After more than a decade of false comparisons, the India and China likeness is starting to find some common ground. It’s not in staggering feats of engineering, or economic growth but in something that is far deeper and hard to measure — corruption. Public examples of corruption in China are starting to grab as many headlines as the cases of graft in India. As these episodes unravel, it’s clear that when it comes to hanky panky, the neighbours are competing hard, undermining both India’s claim of superior rule-based growth and China’s promise of untrammelled growth, driven by its central command.
Transparency International, which maps corruption perception in the public sector, gave India a score of 3.1 last year, making it worse off than countries such as Ghana, Lesotho, Rwanda, Liberia and Serbia. China, albeit, not as badly off had a poor score of 3.6, with 9.5 being the best score for any nation. According to the agency, “these surveys and assessments include questions related to the bribery of public officials, kickbacks in public procurement, embezzlement of public funds, and the effectiveness of public sector anti-corruption efforts.”
China’s most recent high profile case which has helped this perception involved former commerce minister and top politician Bo Xilai whose wife Gu Kailai is being investigated for the death of a British businessmen Neil Heywood, with whom the couple allegedly had dubious business arrangements. Chinese authorities now say the businessman was possibly murdered, even though at the time he died in November 2011, they put it down to excessive drinking. The whistleblower in Bo’s case was a chief of police, Wang Lijun, who seemed to have had a fallout with Bo. Wang chose to expose Bo to US officials at a nearby consulate because of China’s reputation for quashing unflattering revelations about public officers. In the meantime, the plot has thickened with overseas media reporting that power-hungry Bo ran an extensive wire tap that may have even covered the Chinese President.
India’s biggest corruption scandal involving an equally high profile public figure has undoubtedly been that of former telecom minster A Raja who allegedly gave away valuable spectrum at below-market prices to telecom companies. After months of outcry in the media and an equal period of government opaqueness, the case took a dramatic turn after the Supreme Court cancelled the licenses. Still, Raja remains in jail, investigators have yet to prove his guilt and the telecom scam hasn’t played out to its end. To observers, however, the unwillingness of the Indian government to admit to the alleged wrongdoing and the tardy progress by the central investigators is really no different from China’s dismissal of Heywood’s death as a drink overdose, or its inclination to suppress complaints against public office bearers.
There have been other scams in China to match India’s appetite for graft — which pans everything from sport to real estate. A former Morgan Stanley executive colluded with a top public official in a real estate deal to benefit the two, while China’s top football chief is under trail for bribe taking and a former referee has been jailed for match fixing in widespread corruption in the sport. Then it’s been reported that the U S authorities are investigating a clutch of Hollywood studios for greasing the palms of Chinese officials for release rights as China only allows a limited number of foreign screenings each year. Last year China sacked its railway minister for taking bribes running into millions of dollars.
As India-China comparisons continue this decade, India’s only hope is to come off the highly-corrupt-nation list. On several other parameters of progress, it is hopelessly behind.
Anjana Menon is a Delhi-based business writer. You can send your comments to bsshoptalk@gmail.com