Plans to curb corruption in India flounder under vendetta charges

NEW DELHI: India was one of 95 countries that signed the United Nations Convention Against Corruption this month, but activists at home say the political will to investigate corruption — let alone trace its proceeds to secret accounts abroad — is missing.

“All you have to do is look at the failed attempts to prosecute the former chief minister of (western) Punjab and his family to see how far attempts to unearth loot stashed away abroad actually succeed,” Vineet Narain, India’s best-known crusader against corruption and public interest litigant, told IPS.

According to prosecutors, Prakash Singh Badal, chief minister of farm-rich, Punjab state between 1997 and 2002, had amassed a fortune worth over a billion US dollars and stashed the money away in secret funds and investments abroad.

But Badal, a leader of Punjab’s powerful Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) political party that promotes the cause of the Sikh faith, has claimed that he is a victim of a political vendetta unleashed by his successor as chief minister, Amarinder Singh and leader in Punjab of the Congress party.

After spending a week in prison, Badal and his son Sukhbir Singh were granted bail on Dec 10 and walked out triumphantly into a “victory rally” organized outside the jail either by supporters of the SAD or the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) of Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee.

Far from being able to fulfill an election promise to root out corruption, Amarinder Singh is now faced with a serious rebellion in his own Congress party with a faction demanding that he step down for ‘inept handling’ of the Badal case and turning him into a hero in Punjab.

This is not the first time that politicians who are suspected of having stashed away abroad large fortunes, made through corrupt deals and kickbacks, actually spring back to popularity through sympathy waves created over when they are actually arrested.

In southern Tamil Nadu state, for example, Chief Minister Jayaraman Jayalalithaa swept back to power last year in spite of a series of corruption cases pending against her from a previous term in office. Jayalithaa and her political party are now being seen as potential allies in the nationally ruling NDA.

Last month, the Supreme Court let Jayalalithaa off lightly in a case where she had acquired prime public land at a fraction of its market value. It asked her to return it to the state, admonishing her only to examine her own conscience and sense of propriety.

Among those who have in the past faced serious cases of corruption involving the transfer of funds abroad using the “hawala”, a system of illegal fund movement, is India’s Deputy Prime Minister Lal Krishna Advani, who also holds the key interior ministry portfolio.

Public attitudes to corruption prevalent in India would be familiar in Pakistan and Bangladesh, where politicians accused of corruption have screamed vendetta and been able to stage comebacks to power through the ballot box.

Pakistan President Gen Pervez Musharraf’s much publicized plan to crack down on corruption and get people who have stashed away large fortunes abroad to return the money where it belongs is perceived to be floundering under charges that they reek of political vendetta.

Pakistan’s former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, who lives in exile, has been quoted saying that in her country the real issue was military power rather than corruption.

“Every army takeover in Pakistan had been made in the name of cleaning up society, ridding it of corruption and bringing ‘true’ democracy to the ‘people,” Bhutto has been quoted as saying.

In August, Bhutto and her husband Asif Zardari were found guilty of money laundering by a court in Switzerland and sentenced to six-month suspended jail terms. They were also fined 50,000 dollars each and ordered to pay over two million dollars to the Pakistani government.

“The fact is that such events are rare in India and in other South Asian countries and it is nearly impossible to nail down politicians or even top bureaucrats to the funds they regularly stash away abroad,” Narain said.

Narain was among those who have welcomed the Merida Convention against corruption, called such after the city of the same name, as a step towards checking the large-scale transfer of fund to secret accounts in Geneva and other western financial capitals.

The provisions of the convention require countries to criminalize a range of corrupt activities and promote integrity. It also establishes legal mechanisms for the return of looted assets that have been transferred to other countries.

Nearly all of the world’s developed countries have signed the convention but it can come into force only after a minimum of 30 countries complete the process of ratification. This in turn depends on countries developing compatible legislative and administrative measures and giving them political approval.

Once the convention enters into force, a conference of the state parties will be established to monitor compliance.

At the Merida conference, World Bank director for global governance, Daniel Kaufmann, made a rough but conservative estimate that corrupt transactions could be totalling one trillion dollars each year.

India’s junior minister for home Harin Pathak said this country would be creating comprehensive legal instruments to prevent corruption and the transfer of the proceeds abroad and also to track down illegally acquired wealth, wherever it was stashed. —Dawn/The InterPress News Service.