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Even Manmohan has been tarnished

Graft in India

Rotten to the crore?Coping w ith the aftermath of a massive scam

SONIA GANDHI, the head of the ruling Congress party, laments that Indias moral universe is

shrinking, as newspapers fill with ever more galling cases of political corruption. Manmohan

Singh, the prime minister, says he feels like a schoolboy facing a series of agonising tests as

scandals break one after another. Ratan Tata, head of the Tata Group, hints that the scourge is

hurting the economy; officials expectations of bribes, he said, put him off launching a domestic

airline.

It is tempting to hope this season of scams will concentrate the minds of Indias leaders. This

month Congress sacked two prominent officials over graft. Suresh Kalmadi, who oversaw theCommonwealth games in Delhi in October, was sent running on November 9th as evidence of

dubious contracts emerged. On the same day the party also toppled Ashok Chavan, chief minister

of Maharashtra state, over a housing scam. His relatives and associates had taken flats in a new

tower block that was supposedly set aside for veterans and war widows.

The fallout from the dodgy sale of 2G mobile-telephone licences nearly three years ago will be

much worse. On November 14th Mr Singh at last forced a coalition ally, Andimuthu Raja, to quit

as telecoms minister. Mr Raja had refused to auction the licences, preferring to dish them out in

an underhand and chaotic way, awarding 120 in a single day. Favoured companies bought permits

for a song. In the process, the state may have forfeited revenues worth a staggering 176,000

crore rupees (a crore is 10m: almost $40 bill ion in all), to judge by their resale value and by the

sums raised by the auction of 3G airwaves.

Even Mr Singh, who is generally seen as a saintly technocrat floating above the fray, has been

dragged down into the muck. Most unusually, the Supreme Court chided him last week. His sin

was to act too slowly against his coalition partner. Congress, lacking a majority, relies on Mr

Rajas party, the DMK, for parliamentary support.

The opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) scents blood. It has blocked parliament to force a

public inquiry into the 2G affair. More than 20 years ago a similar investigation seemed to show

that a Congress government was bribed by Bofors, a Swedish artillery supplier. They lost the next

general election.

But Congress retorts that the BJPs record is no cleaner. It has been trying to show its resolve

against corruption by pushing for the resignation of one of its own, B.S. Yeddyurappa, the chief

minister of Karnataka state. He stands accused of giving away public land and taking money from

a mining firm. Yet on November 24th he defied the BJPs national leaders and stayed on, castingdoubt on the BJPs credibil ity in any fight against corruption.

The ex-boss of an anti-graft commission, Pratyush Sinha, threw his hands up in despair in

September, saying his job was thankless and lamenting that increasingly materialistic Indians

were becoming utterly corrupt. His complaints were writ large this month in a report by an

American think-tank, Global Financial Integrity, which suggested that since 1948 India had lost

over $460 billion in illicit financial flows, much of it through corruption.

The report concluded that the problem would worsen as the economy grows and incomes become

more unequal. The moral universe may be getting smaller but, despite the shifting of a few

high-profile figures, it seems that India is ready to do little more than shrug.

Asia

Nov 25th 2010 | DELHI | from PRINT

EDITION

ft in India: Rotten to the crore? | The Economist http://www.economist.com/node/17583050/prin

1 01-01-2009 12:47