By Arun G. Mukhopadhyay
12 March, 2012
The Government of
India’s Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) Chief Mr. A P Singh on
February 13, 2012 has acknowledged that Indians are the largest
depositors of illegal money in banks abroad. With an estimated $500
billion, close to $ 40 billion in lost revenue, the money has been
hoarded in tax havens. The colossal amount of money has been extorted
out of the sweat, blood and tears of the metaphoric ’99 per cent’ of
Indians.
In his magnum opus Discovery of India(1946),the
first prime minister of free India Jawahar Lal Nehru expressed his own
anguish in detail about the corruption prevailing during British Rule.
According to Nehru, ’loot’ (plunder) was the only objective of early
British India colonials. The teeming millions of India were awfully poor
and growing poorer while the microscopic minority was prospering under
colonial rule. “Corruption, cruelty, callousness and a complete
disregard of public welfare flourish and poison the air”, Nehru
observed.
In 1950, A.D.Gorwala’s report
observed that quite a few of Nehru's own ministers were corrupt. The
Santhanam Committee, 1962 also pointed to the fact that ministers had
enriched themselves illegitimately through nepotism. The Government of
India tried its best to shield its ministers. V K Krishna Menon, Indian
high commissioner to Britain in the early 1950s, bypassed protocol to
sign a deal worth INR(Indian Rupee) 8 million with a foreign firm for
the purchase of army jeeps. While most of the money was paid upfront,
only a part of the total volume was supplied. Jawahar Lal Nehru, now
prime minister of India, forced the government to accept them. Soon
after, in February 1956 Krishna Menon was inducted into the Nehru
cabinet.
Nehru’s ‘benevolence’ at the expense of the
country’s professed policy of aspiring to a socialist pattern of
society, might have been aimed at securing his daughter’s smooth
elevation to the highest prominence in Indian politics. To sustain such
an ambition, other dynastic projects were also encouraged. Tavleen Sigh
in her 2011 article “Time for dynastic democracy to die” , has judiciously observed that:
“ When a parliamentary constituency becomes an inheritance, it becomes a private estate whose purpose is to benefit the family who owns it. And, the reason why most of our political parties have been turned into private property is because politics is the easiest way to make money in India."
Thus mass-scale distribution of favours and
concessions coupled by reciprocal favours, concessions, bribes, etc.
triggered various corruptions and, inter alia, dependence on crimes and
criminals became inevitable. The findings of British historian Patrick French
in his 2011 survey are still quite consistent with the prerequisites
of a dynastic democracy. Every Indian MP under the age of 30 is
hereditary and two-thirds of Indian MPs under the age of 40 are from
political families.
During the early 1950s, Indira Gandhi served as an
unofficial personal assistant to her father Jawahar Lal Nehru, the then
prime minister. In 1955, she became a member of the Congress Party's
working committee and within four years, president of the party. This
was a formative period, both for the country and the emerging
Nehru-Gandhi dynasty. To mimic the tenets of a socialist democracy,
massive investments were diverted in building social infrastructure like
dams, national highways, mines, and so forth, dubbed as “temples of
modern India”, seeming to replicate the Soviet model of planning. The
licensing machinery was often the prime mover behind the parallel
economy of corruption and black money.
Nehru died in 1964, and was succeeded as prime
minister by Lal Bahadur Shastri. In 1966, Prime Minister Shastri died
unexpectedly during his official visit to Moscow. Indira Gandhi became
the new Prime Minister. By 1973 vast areas of northern India, including
the capital city, New Delhi, were rocked by demonstrations against high
inflation, the poor state of the economy, rampant corruption, and poor
standards of living. In June 1975, the High Court of Allahabad declared
her guilty of illegal practices during the last election campaign, and
ordered her to vacate her seat. There were demands for her resignation
and Indira Gandhi's response was to declare a state of emergency to
suspend democracy for an indefinite period. Political opponents were
imprisoned and press was subjected to strict censorship. During the
emergency, Indira Gandhi’s second son Sanjay's influence on Indira and
the government increased dramatically. According to Mark Tully
, "His inexperience did not stop him from using the draconian powers
his mother, Indira Gandhi, had taken to terrorise the administration,
setting up what was in effect a police state.”
Indira Gandhi, holding both the posts of the Prime
Minister and party president, herself controlled the party funds,
creating the precedent for engendering money power in politics. After
Indira Gandhi’s assassination in October 1984, her elder son Rajiv
Gandhi was the ‘natural’ choice to grace the office of prime minister of
India. V.P. Singh, Rajiv’ Gandhi’s finance minister, appointed an
American detective agency, Fairfax, to investigate the illegal stacking
of foreign exchange overseas by Indians. Rajiv promptly transferred V.P.
Singh from finance to defence. When as Defence Minister V.P.Singh,
ordered another enquiry into various transactions, this was regarded as a
body blow directed at the ‘first’ family of the nation, since Prime
Minister Indira Gandhi herself had been defence minister in 1981. There
was criticism of Singh’s conduct in the Cabinet meeting, and he soon
resigned from government. A few days later, on 16 April 1987, the Bofors
scandal surfaced.
Rajiv Gandhi and several others were accused of
receiving kickbacks, and there was speculation that the amount was to
the tune of INR.400 million, from Swedish company Bofors AB in reward
for a contract to supply the Government of India with 155 mm field
howitzer guns. Sten Lindstrom, Sweden's special prosecutor investigating
the pay-offs associated with the sale of weapons by Bofors to the
Government of India, revealed that a close friend of Rajiv Gandhi’s
Italian wife Sonia Gandhi, Ottavio Quattrocchi had received kickbacks in
the millions. Quattrocchi, in spite of substantial evidence against
him, had managed to escape prosecution in India. Rajiv gave no public
denial of his and his family’s involvement. Meanwhile, Sonia Gandhi has
been ranked in the eleventh position in the list of world’s most
powerful people by a Forbes report, August 2011.
The grand event of the New Delhi Commonwealth Games
in 2010, was flooded by allegations of corruption. The Indian Vigilance
Commission has found massive discrepancies in tenders and
misappropriation of funds out of the budget of INR 700 billions. Next
came the 2G Spectrum scam of INR 1760 billion in 2011, the biggest
scandal in India up to that point, involving the allocation of unified
access service licenses. The former Telecom minister A.Raja in 2008
reportedly has breached norms at every level to allocate dubious 2G
license awards at a throw-away price, pegged at 2001 prices. Allegations
that the Indian Home Minister, P Chidambaram was also guilty are
undergoing investigation. Meanwhile, India dropped 11 places to be
ranked 95th in the Transparency International Corruption Index , December 2011.
The present Nehru-Gandhi Dynasty supremo and
Chairperson of the ruling United Progressive Alliance(of which the
Congress Party is the major partner) - Sonia Gandhi - installed her most
trusted man Manmohan Singh, a non-political economics teacher turned
technocrat, as Prime Minister in 2004. Apparently helpless and hesitant
to tackle the mega-scams, Dr. Singh is in office until the 2014 general
election, when the dynastic heir, the present General Secretary of the
Congress party, Rahul Gandhi, is expected to be sworn in as prime
minister of India. The game-plan has already been activated as the
flattery of Congress politicians gets under way, projecting Rahul as the
next prime minister, while Rahul himself, of course, repeatedly denies
that he has any such ambition. This comic strip episode reminds us of
similar theatrics staged decades back when Congress leaders were busy
discovering Rajiv Gandhi’s rare qualities as future prime minister
despite the chorus of Rajiv Gandhi’s protestations.
Nehruvian socialism has been criticized in a 2011 article
by Amartya Sen and Jean Dreze as it failed miserably to rise to such
basic challenges as school education and healthcare. The evidence is
certainly damning, to take just two examples. Binayak Sen
in his 2011 paper ’Ethics, Equity and Genocide’ has observed that
neonatal low birth weights “occurs far more commonly in specific
communities, obeying the pressures of inequity and social injustice”. A
2011 New York University school of Law report
estimated that more than a quarter of a million Indian farmers have
committed suicide since 1996—“the largest wave of recorded suicides in
human history”.
Shalini Randeria in her 2003 paper
has categorically described India as a "cunning state". The cunning
state’s nexus with transnational and national capital facilitates
accumulation through dispossession in India under the pretext of
economic growth. The erection of the so-called temples of modern India
has been made possible through developmental terrorism to uproot the
downtrodden population from their socio-ecological setting. Amit Bhaduri
in his 2007 article ‘Development or Developmental Terrorism?’ also appeals for the envisaging of an alternative path of development.
Could there be an Occupy Movement for the metaphoric ‘99 per cent’ of Indians waiting in the wings?
Arun G.Mukhopadhyay (arungm10@gmail.com) is formerly of the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta.
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