Graft claims stall Delhi legislative agenda

India’s winter session of parliament, like the monsoon session before it, held great expectations. Debates were due on mining legislation, the capital raising capability of banks and international accountancy standards.

Instead, this month’s winter session ground to a halt barely hours after it started. Allegations of gross corruption in the telecoms ministry have brought parliamentary business to a standstill. For the past seven days the debating chamber of the world’s largest democracy has been filled with the cries of protesting MPs.

Controversy over the undervaluation of 2G licences awarded in 2008 has sullied Indian’s reputation only days after Barack Obama, US president, described Asia’s third largest economy as no longer emerging but “emerged”.

This latest scandal adds to previous concerns over the Commonwealth Games and land deals by the military that have spurred introspection about the state of governance by Sonia Gandhi, the president of the Congress party, and across the political spectrum. Mrs Gandhi complained that higher economic growth had brought a “shrunken moral universe”.

The furore poses grave dangers to Manmohan Singh, the prime minister. On Tuesday a legal representative will answer questions on his behalf at the Supreme Court about the handling of telecoms regulation.

India’s Hindu nationalist opposition Bharatiya Janata party has struggled to find a chink in Mr Singh’s armour for six years. Now its leaders sense they have found one. A man known for his personal integrity and technocratic abilities may inevitably be tarnished by what Arun Jaitley, a BJP leader, describes as one of independent India’s most corrupt cabinets.

The goings-on at the telecoms ministry were widely suspected, if not publicly proclaimed. Indian coalition governments operate by allotting revenue-generating portfolios – such as telecoms, steel, railways and power – to electoral allies as a reward for loyalty. In the world’s fastest-growing mobile telephony market, the portfolio is a prize one.

The release of an official report last week that estimated India’s exchequer could have lost $40bn from corruption and incompetence has turned embarrassment into open outcry.

The citing of “serious irregularities” by the report triggered the resignation of Andimuthu Raja, the minister.

His scalp is not enough for the baying opposition. It wants a cross-party investigation to unearth the full horrors of what some describe as one of the biggest incidences of corruption in India’s post-independence history.

When Mr Obama addressed the Indian parliament earlier this month he told legislators their country needed to hold itself to a higher standard if it was to be a global power. .

Few analysts suspected that Mr Obama, who spoke of greater censure of Burma and Iran, might have referred to the substance of Indian democracy itself, and that within days India’s dirty linen would be hanging out for all to see.

Mr Singh, regarded as one of the G20s most competent leaders, has tried to place India’s misdemeanours in a wider context.

“We have to deal effectively with the threats of corruption and crony capitalism, not only in India but all over the world,” he says.

Mr Singh has also lamented that the opportunity to pass new laws to improve the lives of Indians is being lost. He has appealed to the opposition not to jam valuable legislating sessions, and address “differences” in debate rather than by open protest.

“There should be no doubt in anybody’s mind that if any wrong thing has been done by anybody, he or she will be brought to book,” Mr Singh says.

Kapil Sibal, the education minister now deployed to plug the gaps in the telecoms ministry, uses a cricketing analogy to describe the current breakdown. He says the opposition has run off with the stumps, preventing resumption of play.

An ambitious legislative programme that the Congress party’s victory in June 2009 made possible has yet to make it out of the pavilion. A government beset by national ignominy ensures it stays there.

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Tamil Nadu’s leaders show clout

M. Karunanidhi, a former Tamil screenplay writer and wheelchair-bound octogenarian chief minister of India’s southern Tamil Nadu state, makes only rare visits to India’s capital New Delhi, writes Amy Kazmin.

But for the past 15 years, the patriarch of the 60-year-old DMK party has wielded plenty of influence in India’s capital thanks to his party’s control of a clutch of parliamentary seats that help national parties form a coalition.

This clout allowed Mr Karunanidhi to install Andimuthu Raja, a little-known but politically reliable small-town lawyer, as telecommunications minister in 2007, reigning over the fast-growing mobile phone market in the current Congress-led administration.

Mr Raja was forced to resign last week, accused by the comptroller and auditor-general of India of causing $40bn in losses to the national coffers by awarding mobile phone licences on a “first-come, first-served” basis – at throwaway prices – rather than through an auction. Yet Congress will not be able to escape Tamil Nadu’s political barons quite so easily.

Neither Congress nor its Hindu nationalist opposition Bharatiya Janata party have a strong presence in Tamil Nadu. Instead, the state’s colourful politics are dominated by Mr Karunanidhi and his scions – including a son called M.K. Stalin – and his bitter rival J. Jayalalitha, the former Tamil film star.