The Lokpal Bill movement of Anna Hazare assumes that monetary corruption can be separated from policy and that a skewed set of development priorities can peacefully coexist with complete and transparent financial honesty. This is a fundamental mistake.
For all the wide-spectrum, scattershot weaponry they have built into version 2.1 of the Jan Lokpal Bill, Anna Hazare and the core group of supporters of his “movement” have a curiously narrow focus: the only form of corruption targeted is monetary corruption in public affairs. That such an eradication is impossible to achieve is another matter. Given the acknowledgement of widespread and pervasive venality and the need for effective regulatory mechanisms, we need a clearer definition of the objective.
In an article in The Hindu on 15 April,1 Prashant Bhushan, a senior lawyer and a key member of the drafting committee, hinted at a wider canvas when he said that the Lokpal Bill will not of itself “solve the problem of corruption”, and that the policies that “create enormous incentives for corruption and monster corporations” that are too powerful to be controlled must also be addressed. But this seemed almost an afterthought, and remained so in this inchoate enunciation. That is a shame, for it is precisely the issue of policies that is at the heart of the problem.
Corruption comes from Middle English and Latin roots: corruptus, a past participle of corrumpere; rumpere, to break; therefore, adjectively, utterly broken. It is a word that includes in its sweep perversions of integrity and morality, dishonesty of every stripe, debasement and depravity. It takes many forms: political, corporate, legal, intellectual, police and more. Monetary corruption in the limited sense of bribes, kickbacks and skimming or siphoning is perhaps less a form of corruption than the manifestation or inevitable consequence of policies that are deliberately skewed.
What Corruption?
Hazare’s movement does nothing to address policy. It assumes that monetary corruption can be separated from policy, and that a skewed set of development priorities can peacefully coexist with complete and transparent financial honesty. This is a fundamental mistake. The studied policies and definitions of “development” of the past 20 years have been aimed at producing only visible artefacts of apparent development — glittering buildings, broad roads, shiny airports, expensive cars — but have done little to address issues of primary education, primary health, drinking water, nutrition, environmental protection and employment. The result is peculiar: in India with its 8-9% growth rate, the rich have become impossibly rich and the poor have been left to their own devices to catch up if they can, or be forever left behind. The gap between the rich and poor is larger now than ever before; in terms of policy, this is like the cup of Tantalus, forever out of reach. It is like saying to a man dying of thirst, here is a pot of water, but between you and the pot is a chasm you cannot cross except over this one bridge. That bridge is corruption.
The measures of wealth are simple. The corresponding measures of poverty are infinitely more difficult and very much more malleable. On official count 37% of India’s population is poor; the Below the Poverty Line surveys for enumerating the number entitled to schemes for the poor have come up with a figure of over 50% and the Arjun Sengupta Commission of 2007 estimated that 77% of India’s population lived on less than Rs 20 a day. Over half of Mumbai lives in slums, without affordable housing.2 India’s slum population is greater than all of the United Kingdom and as the Times (London) points out, this is “the latest illustration of how India’s recent economic boom has left behind millions of the country’s poorest people”.3
To assess policies, it is not enough to look at the median. We should consider the extremities, for the distance between extremes (very rich vs very poor) is an indicator of policy balance. In 2008, four of the world’s eight richest individuals were Indians. They each had a net worth upwards of $30 billion. On the other side, those working to provide essential services — police, government teachers and fire-fighters, for example — have salaries that start as low as Rs 7,000 per month or less. Till 2009, the salaries of high court judges were abysmal: Rs 26,000 per month for a judge, and Rs 33,000 for the chief justice. These were increased to Rs 80,000 and Rs 90,000 respectively, and that of the chief justice of India to Rs 1,00,000 (Rs 12 lakh per annum). A December 2010 report in India Today cites India’s top lawyers as earning 25 times as much a day;4 corporate India checks in with its top CEOs drawing salaries in double-digit crores.5 The government sees no reason to regulate these payouts.6
Corporate and market regulators in India are strong on paper but here again the reality is very different. The Satyam imbroglio was simply not possible without regulatory laxity and it is the lack or complicity of institutional corporate overseers and systems that allowed the fund movements behind the 3G telecom scam. That affair is not merely one of political corruption in the sense of misuse of public office for private gain, it is also about the corruption of systems of corporate governance and control. Nothing feeds political corruption so well as corporate corruption.
Private Enterprise and Public Office
Increasingly blurred is the distinction between private corporate enterprise and public office. The days when the men and women in public office had no ties with corporate India are long gone. Today, the links run deep. Holders of public office report inexplicable increases in personal wealth. Last week, Jaganmohan Reddy of Andhra Pradesh declared assets of Rs 365.58 crore, up from the Rs 77.43 crore he declared in 2009. This is an increase of 472%, something far beyond the increase of any ordinary investor.7 Reddy is contesting elections. His late father was the chief minister between 2004 and 2009. He has interests in cement and power projects, and owns a newspaper and a TV channel. The increase in his wealth cannot but be suspicious. Nor is Reddy an exception. At both the union and state levels, the link between public office and private (for-profit) enterprise is deep and extensive: Dayanidhi Maran and Praful Patel have long-standing associations with the corporate sector, as do Amar Singh and others. Getting your favourite MP to make a pitch for you is one thing, and happens everywhere, but using that influence to shape policy is another matter altogether. There seems to be little doubt, for example, that the damage caused to India’s national air carrier, Air India, was exacerbated by the enormous benefits given to private airlines. Privatising a government enterprise may be justified, but allowing a government enterprise to be run into the ground while letting private ventures flourish is criminal. Political stability does not, by and of itself, indicate the absence of political corruption. The 1980s and 1990s saw both political stability and economic reforms “because patron-client networks were used to buy off the opposition using graft and obfuscation. By most accounts, political corruption in India was high and growing during this period.”8
At a micro everyday level corruption has not just torn the fabric of society. It has become its death shroud. Not a single permission, however routine, can be got without graft, whether it is a water connection or a driving licence. Many offences — from traffic fines to evasion of customs and excise duties and even capital crimes — are always handled with a bribe. So systemic is this that it has become both an attitude and a numbers game. As everyone is doing it, there is no reason to be left behind. The increasingly open and brazen everyday corruption stems from an unshakeable confidence that it carries no consequences; at least that much is certain. The corrupt minister will remain free. The corrupt policeman will never be punished, the corrupt judge will only be transferred, and the corrupt bureaucrat can never be dismissed. In some cases corruption has become institutionalised.
Pot of Urban Gold
Developers in Mumbai routinely report that at the level of the Maharashtra Housing Board, which handles redevelopment permissions for old buildings, and the Slum Rehabilitation Authority, the corruption is now indexed to the proposed builtup area on a sliding scale computed in percentage points. Everyone on the ladder has to be fed, and now it’s become a right. Municipal tenders are routinely influenced too. A contractor close to the family that heads the majority in the municipal corporation is sure to get the choicest contracts even though he has far less experience and poorer qualifications. A contractor will underbid, get a contract, claim escalation, take the matter to arbitration where he will succeed, and only has to distribute a fraction of these profits.
As I understand it, the attempt by Anna Hazare and his movement seems to be to nail those found to be taking bribes and so to demonstrate that severe consequences will follow; and thereby send out a message that graft at every level will meet a similar fate. This seems to me to be naïve. To flex muscle on this formulation, the Lokpal will have to go after the big fish. But they are already indicted and the subject of investigations at various levels. Replicating that is pointless and ousting established systems brings its own problems, especially for a fledgling organisation. Even if it works — and it is not exactly clear who is going to be the first target — it seems unlikely that giving an A Raja or a Suresh Kalmadi some jail-time will stop the average beat policeman from collecting his weekly hafta from roadside hawkers and vendors. In the week or ten days since Hazare began his agitation, no one has stopped asking for bribes.
The ordinary remit of an ombudsman is to investigate “maladministration”. That is a very different thing from investigating and punishing monetary corruption. The first assumes that policies and laws are sound, and oversees their proper implementation (taking up cases of undue delay, inaction, misleading conduct, a failure to follow procedures or the law). Usually, this is recommendatory though with a great deal of authority. The second, investigating and punishing monetary corruption, creates an entirely new highoctane legislative regime which comes perilously close to upturning constitutional mandates. The latest proposal to authorise phone-taps9 is a direct fallout of the Radia tapes and the failure to see phone-taps and interception as an intolerable invasion of constitutionally guaranteed personal liberties.
Worse Than the Disease?
If corruption is anything, it is enduring, and, faced with severe enforcement in a few cases, new methods of corruption and cover-up will be devised. The answer to that is not to arm the Lokpal with such omnibus powers. Here, the cure seems deadlier than the disease. Version 2.1 of the Jan Lokpal Bill (the latest iteration is not available at the time of writing) contains many disturbing features, and Hazare’s movement appears intransigent on at least some of them. The most egregious is the refusal to provide for severe penalties for frivolous complaints. Hazare’s group believes that a fine is sufficient. Every lawyer has this experience: whenever a matter is lost, a litigant’s first response is to ask whether the judge was “got at”. Unsuccessful bidders, too, make such claims. If every such claim is to be brought to the Lokpal without fear of any real consequence, it is bound to result in complete administrative paralysis. Add to this the suggestion to provide financial rewards to successful complainants and we have the makings of an oppressive regime. There is a difference between a watchdog and a witchhunt, and it is one that we must be careful to preserve.
The Jan Lokpal Bill also confers terrible police and judicial powers on the Lokpal and in that sense the Lokpal is more emperor than ombudsman. It is a mistake to put such enormous power in the hands of a single institution on the footing that it is and forever will be manned by good men. The system of divided powers was arrived at by historical experience, and it exists for excellent reasons.
Prashant Bhushan’s assertion in his article that it is a misconception to say that the Lokpal will have judicial powers is clearly incorrect. Version 2.1 of the draft categorically deems evidentiary proceedings before the Lokpal to be judicial proceedings; and it is incomprehensible how misconduct of any public servant can ever be gauged except in a judicial manner. The Lokpal is to have “effective powers to investigate and prosecute all public servants (including ministers, MPs, bureaucrats, judges and so on) and others found guilty”; returning a finding of guilty, of necessity, implies a judicial process.
More troubling is the assertion that “the judiciary, which must try and convict the offenders, has become dysfunctional and is afflicted with corruption due to lack of accountability of the higher judiciary”. Yet it is this very “dysfunctional” judiciary that forced the resignation of a chief vigilance commissioner and is forcing the government to act on the spectrum scam, taking up matters of foodgrain distribution and supervising investigation. There seems to be little evidence at present to support the sweeping generalisation that is the basis of subjecting Supreme Court and high court judges to the Lokpal’s jurisdiction.
The Lokpal Bill is not ill-intentioned. Some version of it is even necessary. But it needs specificity, clarity, welldefined objectives and constitutionally valid methods. We must always separate enforcement systems from adjudicatory systems. The Lokpal’s role should only be recommendatory, but with enough statutory force that the recommendation cannot be easily ignored (by requiring, say, a majority of a special bench of the Supreme Court to find against the Lokpal’s recommendations). Such a separation of powers is essential. Without it, the Lokpal runs the risk of becoming its own worst enemy.
Policy imbalances cannot be remedied by ombudsmen and Lokpals, however strongly armed. That requires a very different kind of movement.
Mushtaq Khan (2006), “Determinants of Corruption in Developing Countries: The Limits of Conventional Economic Analysis” in Rose-Ackerman, Susan (ed.), International Handbook on the Economics of Corruption (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar), pp 216-44. ↩
For all the wide-spectrum, scattershot weaponry they have built into version 2.1 of the Jan Lokpal Bill, Anna Hazare and the core group of supporters of his "movement" have a curiously narrow focus: the only form of corruption targeted is monetary corruption in public affairs. That such an eradication is impossible to achieve is another matter. Given the acknowledgement of widespread and pervasive venality and the need for effective regulatory mechanisms, we need a clearer definition of the objective.
