Indian Corruption Reaches the World

The BBC in its post fall from grace piece on Natwar Singh describes the man as a Cambridge educated diplomat who later studied at Peking University. He has been a supporter of what the Beeb calls “iconic Third World Leaders” including Fidel Castro, Gamal Abdul Nasser and Saddam Hussein, a man who shed public tears over the breakup of the former Soviet Union and publicly denounced the US and its allies’ invasion of Iraq. While the Congress Party in which he has been a loyal member and worker after leaving the Foreign Service decided to wash its hands off him as soon as the man’s role in profiting from the Oil For Food scam became public, it was interesting to note how the whole mess began, and, indeed, how the scam has been handled by the government in India.

It was during the first war in Iraq that Natwar’s boss, Rajiv Gandhi, pulled down a government in which the Congress was a coalition partner propping up what was for all practical purposes a one man show with Chandrashekhar as the Prime Minister of India. The reason that Rajiv Gandhi gave for this was that Chandrashekhar had allowed US aircraft bombing Iraq to refuel in Mumbai, something that he sharply disapproved of. Natwar had been a junior minister in the Rajiv Gandhi cabinet, though his years as a foreign service officer gave him the skills to deal with foreign governments, and to do it quietly and secretly. Perhaps, it was this skill that came in handy in the scam that would later end his career.

As a party, the Congress had a leader long before Natwar was of any political consequence who dismissed charges of corruption against her government by telling the world that corruption was a worldwide phenomenon. To this day, Congressmen do not seem to have any interpretation for this - Indira Gandhi did seem to justify corruption in India to the world when she said this. There had been scandals then - the Nagarwala case was a huge issue and the assassination of Raliway Minister Lalit Narain Mishra was also supposed to have been linked with corruption. In any case, the country’s Congress Party were accepted by the Indian people as a corrupt alternative to the completely inept opposition at the time - the Janata Party. After Indira’s assassination, her son Rajiv’s rule was also punctuated with accusations of corruption. Rajiv’s successor as Congress Prime Minister in India after the short lived National Front, Narasimha Rao, was also involved in scam after scam, becoming the first Prime Minister of India to be convicted of buying votes to defeat a no-confidence motion against his government.

It was in this atmosphere that Natwar Singh apparently found his calling, a move that would make him some money and later destroy his political career though it is widely believed that he has been made a scapegoat to protect the party that he was a member of. Iraq under Saddam Hussein was a friend of India. During the invasion and occupation of Kuwait, the Iraqis took care not to hurt hundreds of thousands of Indians who were in that country and the bulk of Indian newspapers justified the invasion in one way or another. When it became clear that war was imminent, the bulk of Indian newspapers and magazines made a big hue and cry about how battle hardened Iraqi soldiers were compared to Coca Cola sipping American troops who had only one war in recent memory to their credit - Vietnam. The view of “experts” in the Indian media was that Iraq would become another Vietnam and that the “US would be defeated” ignoring the fact that the coalition that fought the first war in Iraq consisted of not only the US and its allies in Europe but also Arab countries including Egypt, Syria and Saudi Arabia. After the complete rout of Iraqi forces in Kuwait, some newsmen grumbled that India’s stand would cost it rebuilding projects in Kuwait while others put a brave face on and spoke of even bigger potential projects in Iraq when Iraq would be rebuilt.

It must have been around this time that Natwar Singh probably worked his plan of allying with the Saddam government out. There have been a number of reports about how close some Indian businessmen were to senior Saddam officials - it used to be said that Tariq Aziz would get Dianil tablets for his diabetes from a trusted contact of his son’s in India because he was afraid that any medicines that he received in Iraq may be poisoned. It is a fact that there was widespread sympathy for Iraq under Saddam after the war with no political party happy about the sanctions. In India, itself, the Congress would be voted out of power and become the opposition for almost ten years, not an easy thing for a party known not only for the near stranglehold that it had on Indian politics for most of the time after independence but also for a party that could not digest the fact that being out of power made it look increasingly irrelevant to issues in India. It must have been a time when funds did not come in from donors in India - no one wants to support a lame horse - perhaps, this is where, when the OFP program began, an opportunity opened up.

For all the money that Natwar Singh and his bosses in the Congress may have made in the OFP, the fact is that they were among the smaller players. The Iraqis knew how much they wanted to give people depending on what they could get out of them, and, the opposition in a third world country like India was not likely to be able to do much at the UN or anywhere else. That said, Natwar’s former boss had publicly supported the Iraqi government during the war in Kuwait - probably the only leader to do this publicly along with Yasser Arafat and King Hussein of Jordan. Most probably, this was Saddam’s way of expressing his gratitude to the Congress Party through its representative.

Typical of the bluster that the Congress “shouting brigade” had shown during the Bofors, HDW and other scams during the Rajiv Gandhi government and later during the stock scam in the Narasimha Rao government, there were comments about suing the UN Secretary General and even the United Nations when the Natwar story broke. All of this subsided very rapidly when it became clear that no one was buying this big talk even within India. And then, pro Congress magazines like Outlook went into overdrive with disinformation meant to confuse people who bought their version of what had transpired between Natwar and the Saddam dictatorship. When this attracted even more attention to Natwar worldwide, he was given a quiet political burial and the issue made silent. An Indian politician had got away with corruption once more, only this time, it was corruption in a foreign country. An Indian had shown how his leader’s belief could be proven true - he was involved in what was definitely “a worldwide phenomenon.”