But clarifies he is not for any amnesty.
Amid all the brouhaha over bribes allegedly offered by Congress MPs to secure votes in a no-confidence motion in 2008, Chief Economic Advisor Kaushik Basu says not all but certain kinds of bribes should be treated as legal.
In a paper that he clarifies has been written in his private capacity, Basu argues that there is a class of bribes that people often have to pay to get what they are legally entitled to. He calls these “harassment bribes”. “Suppose an income-tax reimbursement is held back from a taxpayer till he pays some cash to the officer. Consider a case where to buy a regular train ticket, you are told that you have to pay some money under the table. These are illustrations of harassment bribes. Harassment bribery is widespread in India and it plays a large role in breeding inefficiency and has a corrosive effect on civil society,” Basu says.
Currently, both the bribe giver and the bribe taker are criminally liable according to the Prevention of Corruption Act, 1988. Basu says this should change and the entire punishment should be heaped on the bribe taker and the bribe giver should not be penalised at all, at least not for the act of offering or giving the bribe. Such a change in the law will cause a dramatic drop in the incidence of bribery because once a bribe is given, the giver and the taker become partners in crime. It is in their joint interest to keep this fact hidden from the police and to be fugitives from the law, because, if caught, both can expect to be punished. “Under the kind of revised law that I am proposing here, once a bribe is given and the bribe giver collects whatever she is trying to acquire by giving the money, the interests of the bribe taker and bribe giver become completely orthogonal to each other. If caught, the bribe giver will go scot-free and will be able to collect his bribe money back. The bribe taker, on the other hand, loses the booty of bribe and faces a hefty punishment,” he says.
Under the new law proposed by Basu, all that the bribe giver will have to establish is that a bribe has been given — via a photograph or marked currency notes, etc. Basu concedes that if offering bribes becomes legal (and the giver is sure of getting the money back), the incidents of bribery could go up. But there will also be an incentive to report the incident and this will bring down the incidence of individuals harassed into paying a bribe.
However, Basu clarifies that he is not for any pardon or amnesty for bribe takers or givers.
But it is not just harassment bribe that Basu alludes to. He refers to other kinds of bribe, such as the alleged bribery involved in the allocation of 2G spectrum or the kinds of bribery believed to occur when the government gives out big development contracts. “Should the bribe giver be given full immunity in such cases? The simple answer to this is ‘no’,” he says.
This kind of corruption must also get asymmetric treatment because the public servant who takes the bribe is the gate keeper who violates his responsibility and sells the property he is supposed to protect. “Since bribery is not a case of theft but of collaboration between two agents, the primary moral responsibility for it rests on the shoulder of the bribe taker,” he says.
