Illicit India - Implosion: India's Tryst with Reality - page 201

ten conveniently) say they find it impossible to gather sufficient and precise evidence. That
makes it easier for the guilty to buy their way out of trouble, and no one is ever forced to
pay back the illegal funds in modern India where greed is a bigger driver of attitudes than
morals.
The Lalu conviction and jail sentence came at a time when attitudes were hardening, and
the Congress-led government knew that it had to take action to try to reduce the impact
of corruption on voting in the coming 2014 general election. RTI legislation was leading
to the exposure of fraud and extortion, but not enough was being done to prosecute and
convict offenders. Whistleblowers who exposed corrupt deals were themselves being pun-
ished (in the past they been killed) 29 instead of people they were naming. Ashok Khemka,
a senior bureaucrat in the state of Haryana, was transferred from his job three days after
he cancelled a land deal involving Robert Vadra, Sonia Gandhi's son-in-law. 30 He was then
officially charged with exceeding his powers on the Vadra case, and of failing in his du-
ties when he briefly ran the state's seeds corporation and reported widespread corruption.
A year after the Vadra action, court proceedings alleging administrative misconduct were
started by the Haryana government with the approval of Bhupinder Singh Hooda, the chief
minister who has close ties with Sonia Gandhi. 31
It is ironical that Gandhi should allow such action against an apparently honest official at
a time when Congress leaders were responding to popular demand for a tough line against
the corrupt. In what must have been the quickest punishment in the history of corruption,
Pawan Bansal, the minister for railways, had been forced by the government to resign a
few months earlier, in May 2013, just a week after allegations emerged linking his family
to bribes. It was alleged that Bansal's nephew was to be paid Rs 10 crore (about $2m) for
arranging that a senior railway engineer was made the 'member electrical' of the Railways
Board, which runs the railways within the ministry. The bribe was to be paid through a con-
tractor, having been raised from a group of businessmen dealing with railways signalling
and other equipment. During that week, CBI inquiries and a stream of media reports re-
vealed links involving Bansal, his family, and businessmen in a network of deals, plus the
rapid growth of family companies. When he resigned, Bansal asserted he had 'nothing to
do with all this'. 32 Arguments about his involvement continued as the legal process slowly
evolved. 33
The scandal itself was scarcely a surprise - paying for public sector jobs happens in
many developing countries, and maybe in more developed ones as well. Such appoint-
ments are often financed with money from companies that are promised contracts, as was
allegedly planned in this case. Nearly 20 years ago, I was told about a public sector cor-
poration chairman's job that was available in return for a payment of two crore rupees. 34
A prominent private sector company was offering to make the payment, and the candidate
knew it would expect to be given every contract or other services that it demanded while