Implosion: India’s Tryst with Reality

by John Elliott

  Talking about links between companies and bureaucrats, a source told me that ‘they buy people’s souls, offering senior officers, with five years’ career to go, double their salary’. He was referring to defence industry agents and armed service officers and said that the agents would have ‘twenty-five generals still in service on call at any time’. This happens far more widely than armament deals and is another example of how tolerant India is of potentially corrupt relationships. The boardrooms and top echelons of many fast-growing companies are littered with retired bureaucrats and officers, often people who spent much of their career in industries such as power and telecommunications where the companies operate. ‘Some of the large business groups also fund politicians in the Opposition as a hedge to ensure that any decision that may be given in their favour is not opposed by them. They also treat such funding as a long-term investment,’ says B.V. Kumar, a former head of the government’s economic intelligence bureau. Most business houses, he says, ‘maintain’ MPs to influence government policies or decision-making.9

  Corrupt Democracy

  The roots of corruption are to be found in elections, starting with would-be candidates paying parties to be allocated a constituency. Candidates then bribe voters with liquor, cash and other inducements ranging from saris to laptop computers (though people frequently accept the gifts from opposing parties and then make their own decisions). Payouts continue during the formation of governments when massive amounts of money are paid in ‘horse trading’. This happens in local and state assembly elections and, in various forms, in both houses of parliament. A Congress MP has claimed that he was once told that a candidate for the Rajya Sabha had budgeted Rs 100 crore to secure a seat, but only had to spend Rs 80 crore.10 Later the MP withdrew the allegation, but I have been given (confidentially by a reliable source) the name of a businessman who paid Rs 35 crore to a national political party and Rs 40 crore to a regional party to ensure election in the Rajya Sabha’s preferential vote system.

  Leaders of potential coalitions use an array of political and other contacts to cajole small parties and individual members to join them with a mixture of money, ministerial posts and other favours. Lakhs of rupees change hands, as they do sometimes when a government faces a confidence or other threatening vote in parliament. In what is famously known as the JMM case, a small party in the state of Jharkhand was bribed in 1993 with Rs 2.8 crore to vote in parliament against a motion of no-confidence in Narasimha Rao’s Congress government.

  Politics have become criminalized and elections have become the ‘biggest source of corruption in the country’, says former chief election commissioner S.Y. Quraishi, explaining that candidates spend vast amounts of money they cannot afford and need to recover after they are elected. ‘Political power is strong and competition bitter and involvement of criminals is a challenge,’ he says.11 As many as 162 of the 543 members of the 2009–14 Lok Sabha had criminal charges pending against them, compared with 124 in the previous parliament.12 Criminals began by influencing politicians and then decided to get into politics themselves, he adds. According to data collected by two Delhi-based political monitoring organizations, about 30 per cent of members of parliament and of state assemblies had declared criminal cases pending against them in their own election affidavits.13 Quraishi’s solution is to ban candidates facing charges that had been lodged in a court for six months (which would give potential candidates time to counter false charges trumped up by opponents). Moves along these lines have begun in the courts.

  Politicians amass huge funds while they are in power, both in state and central governments, which they use for organizing elections, buying votes, horse trading and other party activities, as well as building up enormous and ostentatious personal wealth. More than a third of the 4,013 candidates who contested in six state elections during the twelve months to May 2013 declared assets of over one crore rupees, far in excess of what they could have earned legitimately and well beyond the dreams of most people in India.

  Real estate and construction companies are especially useful for laundering and storing funds because their accounts are easily fudged, which encourages close relationships between politicians and the companies. At the time of elections, builders send funds to help finance campaigns. An academic study that looked at the cement industry found that demand decreased when builders had to slow down their projects after sending money to the politicians.14 In another example, a chief minister in north India was said to ensure there was continuing income by telling builders to pay their dues to her over a period of 15–20 years. ‘The relationship between land, builders and politicians is symbiotic because the builder can’t get land without the politician’s help, and then gets locked into the financial exchanges,’ says a member of parliament.15

  Kumari Mayawati, who has been chief minister of Uttar Pradesh four times, is a notable example. The daughter of a post-office worker, she is a leader of the Dalits, the desperately poor ‘untouchables’ at the bottom of the Indian caste system. She built up such extensive wealth – and declared at least some of it – that she ranked with famous film stars and cricketers as one of India’s top 20 taxpayers in 2007–08 when she paid Rs 26.26 crore. Affidavits she filed at election time showed that her assets had inexplicably doubled during her last term as chief minister (2007–12) to Rs 111.64 crore. The income was euphemistically declared as admirers’ gifts and, apart from sporadic court cases on specific projects, no one has seriously pursued the reasons or sources of such unaccounted wealth. Mayawati’s personal extravagances included sending her private jet empty to Mumbai to get her preferred brand of sandals at a cost to the state exchequer of Rs10 lakh, according to US diplomatic cables written in 2008 and published by WikiLeaks.16 The cables said she was paranoid about her security and ‘fears assassination’, employing ‘food tasters’ to guard against poisoning and maintains a ‘vice-like grip on all levels of power’.

  Known locally as Behen-ji (sister), she ostentatiously ordered the state government to build massive pink sandstone and bronze monuments, stupas and domes in large parks in Lucknow, the capital of Uttar Pradesh, and in Noida on the edge of Delhi, at a reported cost of Rs 4,500 crore17 during her last stint as chief minister. They were designed to glorify her and Kanshi Ram, her mentor, who founded her political party, the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), as well as Bhim Rao Ambedkar, a revered Dalit leader at the time of India’s independence. She wanted them to be seen as symbols of empowerment for the Dalits, comparable with the palaces and forts of India’s powerful Mughal rulers.

  She did little during four terms as chief minister to develop the state, especially in rural areas, although, with widespread and plausible allegations of massive corruption, she licensed impressive highway and other projects, including a race track for a successful grand prix.18 She lost the last state assembly election in 2012, but she still garners adulation from the millions of poor Dalits who know they will never have even a tiny fraction of the fortunes she has amassed. Since then, the UP Lokayukta has alleged that Rs 1,410 crore was siphoned off by 199 named politicians and government officials during the purchase and erection of the sandstone monuments19 and the state government’s mining department has said that the sandstone was mined illegally.20

  The Power to Say ‘No’

  Often regulations are designed to increase the discretionary system’s ability to disrupt progress lucratively, rather than achieving the purpose for which the regulations are intended. There is, for example, regular harassment of companies starting new businesses with state governments’ labour and other departments demanding payoffs during construction and fire departments withholding protection approvals – often with officials inventing problems to help the extortion.

  A source in the private sector says this about serving with bureaucrats on a government committee:21 ‘Never once did I feel that they were proposing things for the good of the nation or for the basic purpose we were there. They were fighting for their own turf and for what
they could gain personally from it. Ironically, they might well have moved on to other jobs or retired by the time the policies were implemented, so they might not gain themselves, which presumably means they are instinctively guarding a corrupt system rather than trying to introduce new positive policies.’

  Amitabha Pande, a retired senior civil servant who writes a blog, ‘Notes from a Subversive Bureaucrat’, explained the system in one of his articles: ‘First, decentralise and devolve the power to say “no” right down the line, and centralise the power to say “yes” in a way that obtaining a “yes” decision will mean having to go through many hands, all of whom can say “no” at each stage before you get anywhere near the final decision-maker’.22 The headline on the article was ‘The Power to Say Yes’, but it should surely have been called ‘The Power to Say No’. I asked him to explain how it works – the blog was written in relation to the defence ministry, where Pande once worked, but he says it ‘applies to most situations where government has to approve a proposal, make a purchase, grant a licence, give an environmental clearance, whatever’. His explanation below is based on a hypothetical internal matter within the bureaucracy, but it would equally apply to a company or individual trying to obtain approval for something. The power of junior officials to block the wishes of his superiors should never be under-estimated, as his example shows:

  ‘Let us say, I want approval to take up a post retirement job with a private firm. Under the Rules, such permission can be given only if I can satisfactorily show that in my official career I did not have any dealings with the company. Most approvals are given on a “case by case basis”. My application or proposal made out to the Secretary Personnel will go from him to the Section concerned and to the lowest functionary – the “dealing hand” – generally called the “assistant”. The assistant has no power to give this permission, but he is the first level in the hierarchy who “examines” the case and ‘puts up’ on file to the next higher level of the section officer. In his examination of my career profile, he may discover that the firm I intend to take up a job with has at some stage handled the food business, with which I too was concerned at one stage of my life and therefore there could have been a connection. He can, therefore, reject my application or object that I have not made a full disclosure. No one can question his authority to say “no” because it is his job to do due diligence on my application, and he is only doing his job in raising a very valid objection.

  ‘I will now need to gratify him to have the file sent to the next level. That person can find yet another flaw in my application and this process can go on and on until I have satisfied each level and have had my file reach the secretary personnel or the minister or the PM as the case may be. Even if I reach that level, I may well be told that as there have been so many objections raised on my file, it will be inappropriate to overrule the objections raised through the passage of the file. So either I pay a sum large enough (having already paid all the levels of hierarchy to bring it this far) for that person to overrule his subordinates, or he gets them to change the file and put up a fresh case which is now clean and free of all objections so that subsequent scrutiny does not show any deliberate mishandling of the case. This price may be too much for me, so I have the option of either spending through my nose to get the approval or I give up.’

  A friend told me about how his housekeeper had applied for a pension from a bank where her late husband had worked and was told to obtain a certificate from a tehshildar (local tax official) with details of her dependent children. ‘Someone at the bank introduced her to a tout who first wanted Rs 3,500, then Rs 7,000, which she eventually paid, declining my offer of help because she did not want justice, only the piece of paper,’ says Surendra Rao, a former head of an economic think tank.23 After many visits, the certificate was procured. She had clearly known that it was not worth trying to fight the system, and the bank official saw an opening to create work for a tout, and possibly also receive a reward. ‘Such procedures are one cause for low-level corruption,’ says Rao. ‘It seems that the bureaucracy in government and the public sector has created procedures that require intermediaries to get the bureaucrat to exercise his discretion on whether to sign the form or not. Such discretionary powers exist at all levels and they invariably are sources of additional income for the bureaucrat. Even to do the job he is employed for, the bureaucrat expects additional payment. When he is violating a rule to favour an applicant, the fee is higher.’

  Wealth Equals Success

  Hegde’s view that ‘the biggest culprit is society itself’ has been well illustrated by Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan Singh who condoned corruption in many areas of their government – not least by having Lalu Prasad Yadav, the leader of the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), a regional political party in Bihar, in the cabinet as the railway minister from 2004 to 2009. Yadav, a short stocky man with a proud gait and cropped white hair brushed forward, had been jailed on remand (and released on bail) five times for alleged involvement in a mid-1990s corruption scandal when he was Bihar’s chief minister.24 Aid money for fodder and other animal husbandry totalling Rs 900 to 1,500 crore (estimates vary) were siphoned off from government funds.

  The CBI filed a charge sheet in 1997 and formal charges were framed against Lalu and 44 others in 2000.25 In a move that illustrated how corruption charges have little impact on political careers, Yadav installed his wife as chief minister when he was forced to give up the post because of the charges and between them they ruled for a total of 15 years. He then became an MP and was the railway minister in the 2004–09 Congress-led government when he became popular with Sonia Gandhi. He was eventually convicted in October 2013 along with 44 others and sentenced to five years in jail, which threatened to upset his plans to rebuild his run-down party for Bihar’s state elections in 2015 and secure prominent roles for his two sons.26 He was later released on bail but had to leave the Lok Sabha because of a new Supreme Court ruling that convicted MPs could not retain their seats, even if they appealed.27 (A Congress government plan to legislate against the court ruling was abandoned after the dramatic intervention by Rahul Gandhi.)28

  Yadav’s case illustrates how, till very recently, people have rarely been punished, except occasionally with shortish jail sentences during investigations. Many cases are eventually closed or drag on indefinitely without convictions, and that is what Lalu had been anticipating, hoping that a change in his political fortunes would continue to keep him out of jail. Even though many of those involved have been named publicly, investigating agencies (often conveniently) say they find it impossible to gather sufficient and precise evidence. That makes it easier for the guilty to buy their way out of trouble, and no one is ever forced to pay back the illegal funds in modern India where greed is a bigger driver of attitudes than morals.

  The Lalu conviction and jail sentence came at a time when attitudes were hardening, and the Congress-led government knew that it had to take action to try to reduce the impact of corruption on voting in the coming 2014 general election. RTI legislation was leading to the exposure of fraud and extortion, but not enough was being done to prosecute and convict offenders. Whistleblowers who exposed corrupt deals were themselves being punished (in the past they been killed)29 instead of people they were naming. Ashok Khemka, a senior bureaucrat in the state of Haryana, was transferred from his job three days after he cancelled a land deal involving Robert Vadra, Sonia Gandhi’s son-in-law.30 He was then officially charged with exceeding his powers on the Vadra case, and of failing in his duties when he briefly ran the state’s seeds corporation and reported widespread corruption. A year after the Vadra action, court proceedings alleging administrative misconduct were started by the Haryana government with the approval of Bhupinder Singh Hooda, the chief minister who has close ties with Sonia Gandhi.31

  It is ironical that Gandhi should allow such action against an apparently honest official at a time when Congress leaders were responding to popular demand for a tough line against the
corrupt. In what must have been the quickest punishment in the history of corruption, Pawan Bansal, the minister for railways, had been forced by the government to resign a few months earlier, in May 2013, just a week after allegations emerged linking his family to bribes. It was alleged that Bansal’s nephew was to be paid Rs 10 crore (about $2m) for arranging that a senior railway engineer was made the ‘member electrical’ of the Railways Board, which runs the railways within the ministry. The bribe was to be paid through a contractor, having been raised from a group of businessmen dealing with railways signalling and other equipment. During that week, CBI inquiries and a stream of media reports revealed links involving Bansal, his family, and businessmen in a network of deals, plus the rapid growth of family companies. When he resigned, Bansal asserted he had ‘nothing to do with all this’.32 Arguments about his involvement continued as the legal process slowly evolved.33

  The scandal itself was scarcely a surprise – paying for public sector jobs happens in many developing countries, and maybe in more developed ones as well. Such appointments are often financed with money from companies that are promised contracts, as was allegedly planned in this case. Nearly 20 years ago, I was told about a public sector corporation chairman’s job that was available in return for a payment of two crore rupees.34 A prominent private sector company was offering to make the payment, and the candidate knew it would expect to be given every contract or other services that it demanded while he was the chairman. The fact that the company itself was delivering the payment would, of course, increase its hold over him. Many public servants have to pay such bribes to get their jobs. They range sometimes all the way from top ministry bureaucrats to the public sector corporations’ board directors and on to income-tax officials and traffic police. The top people need to cover their costs by making money on policy decisions and contracts they handle, as well as by helping their sponsors. Tax officials take bribes to clear files, and police charge drivers a few hundred rupees for speeding or jumping traffic lights instead of formally booking them. The more lucrative the job, the higher the price.