NEW DELHI: 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 publicized 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 on 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 US dollars.

Sharma was only one of several high-ranking police officers arrested in the scam.—Dawn/The InterPress News Service.