India’s judiciary confronts moral maze

The white dome of India’s Supreme Court rises above the fray of New Delhi’s congested Tilak Marg, one of the city’s main arteries, and sits a short distance from imperious British Raj-era institutions of government.

The court is the final arbiter in the day-to-day loose ends of untidy, and in some cases unseemly, business and government dealings in the fast-growing economy.

Its judges are what stand – in the words of Ratan Tata, one of India’s most revered business leaders – between the world’s largest democracy and a “banana republic”.

The attention of the seasoned jurists inside has narrowed in recent weeks, however, as they have sat in judgment over corruption allegations engulfing the Congress party-led government of Manmohan Singh, the prime minister.

An inquiry into irregularities concerning the 2008 award of 2G telecoms licences by the telecoms ministry – which an official audit claims may have lost the exchequer as much as $39bn – has seen one minister leave the government and is being described by some as India’s Watergate.

While the telecoms scandal is the most threatening, it is not the only corruption scandal confronting the government. It also faces tough questions over graft surrounding the Commonwealth Games, land deals by the military top brass and improper property loans made by state-owned financial institutions.

The opposition scents blood. L.K. Advani, a veteran leader of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata party, has homed in on Mr Singh’s inability to control venal coalition partners. He has also brought parliament to its knees demanding a bipartisan probe into the telecoms scandal, which he argues demonstrates that “the government is indifferent to the problem of corruption”.

The Supreme Court is the institution that now finds itself in the middle and, some argue, in the lead in seeking to uphold the morals of a republic struggling with what Brinda Karat, a communist leader, calls a “malignant nexus” between politicians, bureaucracy and big business.

Today the court will ponder the credentials of the country’s anti-graft watchdog, the Central Vigilance Commission, and the suitability of its chief, P.J. Thomas, who was appointed to the role by Mr Singh.

Mr Thomas, a career civil servant, was until three months ago a senior official at the telecoms ministry. Opposition leaders have also pointed to his alleged involvement in a 1990s scandal in Kerala over the import of palm oil.

India’s top court has swelled as the country’s economy has grown. Today S.H. Kapadia, the chief justice, is joined by 28 judges. The court’s eminence has been tested heavily this year, as unresolved cases have passed up the chain from high courts to the apex court in a judicial system notorious for slow passage and routine appeals.

Some critics also argue that the decisions before it are not as lofty as had been intended 60 years ago, when it was founded with a chief justice and seven judges who would all sit together to weigh cases, guided by India’s new post-independence constitution.

Many of its headlining decisions increasingly concern the country’s powerful corporate sector as much as the rights of the country’s poorest.

Earlier this year the Supreme Court ruled in a dispute between brothers Anil and Mukesh Ambani, two of India’s leading and richest business leaders.

At issue was the price of natural gas amid a wider fallout in one of India’s biggest family succession feuds.

A few weeks later Vodafone, the UK telecoms company, appealed in the Supreme Court against a high court’s decision that it would be liable for tax on a transaction that had occurred outside of India when it bought Hutchison Essar. The Supreme Court has since ordered that it begin handing over some of the $2.5bn tax claim levelled against it by the Indian authorities.

Most recently, Mr Tata, the chairman of the Tata Group, has found himself before the court after asking it to protect his right to privacy and bar publication of intercepted telephone conversations with a powerful corporate lobbyist discussing the award of telecoms licences.