Cable alleges vote buying in India

Diplomatic cable claims official of India’s ruling Congress party told US of bribe plan India’s increasingly shaky coalition government is facing a fresh crisis following the release of an American diplomatic cable obtained by WikiLeaks which appears to reveal a government bid to buy support in parliament before a vote in 2008. Published in the Hindu newspaper , the cable claimed that an official from the ruling Congress party had told a US diplomat stationed in Delhi that a fund of between 500m and 600m rupees (between £7m and £8.2m) existed to pay parliamentarians to ensure the survival of the government. India’s opposition parties demanded the resignation of the prime minister Manmohan Singh, who has been under fire in recent months following a series of corruption cases. The Indian media has closely followed investigations into the scandals, which include an alleged telecoms scam estimated to have cost the state nearly £25m. The former telecoms minister, from a coalition partner of Congress, is currently in detention. Other government figures alleged to have acted corruptly include senior sports administrators involved in last year’s Delhi Commonwealth Games. The WikiLeaks report said an aide to a senior Congress politician had shown the American diplomat two chests of cash and said four lawmakers of a regional party had been paid 100m rupees each for their support. “Money was not an issue at all … the crucial thing was to ensure that those who took the money would vote for the government,” the aide was reported to have said. A second official allegedly told the diplomat that formerly a minister “could only offer small planes as bribes” but “now he can pay for votes with jets”. Votes at all level of politics in India are routinely exchanged for cash or favours. Allegations that money changed hands before the vote in 2008 – which came at the height of acrimonious debates over a controversial civil nuclear deal with the US – have been made before. Narasimhan Ram, editor of the Hindu, said the newspaper had gained access to the cables after long talks with WikiLeaks, which has been releasing portions of 250,000 leaked state department cables through selected newspapers since late last year. In December, the Guardian published a series of reports based on more than 5,000 cables sent by the US embassy in Delhi to Washington. One revealed that Rahul Gandhi, son of Congress party president Sonia Gandhi – who is widely seen as her political heir – had told the American ambassador that violent Hindu radicalism in India posed a potentially greater threat to the country than Islamist extremism . A second cable revealed a briefing by the Red Cross describing systematic torture in Indian detention centres in Kashmir . Ram said his newspaper would publish more revelations in coming days. “Can there be any doubt that there is something deeply rotten in our democracy? You are talking about a rising India … There are a lot of good things happening but at the heart of it is something rotten,” he said. Sushma Swaraj, a leader of the Bharatiya Janata party, said Singh’s government had lost its legitimacy. “This is a hammer blow that it cannot recover from,” she said in parliament. “It has lost all moral responsibility to govern.” The speaker of the house was forced to suspend proceedings for the day. A series of political protests over corruption has blocked parliamentary business in India for months. The current government, in its second term, has been unable to pass much-needed economic reforms as a result. Satish Sharma, the senior Congress politician at the centre of the new scandal, told reporters the claims were “baseless”. The government narrowly won a vote of confidence in 2008 after Communists withdrew support in anger at a landmark civil nuclear co-operation deal between India and the US. The four lawmakers whom the report alleged to have been paid bribes by the Congress official eventually voted against the government. India United States WikiLeaks Jason Burke guardian.co.uk

Posted by on March 17, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.