My first consultation after lunch this afternoon was with Dr. Chutiachod Haramijhaatrandkimoot Gaandukuthri of the Indian Embassy. I immediately concluded that, he, too, had recently finished lunch himself, which, if the odor of his breath was any indication, consisted of something made with stale lentils, sour mangos, over-ripe kudampuli, moldy ratin jot and putrid charoli roasted in rancid linseed oil, all seasoned with decidedly too much cheap curry powder, star anise and cardamom – his wife’s home cooking, I presumed. As he made himself comfortable on the couch by the picture window, Gretchen sent me an IM from her desk in the reception area.
It was then that I realized the odor was not Dr. Gaandukuthri’s breath. “Your current guest asked if he could heat up his lunch our galley microwave, and I let him,” Gretchen’s IM confessed. “I’m sorry. Need to leave now. Will return in about an hour.”
It was shortly after I read Gretchen’s message that I looked up to see that, instead of having recently finished it, Dr. Gaandukuthri was indeed only just beginning to eat his lunch – off the top of the coffee table in front of the couch. “Ah, Tom,” he chortled as he removed a large Tupperware container from a greasy brown paper bag in his briefcase, “would you care for some hand made Masoor dal? It’s a secret family recipe!”
“No thanks,” I cordially replied, gamely battling my gag reflex while watching him eye my liquor cabinet, “I just ate. Care for a drink?”
“Certainly,” he nodded eagerly, “if it’s not too much trouble.”
Figuring that, under the circumstances, I could use a drink myself, I promptly loaded two highball glasses with Evian ice cubes, chilled Perrier water and Macallan 18, then handed one of them to Dr. Gaandukuthri. He promptly killed about a third of it, smiled contentedly, and began slurping dal with a plastic spoon. “So,” he began, between lip smacks, “have you seen the 2011 Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index?”
“Certainly,” I vouched. “New Zealand took top honors for honest government practices this year, scoring nine point five out of a possible perfect ten. Somalia and North Korea are tied for one hundred and eighty-second place with record low scores of exactly one out of ten, which still places them farther from a total zero than New Zealand is from a perfect ten.”
“Yes,” he agreed, “some things in this world are exactly as you would expect. Denmark, Sweden and Finland for example, all rich Northern European countries, all scoring above nine. Meanwhile we have Burundi, Equatorial Guinea, Venezuela, Haiti, Sudan, Iraq, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan and Myanmar – each of which is either poor, war torn, isolated, under the heel of a ruthless dictator, or sometimes two or three of those at once – all of them down at the bottom with scores of less than two.”
“Not the best of company,” I noted. “It’s interesting that Russia only managed to narrowly escape that distinction with a score of two point four – locking the Russians in a nine-way tie for one hundred and forty-third place with Uganda, Togo, Nigeria, Mauritania, Timor, Azerbaijan, Belarus and the Comoros Islands. Maybe that old saw about the Soviet Union being nothing but Upper Volta with rockets turned out to be true – only today, of course, they’re called the Russian Federation and Burkina Faso, and actually, this year, with a score of three for the latter, it looks like if you want to do business, you’ll have to pay more and bigger bribes to government officials in Moscow than in Ouagadougou.”
“Yes, but what,” he demanded, stopping briefly between slurps, “about India?”
“Ah yes,” I acknowledged, “you dropped nine places this year, from eighty-seventh to ninety-fifth out of one hundred and seventy-eight, with a score of three point one. Still, you’re much better off than your neighbor Pakistan, which scored only two point five and came in at one hundred and thirty-fourth, or Nepal, which scored only two point two and came in one hundred and fifty-fourth, or Bangladesh, which scored…”
“China,” he interrupted, “got a three point six! Seventy-fifth place! Can you believe that?”
“Meaning,” I pointed out, “that China is no more corrupt than Romania, which is also vying with it for seventy-fifth place in the governmental transparency derby.”
“Come, come now,” Dr. Gaandukuthri chided as he paused to delicately dab his mouth with a handkerchief, “do you really think India deserves a place twenty slots below China? Not just on this issue, not just on this scale of measurement, but on any?”
“Frankly speaking,” I advised, “there have been a number of… incidents in the past year which probably played a significant role in lowering India’s score. There’s that telecommunications bandwidth sales scandal, for example, in which it’s alleged that Unitech Wireless, Reliance Telecom and Etisalat Limited bribed Andimuthu Raja, your Minister of Telecommunications, and Kanimozhi Karunanidhi, a Member of Parliament for Nadu Tamil in the Rajya Sabha, to fix the price for government sale of 2G bandwidth and thereby cheat the Indian treasury out of over a trillion rupees. It just went to trial early last month.”
“A rupee,” Dr. Gaandukuthri shrugged between bites, “is not worth much.”
“No,” I agreed, “but a trillion of them adds up to around ninety billion dollars, and, while that may not be enough to balance the US federal budget, it’s still quite a chunk of change. Then there was the arrest last February of Lalit Bhanot and V.K. Verma, the secretary-general and director-general of the Commonwealth Games committee in a kickback scheme involving the overpriced purchase of equipment from Swiss Timing in Berne.”
“So why,” Dr. Gaandukuthri objected with a noticeable air of indignation, “did India get a three point one while Switzerland got an eight point eight?”
“Because,” I parried, “the allegedly corrupt acts involved Indian officials of an Indian international sporting event and were allegedly committed in India, perhaps?”
“A pretty sorry excuse, if you ask me,” Dr. Gaandukuthri huffed.
“How about that illegal mining scandal in the Bellary region of Karnataka? It’s alleged that corrupt local officials in Bangalore colluded with executives of the Obulapuram Mining Company to cheat the central Indian government out of billions of dollars in mining tax revenues using a network of bogus front companies incorporated in Singapore for a dollar apiece.”
“I would imagine it’s quite difficult to restrain one’s buying impulses,” Dr. Gaandukuthri observed, “when something only costs a dollar apiece. So they went overboard a little bit – who can blame them for that?”
“In addition,” I continued, “there has been the Adarsh Housing Society scam in Mumbai, where a high rise apartment complex constructed to house war widows and their families allegedly ended up as luxury suites for Indian government bureaucrats who abetted violations of the law concerning its construction.”
“Even Indian government bureaucrats,” Dr. Gaandukuthri sighed, “need a place to live, don’t they?”
“And speaking of government bureaucrats,” I volleyed back, “what about the ongoing investigation of your state-owned airline, Air India, for allegedly making a ten billion dollar purchase of sixty-eight Boeing and forty-three Airbus jets at allegedly inflated prices in return for alleged bribes to various government officials?”
“Tell me the truth, Tom,” Dr. Gaandukuthri insisted. “Would you really want to fly from Dulles to New Delhi for twelve hours in a leaky, creaky old airplane?”
“All right,” I relented, “it sounds like you have an answer for everything today. What can I do for you?”
“Okay,” Dr. Gaandukuthri said with a smile as he finished his lunch, “the way I see it, the true significance of India’s rating with Transparency International is its effect on our nation’s public image.”
“Transparency International is a non-profit organization dedicated to eliminating, or at least reducing corruption,” I flatly stated, “and, as such, can do nothing much else besides affect a nation’s public image. On the other hand, it appears they do a very good job of it.”
“Ah, yes,” Dr. Gaandukuthri concurred, “they do. But the name of the metric is interesting, don’t you think? It’s called the ‘Corruption Perceptions Index,’ isn’t it? Right there in the name, one can readily see, that these numbers are, in the final analysis, only subjective measures of certain individuals perceptions.”
“It’s not,” I cautioned, “quite that simple, I’m afraid. Transparency International says on their Web site that the Index is, ‘an aggregate indicator that combines different sources of information about corruption,’ and consequently, it does in fact involve a certain amount of objective data and unbiased application of calculations. The ultimate basis of determination is assessments and opinion surveys carried out by independent institutions.”
“Perhaps,” Dr. Gaandukuthri allowed. “But nevertheless, at the end of the day, there must be a group of individuals who enter the numbers and turn the crank, so to speak.”
“Yes,” I admitted, “it’s inevitable that there must be some people who review the relevant information, prepare it for analysis, apply the assessment algorithm and obtain the numerical results that comprise the index values.”
“Correct!” Dr. Gaandukuthri exclaimed, leaning toward me with obvious excitement. “And being human, there must be some way to encourage them to produce more… suitable results for India next year!”
“You want me,” I inquired, astounded, “to brainstorm ways to… corrupt the people who calculate the Corruption Perceptions Index?”
“No,” Dr. Gaandukuthri clarified, “not exactly. You see, we at the Indian Embassy have reason to suspect that the French government has already figured out how to do that.”
“And what,” I carefully probed, “makes you… suspect this?”
“They must have,” Dr. Gaandukuthri boldly asserted. “Otherwise, how else could France have scored a seven?”
“So,” I reasoned, “what you really want is for me to come up with some ways to steal the methods and identify the connections the French use?”
“Exactly!” Dr. Gaandukuthri proudly proclaimed, rubbing his hands together in glee. “Then next year, India can get a seven, too! What do you think?”
“Well,” I assured him, “it’s certainly nothing the Chinese would ever come up with.”