← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
Jan 27, 2011
00:28:10
The rampant corruption that blights India's dreams of a brighter future is chronicled...
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You are listening to a download from the BBC. This is from our own correspondent. You can hear the version of the program broadcast on the BBC World Service and presented by Alan Johnston by going to the from our own correspondent website or indeed to that of the BBC World Service. But here's the edition which goes out on BBC Radio 4. It's introduced by Kate Ady.
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Today, Progress, prosperity, greed and corruption. Our man leaving the BBC office in Delhi on the Good, Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Indian life. A tour of the frontline in Mogadishu, once the pearl of the Indian Ocean, now one of the most violent cities on earth. There's a snapshot of Dubai before rampant development and before economic crisis and a turf war in Las Vegas, as two Mafia museums bid to tell it their way. The Indian government this week removed from office two senior officials behind the organizing of the Commonwealth Games last year. It was, they said, to help police carry out an inquiry into alleged corruption. The claim of dodgy dealings at the Games is just one in a series of scandals facing the country at the moment. Corruption seems everywhere you look and the government has pledged urgent action. Tens of billions of pounds are said to be involved and this in a country where millions of citizens remain trapped in poverty. Chris Morris, who has just moved to a new BBC posting in Europe, says the stories of corruption became increasingly commonplace during the three and a half years he was based in Delhi.
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As with many things in India, I had a bit of a love hate relationship with Aruna Asif Ali Marg. This was the road on which I drove or was driven most days I was in Delhi from home to work and back. All life was there, a little bit of everything. There was the India of progress and increasing prosperity. The new hospital on the corner, the South Asian University, the National Institutes of Immunology and of Plant Genome Research. There were wedding halls and restaurants, students going shopping and workmen building bridges. But there was also, how can I put this politely, one hell of a mess. Shortly after I joined the commuters on Aruna Asif Ali, the council knocked down a whole series of buildings which had encroached onto public land by the side of the road. Well, they didn't knock them down completely. They just knocked down enough to make them uninhabitable to Concertina one illegal floor onto the next. It looked a bit like the aftermath of an earthquake. Never fear, I thought, this will soon be part of the new India. India Shining. But then nothing happened. There were legal disputes. Presumably no one told anyone else what to do with the buildings. So they just stayed there, falling to pieces by the side of the road every day for the next three years. Did I say uninhabitable? Well, I was wrong. Little by little, people, families, businesses, started moving back into the ruins. A used car dealership among the crumbling masonry, a tandoori chicken stall in half, a broken room. There were piles of rubbish everywhere. How can there be so much contrast in just one country? People ask. How can there be so much contrast on just one road? Even the surface of the road, the tarmac itself, mirrored this rather schizophrenic existence. Parts of Aruna Asif Ali, where it skirted the wooded campus of the Jawaharlal Nehru University, were like a motorway, six lanes wide and smooth as you like. But you had to know the road to know where to slow down, because the smooth surface ended in the most spectacular undulation, which occasionally caused small cars in front of us to attempt vertical takeoff and landing. And then there was another stretch where the road almost ceased to exist, just a few bits of tarmac scattered among the potholes, which became treacherous lagoons during the rainy season. So imagine my surprise when one day it was all mended overnight. Not bad, I said to my driver. Progress, he sighed. The President, he said, was due to travel down Aruna Asaf Ali to the Chhatapur temple. It had been a very quick fix, and sure enough, the potholes were soon back with a vengeance. Such was life on Aruna Asif Ali Marg. I was always just passing through, which is, I suppose, the fate of the itinerant foreign correspondent. But you didn't have to look too hard to see India unfolding before you. Rich Indians in expensive cars on their way to the designer shopping centre round the corner, more and more middle class Indians building optimistically for the future, and poor Indians struggling and wondering when their time to shine would come. I was walking back to my car from the chemist's shop one day when I saw a man carefully hanging a piece of plastic sheeting from one bit of rubble to the next. It looked like he was moving in, so I wondered over to ask him why no one seemed all that upset to be living and working in the middle of such a mess. Prakash had two children in a distant village and worked as a security guard. Occasionally, he confided he moonlighted as a rickshaw driver. It's not really up to us, he said, gesturing with his head in one direction and then another. It's up to them. Us, very broadly, is the aam admi, Hindi for the common man. Mr. Average, the very guy the Indian government says it's trying to help. And them, well, they are those at the top, the people who've made it in politics or business or Bollywood or cricket. They are wealthy and increasingly they don't care who knows it. And for me, that always jarred a little on Aruna Asif Ali Marg. Because this was a road named in honour of a heroine of the Indian independence movement. It's a name which evokes a different era, images of sacrifice and personal restraint. A reminder of the legacy of Mahatma Gandhi. India still talks proudly about its Gandhian heritage. It trades on it. Parliamentarians were delighted when Barack Obama addressed them in Delhi and told them he might not have been standing where he was if it hadn't been for Gandhi's inspiring example. But for years now, with some notable exceptions, Gandhian values have all but disappeared from Indian public life for most of the time in modern India, greed is good. Maybe they're just reverting to type. Indians love to trade. Hindu festivals are often celebrations of wealth and prosperity. And this is a country which needs to get richer to help the poor. But when the head of the government's main anti fraud body retired last year, he made an extraordinary one in three Indians. Pratya Sinha estimated is utterly corrupt and a majority of the rest are right on the borderline. When we were growing up, he said if somebody was corrupt, they were generally looked down upon. There was at least some social stigma attached to it. That's gone now. There's greater social acceptance. By and large I think he's right. Which is why I was taken by surprise during my last few months in Delhi by the sudden intensity of focus on corruption in high places. Cabinet ministers, wealthy businessmen, members of the armed forces and politically well connected organisers of the Commonwealth Games, all of them came under the microscope. The media were having a field day. India's excitable 24 hour news channels were breaking so much news I thought they might burst. One day my morning paper ran five different major corruption stories on its first eight pages. Nothing else got a look in. So it wasn't too unexpected that when the BBC commissioned an opinion poll which came out in December, corruption and greed emerged as the most widely discussed problem in India. Yes, even more than losing a game of cricket, my more cynical friends were distinctly unimpressed. They assured me it would all be taken care of in the usual way. A couple of scapegoats, a commission of inquiry lasting 20 years and snouts back in the trough. There are times when it feels that way. A nagging worry that India could soon begin to resemble Russia, a country run by a clique of oligarchs with politicians in their pockets. Even the doyen of Indian business, Ratan Tata, the owner of Mumbai's famous Taj Hotel and the man who brought us the Nano, the world's cheapest car, has spoken of the dangers of a banana republic mentality emerging. With crony capitalism ruling the roost, the government says it will get to the bottom of it all. The opposition stalled parliamentary business for weeks, shouting down speaker after speakers in order to embarrass the government. And the record shows that nearly a third of all members of Parliament are facing criminal charges, many of them for corruption. So I must admit I prefer grassroots initiatives like the zero rupee note. It's a replica of the 50 rupee note, complete with a smiling Mahatma Gandhi, except it adds a written declaration that I promise to neither accept nor give bribe. The idea is that you hand one over when any official asks you to grease his or her palm. It's an appeal to that lost sense of shame. More than a million zeros have now been pushed across counters up and down the country. And for those who transgress, who pay the extra money just to get things done, just to take away some of the stresses and strains of everyday life, there are websites like ipaidabribe.com where you can confess all and compare notes with fellow sufferers. But what's been emerging recently has been of a rather different scale. It's not about the low level bureaucrat asking for tea, money to countersign a passport form or hand over a driving license. It's about a multi billion pound overspend on the Commonwealth Games, with no one entirely sure where all the money has gone. It's about a six story building meant for war widows in Mumbai, which became a 31 story luxury complex where relatives of army officers and politicians got preferential rates. And the biggest scandal of all surrounding the sale of mobile phone licenses. It's estimated to have cost the public exchequer more than £20 billion. Little wonder that some are saying enough is enough. And back on Aruna Asif Ali Marg, whether in the ruins, the restaurants or the research centres, there's probably a tingle of pleasure that at least some of them are perhaps finally being held to account. But at the same time, there's undoubtedly grudging admiration for those who've made it to the top. Whether by fair means or foul, India has always been a place where hierarchy is all important, where everyone is supposed to know his or her place out in the villages, the million villages. The caste system still reigns supreme. But in urban India, money determines your status now, no matter how you made it. So on leaving Delhi and sitting here writing this, with the freezing rain of Brussels beating down outside, I still wonder where my former home, that vast country of infectious energy, is going next. What will you miss about India? I've been asked. The chaos, I say. The creative surge. And what won't you miss? The chaos, I say again. The other side of the same coin. If you want a quick taste of it all, you could do worse than to take a trip down Aruna Asif Ali Margaret it's all there in glorious technicolour, the good, the bad and the ugly.
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Chris Morris It's 20 years now since the fall of Somalia's dictator, Mohammed Syed Barre, but peace in that country seems as elusive as ever. Today, in the latest chapter of its troubled history, a transitional government supported by African Union peacekeeping forces is fighting a bloody war against the Islamist militia of Al Shabaab. Justin Marozi is just back from the capital, Mogadishu, and says that while violence is almost an everyday occurrence there, some believe a better future is within reach.
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The approach to Mogadishu is suitably dramatic. One minute we're cruising at 30,000ft in our small UN propeller plane the next we're skimming across the glittering Indian Ocean at 50ft to avoid enemy fire. This sort of flying concentrates the mind. Spend a few days in this once beautiful coastal city, wracked by war for the past two decades, and you soon get used to having heightened senses. In Villa Somalia, the presidential compound in the heart of the capital, stray bullets regularly whiz through at head height. One evening, chatting to a group of Somalis outside the offices of Radio Mogadishu, bullets fly past a little too close for comfort. Quick, it's Youssef. My hosts cry, and we duck into the building to take cover. Yousef? I ask them when I've caught my breath. Who's that? Heart racing, I imagine a deadly sniper peering at us through telescopic sights. Halfway across the city, the Somalis burst into laughter. Yusuf, they repeat, still chuckling, then stretch out the word. Yusuf. It's their nickname for stray bullets. Another afternoon, I joined the African Union forces for a tour of the front line. Major Anthony Alambusi, a Ugandan battalion commander, is not your typical city guide. The glint in his eyes suggests he is up for this fight. It's a noisy experience. The staccato crackle of machine gun fire rips about us. Rocket propelled grenades pound into positions only 50 meters away. Shrapnel fizzes past. What's most shocking, though, isn't so much the shooting as the level of destruction. If the fighting stopped tomorrow, whole swathes of Mogadishu would have to be rebuilt from scratch. There isn't a house or building that's unscathed. Walls have been punched through by rockets and grenades. Roofs have fallen in. Roads and alleys are torn up and overgrown with weeds and bushes. Only flashes of bougainvillea and hibiscus hint at the natural beauty of a city that was once known as the Pearl of the Indian Ocean. There are no monuments in this sun drenched, windswept cityscape. The only landmarks the major mentions are places where he survived a sniper shot, repelled an ambush or drove back an enemy offensive. I gave him the aspirin he needed, he says, enigmatically of one failed attack. Yet for all the fighting, there is a whiff of hope as well as cordite in the air. In recent weeks, government and peacekeeping forces have been retaking parts of the city, and there has been a steady flow of Al Shabaab defectors. I meet two of them in Villa Somalia. Abdi is 28. When he was 14, his teacher took him and 40 other children out of school and sent them to an extremist training camp. He became an explosives expert, taught by foreign jihadists, Al Qaeda types from places like Yemen and Pakistan. Until December, he was a commander in Mogadishu. Then, four months after he was forced to watch his brother beheaded by a senior commander, he came across to the government. He takes his shirt off to reveal two holes in his back from an Al Shabaab bullet. I had to get out, he says. If I didn't, sooner or later, they'd kill me. He describes how the foreign jihadists force young Somalis, many of them underage conscripts, to fight. If they withdraw under enemy fire, he says, they're shot dead by their own side. I used to think Al Shabaab represented justice, he says. Then I saw they had nothing to do with Islamic ideology and were killing our own brothers. It's hypocrisy. Progress in one of the world's most devastated cities is measured by the tiniest indicators. The defence minister says soldiers have been paid for the first time in months. The mayor of Mogadishu, another politician who has returned from exile to one of the most dangerous jobs in the world, says he left his home and family in the UK to help rebuild his country. He's introduced street lighting to parts of the capital, encouraging shops and cafes to remain open at night. And for the first time that anyone can remember, rubbish has been collected from the streets. Yet Somalis have learnt from hard experience these past 20 years not to get carried away by dreams of peace and stability. A few days later, in Nairobi, I have drinks with an elder statesman of Somali politics. The solution to the crisis is very simple, he argues. The international community has been holding conference after conference these past 20 years, but with no success. It's insanity, he says, knocking back his third Campari, doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Just leave the international community out of it altogether. Get the clans together with their elected representatives. History shows they'll take decisions by consensus and agree, he added. Everything comes down to Klan in Somalia. There's no other way.
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That's Justin Marozi. One of the biggest companies in Dubai. The port operator DP World has reported a sizable surge in business, which it suggests means the world economy economy is picking up steam. The company operates at some 50 cargo terminals on six continents. But like other businesses in Dubai, it's struggled during the global downturn of the last few years. The financial crisis has seen building projects in the Emirate halted, unemployment's up, revenue from tourism down. Sarah Monaghan, who used to live in Dubai, has just been back to see how it's coping with unaccustomed austerity.
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Standing on the observation deck of the Burj Khalifa, I'm so high above the earth that it feels as if I am on the wing of an aeroplane. This is the world's tallest tower, the one from which Tom Cruise was filmed in a daring stunt for the new impossible blockbuster. I first visited Dubai 10 years ago, but it is unrecognisable from then. From this aerial viewpoint, Dubai could be a city on another planet. With its futuristic skyscrapers set against the heat haze desert backdrop, I can make out the neighbourhood of Rashidiya, where I lived in a whitewashed villa, its garden overhung by a tamarisk tree. Our neighbours were an elderly Emirati couple and in the traditional way of Arabic hospitality, they often left dishes of fragrant rice and lamb at our door. Then you could walk all the way to the Dubai Creek, the city's estuary, across open salt flats and see Arabian hare darting between the dune grasses. Now that land is under concrete, transformed into luxury residential developments, high rise offices and hotels. There's no doubt that this dream of a spire, which can be seen from 60 miles away is an architectural couple. But a year after its inauguration by Dubai's ruler, Sheikh Mohammed, has it become the symbol of a city of remarkable vision? Or of one that overstretched itself in its bid to become the financial and tourist center of the Arab world? The tower was originally to be called the Burj Dubai, the Dubai Tower. But on opening it was unexpectedly renamed Burj Khalifa in honour of the ruling Sheikh of Abu Dhabi. The oil rich Emirate had stepped in to bail out its neighbour after the government conglomerate Dubai World admitted to a staggering 16 billion pounds of debt. The tower may have just had a change of name, but since then Dubai has not been the same. Hundreds of real estate projects in the Emirate have been cancelled. Half finished skyscrapers bake in the sun, steel beams jutting out and tarpaulins flapping. The army of poorly paid labourers originally contracted from South Asia, having been sent home. The Burj Khalifa is part of new downtown Dubai, an area earmarked for massive development. But the construction around it has ground to a halt. The Dubai Mall, the Middle East's biggest shopping centre, is finished, however, with 1,200 shops, it is the size of 50 football pitches. But when I visited, it was largely deserted. Shop assistants looking out onto gleaming concourses as the occasional Emirati woman glided past in black abaya and Swarovski crystal studded headscarf. Across Dubai, there have been heavy job losses. Until last year, Sophie, a British expat, worked in human resources for a property developer. We laid off hundreds of people, she says. The last redundancy letter I wrote was my own. She lives in a villa with its own pool on the surreal sounding frond sea of the palm Jumeirah, the man made palm tree shaped island off the Dubai coast. Like the other expatriates from Europe, the Middle east and the subcontinent that make up Dubai's 1.8 million population, she was drawn by the sun kiss lifestyle and tax free income. Be they waiters serving tourists in the five star beachfront hotels, businessmen, taxi drivers or construction workers, they're all here for the same reason. As is Jennalyn, who I meet giving manicures to customers in a beauty salon in the wealthy suburb of jumeirah. Pocketing the 10 dirham tip about pound 2 that one suntanned woman gives her, she calls thank you ma'. Am. She's from a village in the Philippines and has left behind her two children with her husband and elderly parents. She's on a two year contract and now rents bed space in one room with seven Other Filipino women, most of whom are housemaids. She shrugs when I ask if she likes Dubai. I earn more here than I could at home, she tells me. The money will give my family a better life. My ears pop as the lift from the Burj Khalifa goes down. It's a long descent, a plunge that mirrors the Emirates fall into its deepest financial crisis. And while its economy is showing some small signs of recovery, the chances of Dubai reaching the real height of its ambitions anytime soon look like a mission impossible.
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Sarah Monaghan finally, we're off to Las Vegas, a city that was built by the mob and is once again in the grip of mob rivalry. David Willis, who's just been to Nevada, has discovered that this time it has nothing to do with protection rackets or skimming off gambling profits. It concerns a new museum, due to open in a few weeks time, which tells the story of organised crime in this desert city famously described as a sunny place for shady people.
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Legend has it that when a man named Bugsy Siegel stopped off in Las Vegas to answer a call of nature, he. He had a vision. Siegel deemed the dusty desert town perfect for an upscale casino resort. And when he got home, he mentioned the idea to his business associates, who liked it and agreed to bankroll construction of what was to become the Flamingo Hotel. Billed as the most luxurious hotel in the world when it opened its doors to the public in December 1946, the flamingo also marked the start of a long and lucrative relationship between Las Vegas and the Italian Mafia. But for Bugsy himself, a notorious gangster, it proved less fruitful. The Flamingo finished over budget, so they shot him. Which only goes to show that if you're looking to impress the Cosa Nostra, don't go spending too much money on the curtains anywhere else in the world. The fact that a city's founding fathers were a bunch of gangsters would probably be a source of discomfort to its residents, if not shame. But one look at the drive through wedding chapels and the all you can eat buffets is enough to remind you Las Vegas has no shame. So when the mayor, Oscar Goodman, a man given to making public appearances with a showgirl on each arm, came up with the idea of a museum devoted to Sin City's delinquent ancestors, folks here barely batted an eyelid. It's a subject Mr. Goodman, a former criminal defence lawyer, knows a fair bit about, because before being elected, he spent 35 years defending people with names like Fat Herbie Blitzstein and Frank Lefty Rosenthal, the sort of characters who make Tony Soprano look like Mother Teresa. Mr. Goodman also had in mind what seemed the perfect location for his museum. The former federal courthouse in downtown Las Vegas. A stately neoclassical building which hosted Senate hearings into organized crime back in the 1950s, was vacant. Not only did it have the perfect pedigree, but basing the mob museum there would bring thousands of people to an area long overshadowed by the Las Vegas Strip, where the big casino casinos, including the Flamingo, are to be found. For a while, funding proved an issue. Then the FBI agreed to donate exhibits from its archives, and eventually the city had the £33 million it needed to start work. Imagine then, how Mr. Goodman must have felt when he woke up one morning to discover his pet project had a rival. The Las Vegas mob experience is the brainchild of a local investor, Jay Bloom, who with the help of the relatives of several former mobsters, has assembled what he says is the largest collection of organized crime memorabilia in the world. More than a thousand artifacts, including home movies, which will form the basis of an interactive theme park type experience. There'll be no need for visitors to trek all the way to downtown to see it either, because Mr. Bloom has a home for his exhibition on the Strip. What's more, it's opening six months before the mayors. At first, Mr. Goodman didn't seem terribly troubled by the prospect of competition. But the rivalry between the two camps took a somewhat bizarre twist when it was announced that Mr. Bloom had added a woman called Antoinette Giancana to his team of advisors. 75 year old Ms. Giancana is the daughter of the legendary Chicago mobster Sam Momo Giancana, who was gunned down in his kitchen one day as he was frying some Italian sausage. Among the murder suspects was a chap called Tony the Ant Spilotro, a small man with a bad temper, so legend had it, whose party piece was to put a rival's head in a vice and tighten it until their eyes popped out, as you do. In fact, that's what he did when he was mildly irritated. You should have seen him when he was really cross. Now, Tony the Ant beat the rap more than once because he had good lawyers. And his lawyer in Las Vegas was none other than, you guessed it, the mayor himself, Oscar Goodman. A couple of decades ago, a turf war of this kind would have ended with somebody being measured for concrete shoes. But Las Vegas is a different place now, which is probably just as well, given the links that remain between those with connections to its somewhat dubious past. Yet while there's nothing good about organized crime, few would argue the mob played a key role in making this place what it is today. A city that's been dubbed the gambling capital of the world. And for that alone, they probably deserve a museum in their honour. And maybe even two.
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David Willis on the strip in Las Vegas. That's it. I'll be here on Saturday morning with a fresh delivery of dispatches from around the world. I hope you'll join us. Goodbye.