INDIA: India's parliament erupted in an uproar yesterday after a nationwide television news channel broadcast images of 11 MPs accepting cash reportedly in return for raising issues in the federal legislature.
"The MPs took between 110,000 Indian Rupees (€2,000) and 10,000 Indian Rupees (€182) each to ask a variety of questions in the House," said the 24-hour Aaj Tak channel reporter Anirudh Bahal, who posed as a businessman offering the legislators the bribes.
The speaker of the 545-member elected lower house, Somnath Chatterjee, said he was shocked by the revelations of the "sting" operation.
"I am extremely scared if the allegations are correct. It is a serious matter and I am looking into it with all seriousness," Mr Chatterjee said, asking all the 11 MPs not to attend the House until investigations into the alleged cash-for-questions were completed.
"We were enticed into taking money. The media has humiliated us but this is wrong because this is nothing but a political conspiracy to assassinate our character," Narendra Kumar Kushwaha, one of the MPs from the regional People's Socialist Party caught accepting a bribe, said after the broadcast.
Six of the MPs who were from the main opposition Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, the BJP, were suspended immediately. So was the lone MP from the Congress Party that heads the federal coalition.
India is one of the world's most corrupt countries, with its citizens paying out more than 210.6 billion Indian Rupees (€3.8 billion) - or an amount equalling a quarter of the country's defence budget - in bribes last year for essential public services, a Berlin-based watchdog group revealed a few months ago.
A wider "national bribe index" compiled by the weekly magazine Outlook found that moneys had to be paid for birth certificates, passports, ration cards, driving licences, electricity, water and telephone connections, for housing plans to be cleared and even for bank loans and for menial jobs.
Bribes even had to be paid at public crematoriums to ensure a plentiful supply of dry wood to cremate dead bodies.