eventually led to the discovery that among the clients of a major ‘havala’ operator were these militant leaders – as well as the cream of the country’s political elite.

Several of these politicians openly admitted to receiving funds routed through the ‘havala’ operator for ‘party work’ – one of them being Sharad Yadav, now a member of Vajpayee’s cabinet.

P V Indiresan, a commentator on public affairs, said the remedy is to legitimise the funding of political parties: ”I would even support the financing of serious political candidates from the public exchequer.”

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