Corruption in India a 'fact of life': WikiLeaks

“American interference” was the political catchphrase of the 1970s. With Indira Gandhi's claims of a “foreign hand” and allegations of CIA-funding against her, it was easy to believe that a vast American conspiracy was active backstage to the great Indian tamasha.
But the Americans themselves saw a different villain, according to a U.S diplomatic cable sent from New Delhi during that period: “India's 'united givers fund,' the Congress party.”
Its “collectors”  sometimes “politicians themselves, sometimes a 'bagman' for the party, sometimes, most recently, eve[n] a bureaucrat”  approach large and small firms alike, says the cable, accessed and released online by WikiLeaks.
It is in this July 7, 1976 communication (1976NEWDE09954_b, Secret) that the Americans first reveal that Sanjay Gandhi's Maruti was seeking to be an agent for the British Aircraft Corporation, as already reported by The Hindu.
The cable was a response to a State Department request for a comprehensive assessment of India's anti-corruption laws as inputs into a U.S. plan then for an “international agreement on illicit payments.”
But, the Embassy wrote, such a “comprehensive inventory may give the misleading impression that corruption/illegal payments are well under control in India.”
In fact, as the cable put it, the Indian experience had led the Embassy to the “cynical conclusion” that in India “there is a direct and positive relationship between laws against corruption and the extent of corruption itself, i.e., each such law only means that there are more people to bribe.”