From C To Shining C

Governance  |  5 November 2010  | print

Corruption is corruption, everywhere; but enough is enough

Transparency International :: 2010 Report

Nothing is sacred. A forest is decimated by a mining operation, the lease granted to nonentity whose only claim to fame is that he is the fruit of the loins of a legislative assembly member or an ruling party factotum. Land reserved for a building for war veterans and widows is usurped by politicians and bureaucrats, whose notion of a defence of the realm means finding new ways to protect their personal hoard. The land mining and Adarsh Society allotment scams are only the most recent instances of government corruption. Others are of such long standing that they have now become institutionalized systems with lives of their own; perhaps the best-kept secrets are those involving the purchase of equipment and materiel for the armed forces and police.

Adarshgate shocks us because of its emotive wallop; after all, widows and veterans were cheated. But would it be any less heinous if these flats were meant for a more amorphous, anonymous class: “middle-income” groups? Police inspectors? Corruption is corruption, and every citizen is a victim. That is the real tragedy of our times, that we are now so inured to corruption, and have let it become so institutionalized, that it takes ever more shocking instances to provoke us. Eichmann realized this in Nazi times, and used it to great effect: if you manage to work something into the ‘system’, then, no matter how outrageous or illegal it is, people will take it in their stride—because it is ‘the system’.

Lawyers joke about the three C’s: if you can’t convince, confound; and when all else fails, corrupt. In governance, that order is reversed. First corruption, then confounding, followed (if at all) by convincing. Denials need not even be plausible. Ashok Chavan blithely announces that his mother-in-law, to whom a flat in the Adarsh Society was allotted, is “not his relative”. Wishful thinking on his part, perhaps, but it fools no one.

There was a time, not very long ago, when one knew that while politicians were corrupt, the bureaucracy was largely straight and worked under enormous pressure. Today, the cancer of venality is so pervasive that citizens are left with nothing but a sense of impotent rage. Ask a taxi driver or bus conductor or the guy on the local train what he thinks of these venal netas and babus. By the happiest coincidence, the answer in the vernacular has words that all begin with C.

Pritish Nandy once said in his Bombay Times column that if we could even tame the hydra-headed monster—forget about killing it—many of our problems would disappear. Of course we can’t kill it; not just here, but anywhere; for where there are men, there will always be corruption. But we can arm ourselves against it. We can assess its extent, a tricky business at best. Transparency International publishes annual rankings of corrupt countries. Its methodology has been questioned, usually on the basis that the essence of corruption being concealment and fraud, it is impossible to gather accurate data.

Transparency International 2010 Report

Yet, year after year, on a scale of 0 (most corrupt) to 10 (cleanest), the Scandinavian countries come out on top; Canada trumps America; and India oscillates between 2 and 3.5. Our corruption competition has the who’s-not-who of nations: Afghanistan, Chad, Somalia, Nigeria. It’s a pretty long list down there at the bottom of scale, but, with the possible exceptions of Russia and Argentina, all are the so-called “third world” poor countries. None of them is reckoned as a now or future global economic superpower. None has the financial muscle of India. Years ago, in the context of reservations in education, the Indian avatar of affirmative action, the Supreme Court invented a truly horrendous phrase to describe the privileged: it called them “the creamy layer”. On the economic front, India is part of the world’s creamy layer. On the corruption index, it’s down there in the sludge.

Over the past quarter century or more, our policies have been so skewed that today our rich are as rich as those anywhere in the world, while our poor have become a whole lot poorer. Nothing else explains the Porsches and the Bugattis, the single-family Antilla, the multi-million dollar endowments to already over-endowed foreign universities by corporate houses and their captive trusts, endowments better used here; and simultaneously rotting food grains and starving farmers, the lack of potable water, education, and basic healthcare, farmers’ suicides. There is only one bridge across this divide, and it is paved with corruption.

In Bihar, once the paragon of lawlessness, Nitish Kumar has taken on the dragon. He has a bill that proposes, among other things, the confiscation of assets of those found to be corrupt. The bill has been awaiting presidential sanction for five months. Meanwhile, the stubble-faced Nitish Kumar is under siege by the cherubic scion of the Nehru dynasty (so much for democracy), our PM-in-waiting, whose family heads a party with a stench about it that grows daily: grain distribution; the Commonwealth Games; mining leases; allotment of flats. Will the Congress and its allies adopt Nitish Kumar’s bill? It would decimate their ranks. Congress’s only answer is to point fingers at corrupt BJP state governments; and that is no answer at all.

A remarkable recent citizens’ initiative in Bangalore, ipaidabribe.com, set up by the Janaagraha Centre for Citizenship and Democracy, uses the device of public shaming—what has come to be called ‘Gandhigiri’, a singularly unfortunate expression that mocks a fundamental societal norm of honesty and a respect for the law by turning into an ideal or an aspiration. It allows citizens to report instances of bribe-taking. Quite sensibly, IPAB does not use names. It is, as they say, about trying to change ‘the system’, not target individuals. One report claims that merely the threat of being named, or having the instance reported, on IPAB was enough.

When confronted with inconveniences like Adarshgate, talking heads crawl out of the woodwork to make the most astounding statements, embellishing dishonesty with idiocy. Three nights ago, Tom Vadakkan, the AICC secretary and a Congress mandarin, told Times Now’s Arnab Goswami that we should not forget that it was the UPA government that “gave” citizens the Right to Information Act. Goswami’s response, with mock folded hands, “and therefore we are forever beholden to you?” was spot on. Unsurprisingly, Vadakkan is completely wrong. The right to information is no gift from the Congress, the UPA or anyone else. It is part of a slew of citizens’ rights, and it has a constitutional foundation. The RTI Act only gives a structure to every citizen’s right to know. That right was not ‘given’ by the UPA government. It’s in our constitution. And Vadakkan’s exceptionally shrill protestations of innocence convinced no one. The halo he kept trying to prop up showed its tarnish two days later at the all-India Congress conclave when nobody—not Sonia, not Rahul, not Manmohan Singh—so much as mentioned the Adarsh Society or the Commonwealth Games. The whitewash is already under way. As Sameer Halankar says in the Hindustan Times, this is hardly surprising given that the Congress institutionalized corruption.

One reason we have this level of corruption is the lack of effective judicial and legislative redressal mechanisms. The common belief is that nothing will come of any of these scams; the guilty will get away, yet again, with perhaps not even a slap on the wrist; and life will carry on as before, till the next exposé. Corruption cases must be time-bound and fast-tracked, and they must be in court because courts don’t have to depend on special laws to exercise power. Committees, like the Shunglu Committee enquiring into the CWG scam are toothless, with neither bark nor bite. Recommendations of formal Commissions of Enquiry, which do have powers, are not binding and are often ignored. What we need are not more newsreports and talkshows, but the launching of prosecutions. The consequences to those found guilty must be severe. The corrupt are corrupt because they believe they can get away with it. They must be shown that they can’t. You need to bring down only one or two, and the rest will fall in line.

The Bihar bill is a beginning, and should be adopted across the country. Till that happens, our leaders and civil servants continue to play the hit-the-spittoon game of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. And they never miss: for them our country is one gigantic spittoon.