Neha Thirani.
Corruption in India’s Ministry of Defense runs deep and wide, judging by the accusations made by defense officials in the past few months. Maybe that shouldn’t be a surprise. In the frequent cases of corruption that have surfaced in the ministry over the years, incidents of graft have implicated everyone from from petty officers to the highest ranks in the department.
This year a drawn-out battle about the birth date of the Indian Army Chief, Gen. Vijay Kumar Singh, ended unsuccessfully for the general when the Supreme Court declared the official date of his birth as 1950, implying that he will have to retire this May. After the decision, General Singh, chief of India’s 1.3-million-soldier army, started a battle of his own alleging in March that he was offered a bribe by a lobbyist for company supplying trucks to the Indian army. In an interview with The Hindu, the general said that he was offered a bribe of $2.75 million to clear the purchase of a portion of 600 “sub-standard vehicles.”
In a letter from him addressed to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh that was leaked on March 12, the general called India’s weapons obsolete, and questioned the country’s military readiness, sparking a furious debate in the country. “Has General V.K. Singh Killed Hope for Reforms?” the Economic Times asked in an editorial on Sunday, while DNA newspaper declared Monday that the General had “hit it right on the bonnet” when he called the trucks in question unfit.
The situation has yet again has raised vital concerns about military purchases in India, the world’s top arms buyer. Experts say that the procedures for defense acquisitions, factionalism within institution, legal maneuvers by defense firms and faulty production systems have led to a dangerous lack of preparation in the armed forces. The inundation of corruption allegations has led to further delays in necessary procurements for the armed forces. Following recent attention brought to corruption in the military, Mr. Anthony said on Thursday that a multibillion dollar deal to buy 126 fighter jets for the air force would be cancelled if there was any hint of corruption in the deal.
While kickbacks from purchases is the topic of discussion this year, the root of many cases of corruption in the Defense Ministry is the large amount of land given to the Indian Army by government, making the ministry the biggest landholder in the country with 1.73 million acres of land across the country. The land, which is given for the purpose of establishing cantonments, offices and residential complexes, often lies unused; there is a surplus of nearly 82,000 acres of land according to one estimate.
The most recent in a series of land disputes involving the armed forces is a case in Pune this past January. The vice chief of the Indian Army, Lt. Gen. Nobel Thamburaj, was charged with colluding with the defense estates officer, S. R. Nayyar, in an out-of-court land dispute settlement with a private builder, Kalpataru. While Kalparatu reportedly benefited by about $9 million, former vice chief of the Indian Army, Lt. Gen. Nobel Thamburaj and two others were booked by the Central Bureau of Investigation on charges of criminal conspiracy, cheating and misconduct. The same private builders were also involved in a case in Mumbai’s Kandivali-Malad area where they have said to have bought the land illegally from the Defense Ministry. Rao Inderjit Singh , the former minister of state for defense production, and former Army Chief Gen. Deepak Kapoor have been implicated in the case.
The functioning of the defense estate management also came into question in a recent land dispute worth about $39 million in Srinagar. There is a CBI inquiry against certain officials associated with the defense estate officer’s office in Sringar for colluding with private builders in the illegal transfer defense land surrounding Srinagar airport. As of March 28, a defense estates officer and a sub-divisional officer have been suspended following preliminary investigations.
In Jodhpur, a controversial decision to transfer 4.84 acres of defense land to the tune of about $3 million to a private trust made the headlines in early January. While the land was set aside for commercial development, a senior Ministry of Defense official wrongfully transferred the land to the Major Maharaja Hari Singh Charitable Trust, belonging to the erstwhile royal family of Jodhpur, without any legal sanction.
The land dispute case related to the armed forces that gathered the most attention in recent years is what has become known as the Adarsh Society Scam in 2010, which has implicated three former chief ministers of the state of Maharashtra, Sushilkumar Shinde, Vilasrao Deshmukh and Ashok Chavan. While the land was meant for housing Kargil war widows over a period of 10 years a posh building was constructed and apartments were allotted to senior military officers, bureaucrats and politicians at artificially lowered prices. On March 27, the Bombay High Court directed that status quo be maintained pending hearing on the petition filed by Union Ministry of Defense seeking implementation of an order directing demolition of the 31-floor Adarsh building. The defense ministry has now alleged that the building is a security threat as it overlooks installations inside the Colaba military station in Mumbai.
In 2008, another land scam that rocked the defense ministry was the Sukna land scam where 71 acres of land near the Army’s headquarters in Siliguri, West Bengal were transferred to an educational institution under the false guise to set up a franchise of Mayo College of Ajmer. Mayo College denied that they allowed any trust to set up franchisee schools. Four senior defense officials were implicated in the case, including former Military Secretary Lieutenant General Avadesh Prakash who was dismissed from service.
The same institution was allegedly in negotiations to purchase another piece of land belonging to the Ranikhet-based Kumaon Regimental Centre in Uttarakhand for the said purpose of opening a school. However, following the Suka inquiry, the sale was stopped. Following the Adarsh Society and Sukna scandles, the Defense Minister A. K. Antony have said that such land scams project the armed forces in a ‘bad light’. He called for a change in policy for local military authority power.
However, the best-known big ticket scandal that tainted the image of the Defense Ministry in India in recent history was the 1980s Bofors scandal. Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and several other top ministers were allegedly involved in bribing related to the $1.4 billion purchase of guns from a Swedish company known as Bofors, marking the first time since India’s independence a prime minister had been involved in a corruption scandal. India’s Central Bureau of Intelligence eventually found no evidence of wrongdoing by the Prime Minister, but that did not lay to rest questions and rumors surrounding the case.
Writing on May 1, 1988, Steven R, Weisman of The New York Times said, “Most people doubt that the controversy over the biggest Indian arms deal in history will go away. Indeed, it has continued as an almost daily feature in the news, with a widening cast of characters including shadowy arms merchants, actors, politicians and a globe-trotting Indian holy man.”
Brijesh Pandey, writing for Tehelka Magazine on Nov. 20, 2010, writes that the “rot runs deeper in the army” than singular cases might suggest. According to consultancy firm KPMG, by 2015, India would have spent 2.21 trillion rupees, or about $43 billion on “one of the largest procurement cycles in the world.” The scale of defense spending makes the scope for kickbacks considerable, and increases the need for vigilance against corruption.
A retired lieutenant general in the Indian Army, Satish Nambiar, writes in Tehelka magazine, “The time has come for the army to reassess its values to restore the image and prestige of the great organization that we have all had the privilege of being part of.”
And what of General Singh? He may be headed to the courts again, after whirlwind of leaks and finger-pointing.
The news channel NDTV said the Army released a statement that alleged a retired officer, Lt. Gen. Tejinder Singh, who served as chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency, had been offering bribes on behalf of Tatra-Vectra, which supplies vehicles to the Army. The chairman of Vectra said that he did not know General Singh, had never met him, and that his company had not offered him money. While General Singh alleged that the Tatra- Vectra trucks were substandard and exorbitant, the high pricing of Tatra-Vectra trucks has raised questions about the military procurement in the past, as well. Lieutenant General Singh, meanwhile, has filed a defamation suit against the Army chief in the Delhi High Court, and asked the government to provide a clarification by April 27, 2012.
-via NY Times
