INDIA: Corruption Scandal Revives Plea for State Poll Funding

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Mar 14 2001 (IPS) - As yet another corruption scandal rocks India and Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s government this time, questions are being asked again why this happened.

Caught on film, accepting money, allegedly to push a foreign defence equipment deal with the government, the chief of Vajpayee’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Bangaru Laxman took the plea that he did this for the party.

“There is no bar on taking money for the party,” Laxman told reporters after he and a string of top ruling coalition politicians, army generals and defence officials, were exposed, allegedly promoting the defence deal for a consideration.

The trap was laid by Indian Internet media group, Tehelka.com, which used fake defence dealers and secret cameras.

The film, screened to the press in the national capital Tuesday, showed Laxman accepting an initial payment worth 2,500 U.S. dollars and putting the money in his desk drawer.

Laxman allegedly, expected a further 30,000 dollars in foreign currency to help swing the deal for the purchase of night-vision binoculars for the Indian Army, from a fictitious company.

The scandal forced Laxman to resign, even as Defence Minister George Fernandes offered to step down. Angry opposition lawmakers Wednesday stalled work in the Lok Sabha (lower house of Indian Parliament), demanding that the government quit.

Laxman is not the first senior Indian politician to be caught accepting bribes. And like him, the others too defended their action by saying it was done for their party.

Though political parties are not barred from collecting funds, large cash transactions are illegal in this country.

The affair has again revived pleas for state funding of political activity as the best way to tackle corruption in high places.

According to eminent economist Arun Kumar of the prestigious Jawaharlal Nehru University in the Indian capital, who is considered an authority on India’s huge parallel economy based on unaccounted ‘black money’, India will have to allow state funding of polls and legalise donations to parties.

Some years ago, a senior member of former premier P.V. Narasimha Rao’s Congress Party government, was forced to quit as telcommunication minister, after some 750,000 dollars worth of Indian currency was found stashed under his bed.

The former minister Sukh Ram said the hoard belonged to the Congress party, which, however, quickly denied this. Ram eventually floated his own political party, which is now a member of the BJP-led ruling coalition.

This was one of a series of high profile corruption cases that shook up the Congress party in the 1980s and 1990s. The Congress has ruled India for most of the years since India’s independence from colonial British rule half a century ago.

The latest scandal is specially embarrassing for the present ruling party because it has shaken up the BJP’s claim of providing clean governance.

In the early 1990s, the suitcase stuffed with currency notes, became the symbol for high corruption in this country after top stockbroker Harshad Mehta claimed having given one, personally to then premier Rao.

Mehta claimed he gave the suitcase, stuffed with 250,000 dollars worth of Indian currency, in return for being allowed to use public money to manipulate the country’s stock markets. Tuesday’s expose by Tehelka, described those caught as the suitcase people”.

Mehta’s stock market manipulations are estimated to have cost the country 25 million dollars in public funds.

A joint parliamentary probe into the affair, subsequently indicted four cabinet ministers, high officials of the central bank and several foreign banks.

Former prime minister Rao’s regime was notable for a large number of scams involving people in high places, including himself and his family.

In October 2000, Rao became the first former Indian prime minister to be charged and convicted for a crime. A court found him guilty of bribing members of a small opposition party to support his then minority government in a crucial trust motion in parliament in mid-1993.

However, it was Rao’s government, which set up the Vohra Committee to probe links between politicians and criminals. Though the Vohra panel concluded that several ruling politicians, businessmen and senior bureaucrats had links with the underworld, little was done to follow up on this charge.

Ironically, during his years as prime minister, Rao vigorously pursued cases of corruption against political rivals within his Congress party as well as those in opposition parties.

It was under Rao that progress was finally made in the probe into India’s most famous political corruption scandal, involving his assassinated predecessor Rajiv Gandhi.

Gandhi was one of those accused of having accepted paybacks from Swedish arms maker Bofors, to help it clinch, in the year 1986, a multi-billion dollar deal to supply howitzers for the Indian Army.

The Bofors scandal was the main factor in the fall of Gandhi’s Congress government in national elections three years later.