Tag Archive for ‘Corruption’ at Asian Window

Tag Archive for 'Corruption'

The zero-rupee protest

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on January 27, 2010

in Economy and India

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The zero-rupee note

From CommGAP (The Communication for Governance and Accountability Program) at blogs.worldbank.org:

Imagine that you are an old lady from a poor household in a town in the outskirts of Chennai city, India. All you have wanted desperately for the last year and a half is to get a title in your name for the land you own, called patta. You need this land title to serve as a collateral for a bank loan you have been hoping to borrow to finance your granddaughter’s college education. But there has been a problem: the Revenue Department official responsible for giving out the patta has been asking you to pay a little fee for this service. That’s right, a bribe. But you are poor (you are officially assessed to be below the poverty line) and you do not have the money he wants. And the most absurd part about the scenario you find yourself in is that this is a public service that should be rendered to you free of charge in the first place. What would you do? You might conclude, as you have done for the last 1-1/2 years, that there isn’t much you can do…but wait, you just heard about a local NGO by the name of 5th Pillar and it just happened to give you a powerful ally: a zero rupee note.

In Doha last month, CommGAP learned about the work of 5th Pillar, which has a unique initiative to mobilize citizens to fight corruption. In India, petty corruption is pervasive – people often face situations where they are asked to pay bribes for public services that should be provided free. 5th Pillar distributes zero rupee notes in the hopes that ordinary Indians can use these notes as a means to protest demands for bribes by public officials. I recently spoke with Vijay Anand, 5th Pillar’s president, to learn more about this fascinating initiative. More:

[Image: 5th Pillar]

The biggest pain in Asia isn’t the country you’d think

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on January 4, 2010

in India, Politics and human rights

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How India gives global governance the biggest headache. Barbara Crossette in Foreign Policy:

India happily attacks individuals, as well as institutions and treaty talks. As ex-World Bank staffers have revealed in interviews with Indian media, India worked behind the scenes to help push Paul Wolfowitz out of the World Bank presidency, not because his relationship with a female official caused a public furor, but because he had turned his attention to Indian corruption and fraud in the diversion of bank funds.

By the time a broad investigation had ended — and Robert Zoellick had become the new World Bank president — a whopping $600 million had been diverted, as the Wall Street Journal reported, from projects that would have served the Indian poor through malaria, tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS, and drug-quality improvement programs. Calling the level of fraud “unacceptable,” Zoellick later sent a flock of officials to New Delhi to work with the Indian government in investigating the accounts. In a 2009 interview with the weekly India Abroad, former bank employee Steve Berkman said the level of corruption among Indian officials was “no different than what I’ve seen in Africa and other places.”

India certainly affords its citizens more freedoms than China, but it is hardly a liberal democratic paradise. India limits outside assistance to nongovernmental organizations and most educational institutions. It restricts the work of foreign scholars (and sometimes journalists) and bans books. Last fall, India refused to allow Bangladeshi and Sri Lankan journalists to attend a workshop on environmental journalism. More:

Who will save Pakistan?

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on November 19, 2009

in Pakistan

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Sardar Mumtaz Ali Bhutto in The News, Pakistan:

While the entire focus is on the game of musical chairs being played by Zardari and Nawaz Sharif and the question being asked is “When will Zardari quit?”

The Zardari-Sharif game is easy to comprehend: Zardari, of course, has no desire to vacate the house on the hill and has devised a strategy of paying out the rope a little when the pull gets too strong in the tug-of-war for power. First of all, it was reconciliation, through which Zardari appeased the opposition and, beyond his wildest dreams, got the top job while others too received huge shares of power. Consequently, there are 90 federal ministers and advisers, compared to less than 20 during the tenure of Shaheed Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, each of them costing people Rs100,000 per day. Then we have the repeated agreements at Bhurban, Islamabad, Dubai and London to restore the judges, but Zardari relented only in the face of the long march. However, he did manage to get a few months’ reprieve out of the wrangle. Recently there has been the matter of the NRO and finally the surrender on that too, which has again bought Zardari another respite until the fate of the cases against him and his fellow travellers are decided by the courts. More:

Karzai in his labyrinth

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on August 10, 2009

in Afghanistan

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Elizabeth Rubin in the New York Times Magazine:

On a sunny June morning in Kabul, I sat among hundreds of turbaned men from Afghanistan’s Helmand and Kandahar provinces in a chandeliered wedding hall where they had gathered for a campaign rally to re-elect President Hamid Karzai. War was raging in Helmand and Kandahar. And yet there was an atmosphere of burlesque about the place. Waiters hammed up their service, skidding across the floor balancing mounds of rice, bananas and chicken, whirling shopping carts of Coke and Fanta. The organizer of the event and master of ceremonies was none other than Sher Muhammad Akhundzada, the five-foot-tall ex-governor of Helmand and probably the country’s most infamous drug trafficker. From a velvet couch he barked out to the speakers: “Not so many poems! Keep your speeches short!” – but no one was listening.

At my table, an elderly Helmandi engineer described how awful things were in his region – families killed in coalition airstrikes, villages overrun by the Taliban. So why more Karzai? “If we choose someone else, it will only get worse,” he said through an interpreter. Another man said that at least Karzai had brought education and unity. “They are all lying,” a third said in English. He was the son of a prominent Kandahari elder who, a year before, was assassinated outside the family’s house. He’d also lost his uncle, brother and 45 other members of his extended family, he told me. He blamed the government. He was shaking his head at the spectacle in the wedding hall. “I told the men at my table, ‘You just came to show your faces on camera so if Karzai wins he will give you privileges.’ ” He laughed and said, “They told me they just came for lunch.” I asked what he thought would happen during the election in Kandahar. “Fraud,” he said. He himself claimed to have made 8,000 fake voter-registration cards. They were selling for $20. More:

Nepal bans airline staff pockets to fight bribes

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on July 1, 2009

in Nepal

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From BBC:

Staff at Nepal’s main international airport are to be issued with trousers without pockets, in an attempt to wipe out rampant bribe-taking.

The country’s anti-corruption body said there had been growing complaints about staff at Kathmandu’s Tribhuvan airport.

A spokesman said trousers without pockets would help the authorities “curb the irregularities”.

The move comes after the prime minister of Nepal said corruption was damaging the airport’s reputation, AFP reported. More

India’s greatest failure

Published

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on May 24, 2009

in India

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Paul Beckett from new Delhi in the Wall Street Journal:

Since he retired as India’s most senior civil servant in 1998, T.S.R. Subramanian likes to say that he can be spotted frequently on a golf course. Recently, using a stenographer (four decades climbing the bureaucratic ladder means you don’t learn to type) he put his mind to a question that appears to nag him as he marches the fairways: What has gone wrong in official India?

It is a timely question, given that we are at the start of a new administration. And it is one Mr. Subramanian is eminently qualified to address, given his rise through the Indian Administrative Service to become Cabinet secretary under three prime ministers. It is also one he is eminently capable of fudging, given that same resume and the many vested interests he might feel obliged to protect.

Fortunately, he takes the attitude that if you’re going to go to the trouble of thinking and writing, why coat it in gloss? The result is a pithy tome, almost a Victorian-style treatise, called “GovernMint in India.” It assesses whether the Indian government is up to par when measured against the mandate of the Indian constitution. His verdict, if I may paraphrase: If the Indian government were a golfer, it would score quadruple bogeys on every hole, cheat on the score card, then grab the stakes the other players had bet with. More:

An Afghan reconstruction horror story

Published

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on March 27, 2009

in Afghanistan

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The corruption and incompetence of the current Afghan government. Michael Weiss at NewMajority.com:

The sad case of Dr. Mohammed Atash, the former president of Ariana, Afghanistan’s largest commercial airline, should be seen as a cautionary tale for what the U.S. and Europe may face in short order: namely, a failed state built on the ruins of the Taliban and sustained by cynical domestic interests.

Like many gifted students from the Middle East in the late 1960’s, Atash received a cosmopolitan education, first earning a B.S. in chemistry from the American University in Beirut, for decades the training ground for future Muslim luminaries-in Atash’s year, the school graduated the U.S. ambassador to both postwar Afghanistan and postwar Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad, Voice of America journalist Rauf Mehrpour, former Chancellor of Kabul University and Minister of Finance Dr. Ashraf Ghani, as well as a host of other notable Afghans. And like Khalilzad, Atash continued his graduate studies in the U.S., attaining a Ph.D. in Educational Research, Statistics, and Measurement from Florida State University, which enabled him to act as the Head of Chemistry and Research Departments in Afghanistan’s Ministry of Education Science Center between 1970 and 1977. Having completed that stint, Atash returned to the U.S. and worked as a researcher and professor of applied statistics; he also founded a chain of automotive lube shops; his own consulting firm, PARSA; and the non-profit Nooristan Foundation, which has been dedicated to rebuilding schools in the rural districts of Afghanistan and in 2003 received a $100,000 grant from America’s Fund for Afghan Children, established by President Bush. In 1999, Atash was invited to participate in the Rome Group of the Loya Jirga, the government-in-exile that sought a peaceful form of regime change during the pre-9/11 reign of the Taliban.

For Afghans, a price for everything, and anything for a price

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on January 2, 2009

in Afghanistan

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From the New York Times:

Kabul: When it comes to governing this violent, fractious land, everything, it seems, has its price.

Want to be a provincial police chief? It will cost you $100,000.

Want to drive a convoy of trucks loaded with fuel across the country? Be prepared to pay $6,000 per truck, so the police will not tip off the Taliban.

Need to settle a lawsuit over the ownership of your house? About $25,000, depending on the judge.

“It is very shameful, but probably I will pay the bribe,” Mohammed Naim, a young English teacher, said as he stood in front of the Secondary Courthouse in Kabul. His brother had been arrested a week before, and the police were demanding $4,000 for his release. “Everything is possible in this country now. Everything.”

Malaise de Goa?

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on November 16, 2008

in India

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Beneath the idyll of a paradise called Goa, a grim, gritty picture of a state scorched by corruption and apathy. Sudeep Chakravarti with photographer Satish Bate in Hindustan Times:

On a cool evening in mid-October, a hundred or so people, mostly Goan – teachers, writers, painters, journalists, businesspersons, fashion designers and lawyers – stood near one of Atanassio Monserrate’s two large villas near Panjim.

They held candles; an emphatic circle of light. I was there too, wax from a temperamental candle blistering my fingers.

It seemed a small price to pay. After all, I didn’t join in the singing of we-shall-overcome, or impassioned speech-making.

My fingers had not been severed with a chopper, as happened to a Goan lawyer the previous night. Nor had I been severely beaten about the head, as had a young Goan professor of history, as he dined on chicken xacuti with this lawyer friend at a modest Panjim restaurant. It’s why we had all gathered in civil outrage.

In world’s most corrupt nation…

Published

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on November 14, 2008

in Bangladesh

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Jeremy Page reports from Dhaka in the Times:

The political rivalry between Begum Khaleda Zia, left, and Sheikh Hasina Wajed has polarised Bangladeshi society.

Political rivals Begum Khaleda Zia, left, and Sheikh Hasina Wajed. See story below

How many people does it take to fix a broken lavatory in the most corrupt nation on earth? The answer, according to the Bangladesh Telecommunications Company, is 126.

To move some files from one cabinet to another? It takes 256, to judge by the same state-run company’s accounts. In both cases the workers were paid – even though they never existed.

Just two examples of the endemic graft that earned Bangladesh – condemned as a “basket case” by Henry Kissinger in 1971 – the insult of being rated the world’s most corrupt nation from 2000 to 2005.

Also in the Times: Bangladesh’s mortal enemies prepare to talk – but about what?

India slips further in world corrruption index

Published

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on September 24, 2008

in Lists

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India has slipped further in the global corruption perception index released annually by corruption watchdog Transparency International (TI). In world rankings, India came down from 72nd to 85th slot in a list of 180 countries. Some rankings:

Bhutan 45; India 85; Sri lanka 92; The Maldives 115; Nepal 121; Pakistan 134; Bangladesh 147; Afghanistan 176; Burma 178.

China is at 72.

The Top five: Denmark, New Zealand, Sweden, Singapore, Finland

The US is at 18 and the UK at 16

More here, and click here for the full list:

Zardari and the Surrey mansion

Published

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on September 23, 2008

in Pakistan

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Dropped corruption case may free up mansion cash for Pakistan president. From The Guardian:

For more than 10 years a Surrey mansion, put on the market for £8.5m by its new owners, has been the most visible symbol of the corruption charges that have stalked Asif Ali Zardari, the new president of Pakistan, and his late wife, Benazir Bhutto. But since Bhutto’s assassination last December and his improbable transformation from former prisoner to head of state, the saga of Rockwood House may soon be resolved.

Once the final legal details are sorted out, Zardari can expect to pocket around £3m from the property’s earlier sale, which occurred in 2004 after it had been put into the hands of a liquidator.

That sum will be on top of the $60m (£32m) in frozen assets released to him by the Swiss authorities a month ago. Geneva prosecutors were obliged to drop their money-laundering investigation at the request of Zardari’s government.

Bhutto widower with clouded past is set to lead

Published

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on September 6, 2008

in Pakistan

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Asif Ali Zardari will start his tenure as Pakistan’s president burdened by unproven corruption allegations. Jane Perlez in the New York Times:

Asif Ali Zardari

Asif Ali Zardari, the widower of Benazir Bhutto, is set to become president on Saturday, an accidental ascent for a man known more as a wheeler-dealer than a leader. He will start his tenure burdened by a history of corruption allegations that cloud his reputation even as they remain unproved.

Though he has won the reluctant support of the Bush administration, which views him as a willing partner in the campaign against terrorism, Mr. Zardari will assume the presidency with what many consider untested governing skills as a tough Taliban insurgency threatens the very fabric of Pakistan, a nuclear-armed state of 165 million people.

It remains to be seen how forcefully he will act against militants in the face of Pakistani public opposition to American pressure. Nor is it clear how much influence he exerts over the still powerful military and the nation’s premier spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence.

Dynastic excesses make Zardari Pakistan’s new president

John Elliott on his blog, Riding the Elephant:

His rise to the top began in the 1980s when he was a Karachi playboy, well known and popular on the polo party circuit. He came from a little known family based in the Bhutto family’s home area of Lakarna, and was selected by Bhutto’s aunt as a safe arranged-marriage husband.

People who knew him before his marriage say little against him. But his reputation has been in continual decline since then. In addition to widely believed allegations of corruption, he was also accused of authorising the murder of Benazir’s brother in 1996 – which, of course, he denied. He spent eight years in jail on corruption charges but was released in 2004 as a result of talks between General Pervez Musharraf and Bhutto. The charges have now been waived.

Where’s the money?

Published

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on August 10, 2008

in Pakistan

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Benazir Bhutto’s widower is accusing President Musharraf of siphoning off millions from aid intended to support war on terror. Christina Lamb reports from Islamabad in The Sunday Times:

Asif Ali Zardari

The embattled president of Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf, has been dealt his latest and most serious blow with the accusation from the leader of the ruling party that he misappropriated hundreds of millions of dollars of American aid given for supporting the war on terror.

Asif Ali Zardari, who took over the Pakistan People’s party (PPP) after his wife Benazir Bhutto was assassinated in December last year, made the charge in an interview with The Sunday Times.

He also detailed for the first time Musharraf’s attempts to sabotage his government which, he says, forced him to take the drastic step of demanding his impeachment.

“Our grand old Musharraf has not been passing on all the $1 billion [£520m] a year that the Americans have been giving for the armed forces,” he claimed. “The army has been getting $250m-$300m reimbursement for what they do, but where’s the rest?

Indians’ worst fear: the honest politician

Published

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on August 1, 2008

in India

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For Indian voters, news of a corruption scandal is a sign of a political system in ruddy good health. It’s honesty we distrust. Arvind Adiga, author of The White Tiger, in The Guardian:

When I was growing up in the south Indian city of Madras, there were only two political parties that mattered; one was run by a former matinee idol, and the other was run by his former screenwriter. My mother, giving me my first lesson in politics, explained that the difference between the two parties was that one party took large bribes and usually did the work that it was bribed for; while the other took equally large bribes – and did not do the work it was bribed for.

Corruption, which does for Indian political life what sex scandals do for western democracies, is once again in the news in New Delhi, where the furore continues over the allegations that bribes – colossal bribes, ranging into the millions of pounds – were paid to some members of parliament in a bid to save the Indian government. After the Communist parties withdrew their support to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, because of his decision to push through a controversial nuclear power deal with the US, his government looked likely to collapse. Yet when parliament met on July 22 to vote on Singh’s future, he survived. A few opposition MPs, at the very last minute, changed their votes in his favour. A Communist leader alleged that the government’s supporters had bought these votes with bribes – he claimed that nearly three million pounds had been paid for each opposition vote. To add to the drama, three MPs smuggled in bags containing nearly a hundred thousand pounds in cash into parliament, and waved the money in front of the gathered journalists, alleging that the money was given to them in a bid to influence their votes. The government has survived, but the furore over the alleged bribes continues to grow by the day, dominating TV and newspaper headlines.

Indian Parliament: Show me the money

Published

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on July 22, 2008

in Politics

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Posted by Namita Bhandare:

Shame shame poppy shame. A vote of confidence debate in India’s Parliament was adjourned after Opposition BJP MPs interrupted the session by waving wads of cash which they claimed was evidence of bribes being offered by Amar Singh of the Samajwadi Party to abstain from voting against the ruling United Progressive Alliance.

Manmohan Singh’s government went on to win the vote with 275 for it, 256 against and 10 abstentions.

Meanwhile, Amar Singh has denied the charges and is threatening defamation suits against the MPs

For the Indian Parliament this is a new low. But cash and politics is hardly a new story. Here’s a quick history:

Jharkhand sham: In 1993, the Congress was accused of paying 10 MPs from Jharkhand and UP to vote in favour of the Narasimha Rao government. Some MPs went ahead and deposited the money into their bank accounts and the paper trail clearly established that cash was paid. The Supreme Court took up the matter but in 1998 ruled that the MPs who took money had not committed a crime. The judges said they were protected by the Constitution which grants immunity to MPs for anything they say or do in Parliament

Cash for questions: In December 2005, news channel Aaj Tak aired tapes (shot by website Cobrapost) of Indian MPs taking money purpotedly for raising questions in Parliament. Speaker Somnath Chatterjee said it was a very ’serious matter’ and appointed a five-member committee that found all 11 — ten from the Lok Sabha and one from the Upper House — guilty of accepting bribes ranging from Rs 15,000 to Rs 1.1 lakh for asking questions dealing with small business issues. They were all expelled.

Tehelka sting: In 2001, undercover journalists working for Tehelka posed as weapons contractors and caught the then BJP president Bangaru Laxman on camera accepting a bribe of Rs one lakh. Laxman was forced to resign and remains in the political wilderness. Tehelka also claimed that the corruption in India’s weapons acquisition programme involved the then defence minister George Fernandes and caught footage of his close associate, Jaya Jaitley apparently accepting money.

Harshad Mehta: On June 28 1993, Harshad Mehta — also known as the Big Bull of the Bombay Stock Exchange — held a press conference at the Taj Hotel in Mumbai. He announced that he had made personally made a pay off of Rs one crore to Prime Minster Narasimha Rao. The first installment of Rs 67 lakh had been made at Rao’s official residence at Racecourse Road. Rao denied the charge and in the event, was able to establish that he couldn’t have met Mehta on the day he claimed he had. But the charges of corruption and general venality stuck.

Hawala: In 1991, the arrest of Surendra Jain, a Madhya Pradesh businessman, yielded two diaries apparently written by him that detailed bribes and payoffs totalling a total of Rs 65 crore made to a total of 115 politicians and senior bureaucrats. For several years the CBI sat on what it knew was a hot potato. Then, Ram Jethmalani got wind of the diaries and went public with them. In January 1995, the CBI finally recommended the prosecution of 15 people, including L.K. Advani. Advani declared that he would abjure public office until he was cleared of all charge. With time, Advani was cleared but by the then, the BJP had propped up Atal Bihari Vajpayee as its prime ministerial candidate, and Advani was relegated to second place, losing out his chance at the top job.

Scandal gnaws at Buddha’s holy tree in India

Published

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on February 5, 2008

in Faith

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A Reuters report by Simon Denyer:

Tales of corruption, looting and religious rivalry are swirling around the spot where Buddha is said to have gained enlightenment in eastern India some 2,500 years ago, sullying one of Buddhism’s holiest sites.

Buddhist scriptures describe it as the “Navel of the Earth”, and 100,000 pilgrims and tourists visit every year, packing the town of Bodh Gaya in Bihar state and its Mahabodhi Temple.

An ancient pipal tree, Ficus religiosa or sacred fig, grows at the back of the temple, said to be a descendent of the one Buddha sat under for three days and nights in the sixth century BC, before finding the answers he sought under a full moon.

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