OPPOSITION parties in India led by Congress and the left parties have demanded independent investigations into one of India’s largest corporate groups, Adani and its head, Gautam Adani, over corruption allegations.
They allege that the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is shielding and promoting the businessman due to its own links with the corporate giant, at the cost of the interests of the country.
The opposition has been raising the demand for a joint parliamentary probe following the indictment of Adani, his nephew Sagar Adani, and six other high-level officials of the company in the US last month for bribery and fraud.
Adani was indicted last month by a federal court in the US on five counts for giving out over $250 million in bribes to various state officials in India to obtain solar energy supply contracts. It accuses Adani of “conspiracies to commit securities and wire fraud” with a scheme “to obtain funds from US investors and global financial institutions on the basis of false and misleading statements.”
The BJP-led ruling National Democratic Alliance (NDA) has, however, refused to listen to the demands of any investigations into allegations on the Adani group and instead has accused the opposition of conspiring with “foreign forces” to destroy Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s image and derail India’s economic development.
However, the opposition has refused to back off, leading to repeated confrontations between the ruling and opposition groups both inside and outside of India’s parliament. The Congress, India’s largest opposition party and the left have demanded immediate arrest of Adani and a joint parliamentary committee probe (JPC) into the matter.
The BJP government has been refusing to allow a discussion on the issue in the parliament. It has been so adamant in denying such formal discussions on the floor of the house that it has led to repeated suspensions of the entire proceedings of the legislative work of the parliament since the beginning of the winter session in the last weeks of November.
The opposition members of the parliament have been staging demonstrations in front of the country’s parliament’s entrance for weeks now after the government refused to allow the discussion.
The left parties, Communist Party of India (Marxist), Communist Party of India (CPI) and Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation, have organised demonstrations across the country in demand of Adani’s arrest and a thorough probe into the allegations against the corporate giant.
Allegations of cronyism
The opposition in India has raised the issue of alleged kickbacks to Adani provided by the ultra-right BJP government in return for its alleged personal links with Prime Minister Modi, his financing of BJP’s elections campaigns and interventions in political affairs to promote the party interests.
The opposition’s allegations of close links between the BJP and Adani are nothing new. Previously, allegations had been made of the government favouring Adani in the allotments of contracts for large projects, such as the management of a large number of airports in the country and coal mining projects, unjustly as a quid pro quo for its favours.
Adani has been repeatedly accused of indulging in corrupt practices such as forging its accounts to mislead investors and using the government machinery to arm twist other entities to sell their equities to it, for example, in the case of the acquisition of the media channel NDTV in 2022.
Modi has been accused of promoting Adani’s business interests during his official state trips abroad by coercing and cajoling the host governments to clear their investments.
Both Modi and Adani come from the Indian state of Gujarat. Modi was chief minister of the state for almost over a decade before becoming the prime minister of India in 2014. Adani, then a small business house, had allegedly developed close links with Modi during his chief ministership.
The opposition has claimed that Adani’s rise to one of the richest in the world coincides with BJP’s rise in power in India in 2014. Speaking in the parliament last year, Rahul Gandhi, now the leader of the opposition, has accused Adani’s net wealth increased from around $8 billion in 2014 to over $140bn by 2022 thanks to the tailor-made policies of the Modi government.
Despite explicit allegations made against Adani of fraud in accounts to mislead its investors in Hindenburg reports last year and again earlier this year, the BJP government and courts in India refused to constitute any investigation into the matter.
Brinda Karat, a politburo member of the CPI (M), told the press last month that it is shameful and concerning that the ruling BJP, including even Prime Minister Modi himself, has been defending the corporation repeatedly ever since the Hindenburg revelations were made.
