Dragging India Out of the Muck Convoluted bureaucracy provides fertile soil for corruption, but strong, credible institutions could still help.By SADANAND DHUME Mash together newspaper headlines, television news bulletins and the most popular Indian topics on Twitter, and you arrive at an inescapable conclusion: Something is rotten in India. Exhibit A: A massive telecom scandal that has seared itself into national consciousness. Last week, a government audit accused former telecom minister Andimuthu Raja of losing taxpayers $40 billion by selling mobile telephone spectrum licenses to favored firms at throwaway prices two years ago. Mr. Raja, who was forced to step down from office last week, says he is innocent. Meanwhile, users of the social networking sites Twitter and Facebook are aflame with anger at what many see as a cozy nexus between powerful corporate lobbyists, top politicians and influential journalists. Last week, two news magazines published transcripts and recordings of secretly taped conversations last year between Niira Radia—a lobbyist for two of India's richest men, Mukesh Ambani and Ratan Tata—and, among about a dozen others, columnist Vir Sanghvi, television anchor Barkha Dutt and magazine editor Prabhu Chawla. Each conversation tells a different story. Mr. Sanghvi appears eager to act as a glorified public relations flak. "What kind of story do you want?" he asks Ms. Radia baldly. By promising to ferry messages between Ms. Radia and senior Congress Party politicians deciding on cabinet posts, Ms. Dutt appears to cross a line between reporting the news and actively shaping its outcome. For his part, Mr. Chawla speaks suggestively of influencing a high-profile court case over gas pricing between Mukesh Ambani of Reliance Industries and his estranged brother Anil. It's important to note that none of this was illegal; rather, the question is journalistic ethics. Both Mr. Sanghvi and Ms. Dutt deny any wrongdoing and characterize their conversations with Ms. Radia as routine news gathering. Mr. Chawla has not commented. Though many Indian newspapers and most television channels have avoided covering the Radia tapes—honoring a somewhat dodgy tradition of journalistic solidarity—the recordings have nonetheless come to dominate the country's Internet chatter. Scores of people commented on this newspaper's blog posts on the controversy, and it has dominated Indian traffic on Twitter for five days running. Much of the outrage is exaggerated. Virtually all journalists sweet-talk their sources; just how much is a matter of degree. Moreover, there's no evidence that any of the journalists in the Radia tapes profited from their conversations, much less had a direct hand in landing Mr. Raja the coveted telecom portfolio that led to the spectrum scam. Indeed, Ms. Dutt and Mr. Sanghvi have been sharply critical of the tainted minister. Many of those who attack them also forget to point out that the magazines that published the transcripts invaded the privacy of private citizens accused of no crime. The din of the Twitterverse appears to have swallowed an important distinction between the unseemly and the illegal. And the Indian public seems to want to have it both ways: lauding journalists for their access to power while simultaneously expecting them to keep a dignified distance from power's murk. Simply put, it's naïve to expect a country's political journalism to be entirely insulated from its political culture. Nonetheless, the uproar stems from a deeper question. Why does India—founded on high ideals and home to a free press and a famously vibrant democracy—do such a shoddy job of policing corruption? Transparency International ranks the country 87 out of 178 surveyed for perceptions of public corruption, 11 places behind autocratic China and on par with Albania and Liberia. The answer involves a toxic cocktail of politics and culture. In general, those who feel most upset by corruption—especially an abstract loss to the state exchequer of the sort embodied by the spectrum scam—are also those who matter least in terms of electoral math. At best, 300 million Indians can be deemed middle class by any yardstick. For most of the rest, caste and the price of food grain is more likely to influence their vote than notional looting in distant Delhi. Moreover, in an era of coalition politics, caste-based or regional parties with little conception of the national interest wield disproportionate clout. Mr. Raja belongs to one such party, the DMK, a key Congress ally from the southern state of Tamil Nadu whose campaign techniques include distributing cash and cable TV connections to prospective voters. For its part, the middle class tends to take a constrained and personalized view of corruption. In advanced democracies, leaders are deemed upright as much for presiding over a clean system as for personal integrity. By contrast, until now Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has risked no personal taint for the misdeeds of his colleagues. Over the years, Indians have developed a finely honed ability to focus on supposedly saintly individuals while ignoring the muck they spring from. A culture of shame (rather than guilt) ensures that for many politicians the crime of corruption is only the crime of getting caught. Add to that a hierarchical society that discourages whistle blowing, a convoluted bureaucracy bequeathed by four decades of socialism, and a culture that widely condones special favors for family and friends and you see why the problem won't vanish overnight. Anybody who has lived in India has likely encountered the traffic cop who expects a bribe for not writing a ticket, the office clerk who won't do his job until his palm is greased, and the touts and fixers who congregate wherever the life of the citizen meets the authority of the state. But this doesn't mean that India can't begin to make a dent in corruption. Every walk of life—from politics to the bureaucracy to, yes, journalism—has its share of the scrupulously upright. Unlike many developing countries, India has a record of sustaining credible institutions, among them the Supreme Court, the Election Commission and the Securities and Exchange Board of India. If Prime Minister Singh wants to be remembered as more than just a personally clean man who presided over a staggeringly corrupt administration, he needs to establish similar institutions to fight graft. Activists believe a good place to start would be an independent anti-corruption commission backed with investigative powers, prosecutorial heft and fast-track courts. Only when India begins to rein in its out-of-control politicians will it be realistic to be squeamish about those who report on them. Mr. Dhume, a columnist for WSJ.com, is writing a book about the new Indian middle class. Follow him on Twitter @dhume01
