By Ranjit Devraj
NEW DELHI, Dec 3 2003 (IPS)

For a party that came to power in 1998 vowing to root out corruption, Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has performed pretty dismally and with general elections due next year, the boot is now clearly on the other foot.

On Wednesday, the winter session of the Indian Parliament opened to demands from the opposition led by the Congress party that government account to the house for a series of highly publicised scams that has shocked a nation that has become used to and even inured to corruption in high places.

The House quickly adjourned but Vajpayee will have a tough time in the coming days explaining why he sacked, but did not have arrested, one of his ministers who was exposed a fortnight ago on a video recording accepting wads of currency and promising mining concessions to the representative of an Australian firm in return.

Dilip Singh Judeo, chief ministerial candidate of the BJP in the Dec. 1 elections for the mineral-rich central state of Chattisgarh, did not care to deny that he took the money.

But he justified his act by saying that even the ascetic Mahatma Gandhi accepted money in his campaign to win independence for India from British colonial rule.

Judeo’s defiance tells a story of the virtual impunity enjoyed by politicians and bureaucrats in corruption cases, especially when its suits the interests of the government of the day. Sunil Sondhi, who teaches political science at the University of Delhi, says that major factors in the growth of corruption are the casual and clumsy way in which cases are handled and the unwillingness of those vested with disciplinary powers to use them.

”Government officials entrusted with the responsibility of dealing with corruption do it in a most inefficient and lethargic manner and this suits the political leadership which patronises corruption,” said Sondhi.

According to Sondhi, corruption, including bribery and nepotism, has now found acceptance in the social psyche and behaviour. People who have acquired wealth through unfair means are accorded a high status in society.

Ministers and top bureaucrats think nothing of milking large public sector undertakings to make money for themselves or to stuff them with their own relatives, critics say.

Apart from the Judeo episode, Vajpayee is under pressure from the opposition to lay bare the truth in allegations that several of his ministers had been systematically exploiting the financial and other resources of government-owned corporations.

”The Prime Minister will have to tell the nation whether the ministers were involved in milking public sector undertakings,” thundered Somnath Chatterjee, one of India’s longest-serving parliamentarians, soon after the house adjourned without conducting business on Wednesday.

”Corruption has engulfed this government – there is a new scam everyday and as usual the government is making selective arrests and allowing political functionaries to get away scot-free,” said Chatterjee, a lawyer and leader of the Communist Party of India – Marxist (CPI-M).

Chatterjee was referring to discrimination shown in the arrest Tuesday of Ranjit Singh Sharma, a day after he retired as police commissioner of the western port city of Mumbai for his alleged involvement in a racket to print and distribute legal stamp paper estimated to have cost the exchequer at least 750 million U.S. dollars.

Sharma was only one of several high-ranking police officers arrested in the scam.

Typically, despite the seriousness of the issue it is turning into an opportunity to score political points between the Congress party-ruled state government in western Maharashtra state, of which Mumbai is capital, and the BJP-ruled central government.

While the state government of Maharashtra has asked its own Special Investigating Team (SIT) to look into the stamp paper case, the central government has been demanding that it be handed over to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI).

It has been left to the Supreme Court to settle the jurisdiction issue. But the anti-corruption activist Anna Hazare, who was instrumental in getting the Bombay (older name for Mumbai) High Court to order the Maharashtra SIT to crack down on the racket, has argued that handing over the case to the CBI would only result in the dilution of the case.

But Chatterjee pointed out that while police officers are being arrested, their political masters have remained unscathed by a racket that could not have run for years without their patronage.

Sondhi blames the lack of commitment on the part of the political leaderships of the states and central levels for the failure to tackle corruption effectively.

”It is more than clear that all these institutional arrangements to combat corruption can be useful only if correctives come from the political class which is the final legislative and executive authority in a parliamentary democracy,” he said.

”Unless politicians are made to differentiate private conscience from public morality and personal profit form national interest the ongoing unrestrained plunder of the exchequer cannot be stopped,” he added.

Curiously enough, some of the scams that have taken place under BJP rule are replicas of those that had taken place under previous Congress party governments.

Thus a stock market scam two years ago in which millions of investors were cheated out of their small savings by a stock market broker who maintained links with the BJP closely resembled another one in size and scope, where the key figure was someone who enjoyed the confidence of top Congress party politicians in the early 90s.

One of the features of corruption in India is that the very agencies that are tasked with controlling corruption and the growth of a huge parallel economy have long ago been compromised, critics add. According to N Vittal, former chief vigilance commissioner, the poor state of India’s economy is a ”standing monument” to the corruption and inefficiency of four departments – customs, central excise, income tax and enforcement.

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