Few countries are blest like India with a prime minister with such sound intentions and of such unimpeachable integrity. But Manmohan Singh is, indeed, a good man fallen among politicians if he imagines that yet another mechanism to punish venal public servants will make any impact on the massive corruption that is destroying India. His proposal might have the effect of upstaging and discomfiting the Opposition whose attacks on the prime minister are truly “despicable”, as Sonia Gandhi put it, but that tactical advantage will certainly not cleanse public life.
Nor may corruption “verily prove a nail in the coffin of the Congress,” as Rajendra Prasad warned, for all parties are probably equally tainted today. The problem is not, however, with major scams of which we have had many between Krishna Menon’s Rs 216-crore jeep scandal and the $1.6 billion Bofors case. No tears need be shed for tycoons who can afford to pay for goods and services, and who factor bribes into the overheads. If they have to gratify a politician or a bureaucrat they recoup the expenditure from the public. That’s why businessmen ignored Inder Kumar Gujral when, sitting in Dr Singh’s chair, he pleaded with them in private and in public to inform a special cell in his office of every demand for a bribe. Even Ratan Tata didn’t bother to disclose what he did recently about the rock on which his airline proposal foundered.
But ordinary folk desperately need protection from an increasingly rapacious system. When he was Central Vigilance Commissioner (CVC), Subimal Dutt, a respected member of the Indian Civil Service, lamented that bureaucrats in an increasingly lengthening list of government departments refused to perform even their legitimate duties unless they received what was euphemistically called “speed money”. This, Dutt observed, had become “a way of life”.
I mentioned this to Rajiv Gandhi when he was prime minister and the reply was immediate and idealistic. The solution, he said, lay in a strong consumer movement. Quite so. But Ralph Nader would not have gained iconic status in the US if every branch of the administration had not responded positively to the public lectures and campaigns against corporate greed and official indifference that his young followers, known as “Nader’s Raiders”, mounted. Laws were changed, courts alerted, and exposure of the car industry’s faulty designing led to the discontinuation of Chevrolet Corvairs.
Several Indian states boast moderately successful consumer movements but, by and large, ordinary citizens still have no redress against, say, BSNL’s exploitative lethargy or the Income Tax department’s reluctance to disgorge refunds. In an earlier stint as finance minister, P Chidambaram dismissed corruption as the “by-product of controls”, saying, “If we remove controls, the corrupt are easily identified, isolated and punished.” But it’s only an escapist cliché that all abuses were rooted in the control-permit-licence raj. If anything, the greater liquidity accompanying the abolition of controls encourages even more corruption.
Not that corruption is only financial. Delving into history, Kalyan Singh’s appointment of 93 ministers (16 of them with criminal antecedents) in Uttar Pradesh was also a corrupt practice, morally if not legally. But money, land and mining excite the senses most; they also permit point-scoring.
Two prescriptions might provide partial relief. First, the Santhanam Committee’s recommendation that the CVC should be empowered to initiate inquiries and investigate the conduct of leading political personalities, which all previous governments understandably rejected. Second, a far stronger corrective machinery – meaning an honest police force and an impartial judiciary – to bring the guilty quickly to book so that Indians are no longer reduced to begging and bribing for every single service.
We did not need Wikileaks to tell us that the “police and security forces are overworked and hampered by bad police practices, including widespread use of torture in interrogations, rampant corruption, poor training, and a general inability to conduct solid forensic investigations.” No wonder the Americans scathingly accuse the police here of cutting corners to avoid a “lagging justice system, which has approximately 13 judges per million people.” Surprisingly, the leaked cables made no mention of ramshackle courtrooms, dilatory, underpaid court officials, cunningly exploitative lawyers and venal judges.
Reform the police and the judiciary to give a strong consumer movement a chance. Perhaps we might then think of a clean administration that serves the aam admi instead of preying on him. But, then, to return to my favourite quotation from Juvenal because it seems so apt to modern India, “Quis custodiet ipsos/ Custodes? Who is to guard the guards themselves?” sunandadr@yahoo.co.in
