In 2005, India was ranked near the middle of Transparency International’s league table of the world’s most (and least) corrupt countries (Transparency International 2005). Of the 159 countries surveyed, India was tied with eight others in 88th position, with the top slot claimed by squeaky-clean Iceland, and Bangladesh and Chad sharing last place. The technical challenge of measuring something as furtive as corruption, and the near impossibility of presenting the findings of a global survey in ways that are fully comparable across countries as different as Angola (151st) and Austria (10th), mean that few Indians take such international rankings all that seriously. That’s not to say that no one in India discusses the survey results. Scoring considerably ahead of Pakistan (way down at 144th) is a source of mild satisfaction for many Indians. There is also a lurking suspicion that China’s ranking (10 places ahead of India, at 78th) reflects various aspects of its authoritarian regime. India’s free press and multi-party politics, according to this view, mean that allegations of corruption in India will always be more pervasive and publicised in greater detail than in China, even if the actual incidence of corruption in the two countries was identical. Moreover, Transparency International measures perceptions of corruption, including among foreign investors, diplomats and other external actors. Hence the suspicion, in some quarters, that China’s score benefits unfairly from the appearance that its government is cracking down on corruption – a perception nourished whenever Chinese courts execute a bribe-taking official by using fast-track methods unavailable to India’s prosecutors, who operate in a legal system with strong due- process protections. Whether or not such explanations are convincing, they underscore the tendency for democracy to figure prominently in debates about corruption in India – not that the discourse is always logically consistent. There is, in fact, a great deal of ambiguity in the relationship between corruption and democracy. Note, for instance, the contradictory uses to which the two examples of Pakistan and China were put: Pakistan’s poor score was seen to be exacerbated by its non-democratic political system, whereas the Chinese government’s freedom from the burdens of democracy was considered a boon, providing officials with the tools to stamp out the most growth-retarding forms of corruption. Indeed, discussions about the relationship between democracy and corruption parallel similar debates concerning the link (or lack thereof) between democracy and economic growth. India’s democracy is seen as either its greatest asset – providing rule-bound institutions for enforcing contracts, and © 2006 The Author. Journal compilation © 2006 ippr Democracy, development and India’s struggle against corruption Rob Jenkins Birkbeck College, University of London research policy public