Waves of joy-and-gloating or fear-and-loathing are sweeping America every day—depending upon one’s political allegiance—as president-elect Donald Trump announces bizarre appointments for his government. But this week brought exotic news to Americans when law officers in New York indicted the Adani Group for alleged wire and securities fraud, $250 million in bribes to secure contracts for Adani Green Energy in India, and conspiracy to conceal this. Court documents refer to the scheme as “the corrupt solar project”.
Will it make a difference to Gautam Adani, who has weathered a damaging attack by the short-seller Hindenburg Group? Well, the US president-elect has been indicted on 34 counts—and it hasn’t hurt his prospects.
The day before Adani’s indictment, Trump began to get intelligence briefings in the lead-up to assuming office. An FBI raid in 2022 on his golf club had uncovered reams of classified documents which he was supposed to have surrendered when he lost office. With his re-election, he seems to have gotten away with this serious security breach, too. This is legitimising impunity—in comparison, alleged bribery by a foreign business owner looks fairly minor.
Corruption does not enjoy the casual legitimacy in the US that it does in India. The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act prohibits the use of American investments to gratify foreign officials to influence decisions. Penalties include huge fines, possible jail terms and being disbarred from doing business with the US government.
In this case, Adani and seven executives including his nephew Sagar Adani are accused of raising billions of dollars from US investors and others for a solar energy contract in India, while concealing their intention to pay an alleged $250 million in bribes to Indian government officials to secure it.
Adani is in august company. Companies charged under the FCPA include defence contractor Raytheon Technologies, proven to have bribed military officers and officials in Qatar to secure a contract that included Patriot missile systems. Walmart was accused of playing fast and loose with FCPA norms designed to prevent bribery and routing speed money through intermediaries in India, China, Brazil and Mexico. Both paid hundreds of millions and committed to harden anti-corruption measures.
Cash works fine and they were presumed to have paid their debt to society. That’s how the American legal system works. No sense of shame survives, though it is a powerful deterrent to lawbreaking.
In India, in contrast, shame persists. It has imposed cumulative costs on the Congress, partly because it carried on regardless. The shadow of Bofors still stalks it, and party functionaries have made it worse by persisting with corruption in, for instance, the Commonwealth Games. The Congress lost control of its future during the India Against Corruption movement, which capitalised on the party’s inglorious culture of bribery. Even Comptroller and Accountant General Vinod Rai’s absurd notion of “presumptive loss” in the award of 2G spectrum looked acceptable.
Now, in the US, Trump is leveraging a political order in which shame is not a permanent disability, by making appointments that are designed to shock. The appointees are poorly equipped to man the offices they will hold and personal loyalty to Trump is their main qualification. This is not a novelty for Indians, who are accustomed to education ministers who may be undereducated and health ministers who may favour unproven cures.
But for Americans, it is a shock to find that anti-vaxxer conspiracy theorist Robert F Kennedy Jr, who had bowed out of the contest to support Trump, will head the health system. It does need intervention because it is the world’s most expensive. But it is also the most advanced, conducts cutting-edge research and offers treatments that are hard to find elsewhere. It would be a pity if Kennedy tightened its belt in order to finance remedies like hyperbaric oxygen therapy, which he supports.
It doesn’t help that Kennedy is the odd man in. In this year’s campaign, he will be remembered most for the brouhaha he caused by dumping the corpse of a bear cub in Central Park in New York City. It was roadkill that he had planned to take home to eat, but then remembered that he had to go someplace else where he couldn’t take the bear. It takes a man of a certain quality to think of dumping a bear in one of the city’s best-known attractions.
That’s not all. A TV doc who sells supplements online will look after health insurance. A wrestling entertainment entrepreneur will take care of education, and more appointments designed to shock and awe lie ahead. There is no shame associated with this process. It’s just politics.
In India, Adani has played the shame game well. He weathered the Hindenburg attack by conflating the idea of Adani with the idea of India, upon which the attacker was revealed to be a disgraceful ‘anti-national’. Adani hasn’t had more than a year of peace after recovering from that attack with the help of foreign investment. Now, he has been blindsided in the quest for more foreign investment.
It’s a fine irony that in a nation where anti-corruption rhetoric features high on election manifestos, alleged corruption involves one of the nation’s flagship solar projects.
Pratik Kanjilal
For years, the author has been speaking easy to a surprisingly tolerant public
(Views are personal)
(On X @pratik_k)
