State of Corruption in South Asia 2000-01

Corruption afflicts South Asia at all levels of state and society. Scarce government resources that ought to be financing basic health, nutrition and education programmes are often allocated to huge arms deals and infrastructure projects that offer officials and politicians prospects of lucrative kickbacks. At the individual level, high levels of corruption impose disproportionate costs on the majority of South Asians, as they are forced to pay bribes in order to gain access to basic social services. Democratic and authoritarian governments alike wax lyrical about the need to combat corruption, but the region's political, bureaucratic and military elites are rarely held accountable.

The largest country, India, has the strongest democratic institutions in the region, but it is as plagued as Bangladesh, Nepal and Pakistan by systemic public and private sector corruption. Sri Lanka, which has the highest Human Development Index ranking, also suffers from this menace.

Foreign donors have played a significant role in influencing the region’s development as a whole over the past decades, pushing in recent years for good governance. But the direction of foreign aid in the region is still dictated by political and strategic considerations, rather than the economic needs and policy performance of recipients. There is no evidence that less corrupt governments receive more aid.

For governments, corruption has emerged as a key issue around which political battles are fought. Increasingly, South Asian governments stake their own legitimacy on the lack of accountability of political opponents, as events during 2000-01 clearly showed. The state's standard response to the demand for corruption control is to implement new strategies, laws, regulations and institutional mechanisms. These provide governments with a measure of legitimacy and serve to deflect public pressure, but it is questionable whether fundamental change is thereby achieved.

In India, convictions of high-level politicians restored a small measure of hope in the rule of law. In October 2000, P.V. Narsimha Rao became the first Indian prime minister to be convicted on charges of corruption. He was sentenced under the Prevention of Corruption Act 1988, along with a former home minister, to three years' imprisonment for bribing four minority MPs to alter their vote. At an All India Conference of State Vigilance Commissioners in January 2001, prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee vowed to "provide a clean, efficient and transparent administration" and to "adopt a policy of zero tolerance while dealing with corruption", His words boomeranged as an arms bribery scandal exposed by the news web site tehelka.com rocked the ruling coalition government of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA). A video-taped sting operation conducted by two journalists posing as arms dealers appeared to show politicians, senior military personnel and defence ministry bureaucrats receiving bribes.

In August 2000, allegations of kickbacks in arms deals, which implicated two army chiefs, one naval chief and two air force chiefs, hit the Pakistani headlines. The arms deals reportedly amounted to US $2.7 billion worth of submarines, jets and tanks from French and Ukrainian companies. In Bangladesh, official anti-corruption efforts continued to target political opponents of the ruling Awami League government. In August 2000, Hussein Mohammed Ershad, head of his own faction of the opposition Jatiya Party, was sentenced to five years' imprisonment, and fines US $1 million for misuse of office and corruption during his presidency. A month later, Khaleda Zia, a former prime minister, charged with receiving kickbacks of Tk1.7 billion (US $32 million), allegedly paid during the purchase of two French airbus passenger jets for state-run Biman Airlines during the party's 1991-95 rule.

In India, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) is often used by the government in power to promote its partisan objectives. The filing of the charge-sheet in the Bofors arms scandal case in October 2000 was seen by many in political and media circles as an attempt to malign Sonia Gandhi, president of the Congress Party. This was also seen to be the case with the disproportionate assets case filed against her personal secretary. Meanwhile, when it was the government’s turn to clean up its act in the wake of the Tehelka allegations, the focus of its inquiry was superficial – on the making and publication of allegations, more than on the alleged corruption itself.

In Pakistan, five successive elected governments have been dismissed on charges of corruption and mismanagement since 1988. Most recently, the Sharif government’s alleged manipulation of the trial judge in the Bhutto case, and Sharif's exile to Saudi Arabia in the 'national interest', left little doubt as to the political motives of official anti-corruption drives. Political observers and human rights activists in Pakistan questioned the legality and fairness of the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) ordinance that allowed detention of suspects for 90 days without a trial until recently, but which explicitly excludes serving military personnel and judges from its purview. While politicians useful to the military’s political machinations are also excluded, those from Sharif’s faction of the Pakistan Muslim League (PML) remained prime targets of the accountability bureau as the regime tried to use the stick of accountability to effect defections to the pro-military faction of the PML.

A further problem is the absence in the region of functioning judicial systems. While all South Asian countries have rigorous anti-corruption laws, conviction rates are low and sentences rarely carried out. The judicial process is open to manipulation and cases drag on for years. However, a vibrant press, with a healthy tradition of exposing corruption in high places, is emerging. Corruption exposés are turning the heat on governments and providing an impetus for reform. In the aftermath of the devastating Gujrat earthquake, media exposure of collusion between cabinet ministers, senior officials and construction firms to allow lax building codes provided further evidence of the investigative tradition in the Indian media coming into its own.

The Nepalese government introduced its key anti-corruption measures under sustained pressure from the media, the public and NGOs. In Sri Lanka, the government moved to institute a parliamentary select committee to investigate allegations of corruption in arms deals amid demands for accountability from the opposition and media. Freedom of information bills, the distinguishing mark of democracy around the world, are on the legislative table in India and Nepal.

As South Asian militaries are dependent on imports of critical weapon systems and technologies, millions of dollars are spent annually on arms procurement in the region. Arms deals offer the widest scope for corruption and malfeasance as governments override demands for transparency in the name of national security. Regulating the role of middlemen, reducing discretion and secrecy, ensuring the participation of all civilian and military actors in the decision-making process, and parliamentary oversight are some options for making arms deals more transparent. There is a belief in the region that the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention fails to make parent companies act with sufficient responsibility for the corruption of their subsidiaries or local agents. The menacing role of the global arms trade in fuelling a nuclear arms race in the region can only be ignored at our own peril.

As South Asian countries grapple with critical social, political and economic transformation, corruption is unlikely to decrease in the short run. Political instability, underpaid civil servants and unresponsive state institutions are compounded by rising poverty and unemployment. Political violence, increasing military expenditures spawned by intra-state and inter-state conflict, and massive debt burdens are also major problems. All these factors limit the capacity of states to institute the meaningful institutional reforms necessary for economic development and reducing corruption. Media and public pressure, collective citizen action and the consolidation of democratic institutions could, however, turn the tide in the medium term.

The writer is an Islamabad-based political analyst.

Excerpt from Global Corruption Report 2001, ©Transparency International, to be published on 15 October 2001 (www.globalcorruptionreport.org).