Telecom Scandal Plunges India Into Political Crisis

Tycoons with friends in high places. Public tenders conducted by irregular rules. Tens of billions of dollars in potential losses for the national treasury. Allegations of government ministers on the take, and of a respected prime minister too aloof to notice. Those are some of the ingredients of a telecommunications scandal that is growing into India’s equivalent of Teapot Dome.

It has produced almost daily revelations about bribery, abuse of power, and privatization of public wealth that paralyzed Parliament for more than three weeks before its winter session ended Monday and have plunged the governing Congress Party into its worst political crisis in years. The issue is how a minister allied with the party sold cellphone operators the airwaves to provide their service in 2008. But the amounts involved, and subsequent revelations of how some of India’s richest men sought to exercise influence over political appointments and regulatory decisions, have surprised a nation seemingly inured to reports of corruption in politics. An independent auditor estimated that the government may have left almost $40 billion on the table by selling the rights too cheaply. The political fallout seems to grow each day.