Wavelength of a scam

The contradiction stares you in the face. Never before in the history of independent India have so many once-influential politicians, businesspersons and bureaucrats been simultaneously spending time behind bars on corruption charges. Yet the current United Progressive Alliance government is widely perceived as being packed with people with flexible ethics, if not those who are downright corrupt. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is a man whose personal integrity has not been questioned. But he is also seen as the head of a government who turned a blind eye to the corrupt practices of a few of his erstwhile Cabinet colleagues.

The demand for the expeditious enactment of a new law to set up an effective anti-graft constitutional authority in the form of a Lokpal or ombudsman — which the government has conceded — gained ground precisely on account of the perception that the government was not doing enough to curb corruption in high places. How does one explain the apparent contradiction of a government that claims that it has acted (and will continue to act) against the corrupt and which is nevertheless struggling to refurbish its image of being a non-performing, corrupt administration?
Here is the head of our government who is repeatedly asserting that his is not the “most corrupt” government the country has seen — some past Congress governments may contend for that position. Still, Dr Singh is considered to have been excessively pliant because he did not oppose the questionable actions of some of his ministers and MPs. He blamed his inaction on the compulsions of coalition politics and for which, he is now repenting at leisure.
Some of Dr Singh’s recent utterances relating to tackling corruption in private enterprises have been assertive. Yet his claims that his government is serious about tackling corruption are not being taken seriously. Why is there such a yawning credibility gap? Dr Singh’s political opponents argue that his is a case of “too little too late”. Some of the conflicting remarks made by Dr Singh and his senior colleagues on the working of the Right to Information Act and the role of the Comptroller and Auditor General of India have hardly gone down well. Dr Singh’s repeated contention that a distinction should be drawn between genuine mistakes made in situations of uncertainty and deliberate wrongdoing with criminal intent, is being interpreted as an attempt to justify past acts of malfeasance.
Here’s a list of important politicians who are currently in jail: Andimuthu Raja, former Union minister for communications and information technology and member of Parliament belonging to the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, three Rajya Sabha MPs — K. Kanimozhi (DMK), Suresh Kalmadi (Congress) and Amar Singh (formerly with the Samajwadi Party) — former Karnataka chief minister, B.S. Yeddyurappa of the BJP and former chief minister of Jharkhand Madhu Koda, not to mention former Karnataka minister for tourism, youth affairs and infrastructure development Gali Janardhan Reddy.
A glance at the names of those accused in the 2G spectrum scam would add to the list of luminaries who are in judicial custody at present: Siddharth Behura, former secretary, department of telecommunications, R.K. Chandolia, former private secretary to A. Raja, Swan Telecom promoters, directors and their associates Shahid Usman Balwa, Asif Balwa and Rajeev Agarwal, DB Realty promoter Vinod Goenka, Unitech’s managing director Sanjay Chandra, Sharad Kumar of Kalagnar Television and Bollywood film producer Karim Morani. To this list of accused can be added the names of three senior executives of the Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group (Gautam Doshi, Surendra Pipara and Hari Nair) — who allegedly acted on their own without the knowledge and consent of their employer.
The nexus between business and politics was never out in the open as it is in this scam. Yet the government continues to claim that there was no loss in the manner in which 2G spectrum was priced and allocated in January 2008. Why then have so many been incarcerated? This is a question that many (including Mr Raja) are asking current communications minister Kapil Sibal. Time will tell if the government’s actions are upheld by courts of law. In the eyes of many citizens, the “guilty” in the 2G scam have already been “punished”. Mr Raja has, after all, been in Tihar Jail since February 2.
It is being grudgingly acknowledged even by the most ardent votaries of the policies of economic liberalisation which the country has followed over the last two decades that crony capitalism has become rampant. An important reason why Indian-style oligarchs — yes, that’s how one prominent head of a multinational corporation based in Mumbai publicly describes some prominent Indian industrialists — have flourished is poor regulatory mechanisms that have been manipulated by the politician-businessperson-bureaucrat nexus.
What cannot be denied is that the government has rather belatedly woken up to the fact that corruption is an issue that has disgusted very substantial sections of the population, cutting across economic classes as well as social, religious, caste and regional barriers. Having been lulled into complacency on account of a weak and splintered political Opposition, the ruling coalition is gradually waking up to the reality on the ground, namely, that people’s anger against the corrupt has overflowed and spilled into the streets. But the government’s actions remain knee-jerk. It is unsure how much should be done and how far it should go.
The government has dragged its feet on combating corruption. It has hesitated whittling down the edifice, which is the fountainhead of corruption in India, that is, the pattern of funding elections. While the BJP has been harping on bringing back the wealth illegally stashed away in Swiss bank accounts by Indians, the government has deliberately kept the Mauritius route wide open to facilitate the laundering of black money. The government has also consciously allowed participatory notes to be used in stock-exchange transactions by foreign institutional investors, which help conceal the source of funds coming into the country (despite criticism by the Reserve Bank of India).
All this is happening as honest sections of the judiciary, civil society and the media are becoming increasingly proactive and vocal about checking corruption.

The writer is an educator and commentator