The last month on India's political front has been dominated by scams: the Commonwealth Games, the Adarsh building scam and the telecommunications scam. These have brought about the short-term political demise of Messrs Kalmadi, Ashok Chavan and A. Raja respectively.
For a variety of reasons, I've spent some time recently reflecting on (and discussing with friends) the nature of wrongdoing and the purpose of punishment. The more I learn about the subject, the less comfortable I feel with the way we as a nation pursue allegations like the ones above. Let me try to list my reasons for discomfort.
(i) The press and public are pre-convinced of the guilt of the concerned parties in each of the cases. But, while there are specific and serious allegations in all the cases, there hasn't yet been a complete investigation of any of them. By the time this happens, a lot of people (and the media) will have lost interest.
(ii) In each case the concerned persons are out of office pending investigation. This would be a good thing if it conveyed the principle that a tainted official should voluntarily step aside till their name can be cleared, or otherwise. But none of the persons here were dismissed voluntarily. And even if their guilt is totally established in the future, it's possible - quite likely, in fact - that they will simply be kept out of the limelight for a while and then slowly rehabilitated.
(iii) In each of the cases, not only is guilt apparently "established" by the press and the public, but the presumed degree of guilt appears to be infinite, and therefore essentially on the same footing for all three persons. The slogan of the middle-class is that all politicians are utterly and irredeemably corrupt without limit.
The third point is my greatest source of discomfort. It is childish and ultimately self-defeating for us to clamber on the bandwagon of "all politicians are corrupt". There always have been some who are honest and upright, shouldn't we actually be highlighting them? As for the corrupt ones, this is a democracy and we have elected our politicians - so how did they get to be the way they are? It wouldn't have anything to do with us being the way we are, by any chance?
Some people will tell you it is the poor and uneducated who elect corrupt politicians, so the middle-class isn't to blame. Others will tell you corruption is really a politician-businessman nexus. Yet others will insist the blame devolves on the bureaucrats or "babus". In all these views, whoever is responsible for corruption, it isn't the middle class (which makes me suspect we could have found the culprit).
Now suppose M/s Kalmadi, Chavan and Raja in fact turn out to be guilty as charged. How effective will the current handling of their cases be in deterring others? Ashok Chavan may be no genius and seems totally lacking in the kind of imagination required to run a major state like Maharashtra. But his reputation has consistently been that of a reasonably honest and sincere Chief Minister, in a similar category as Sushil Kumar Shinde and in a totally different league from other predecessors like A.R. Antulay or Narayan Rane. If Chavan is guilty in the Adarsh scandal, all he's probably done is put in a word for a couple of his relatives to get a flat they don't deserve (something most middle-class Indians believe is the right thing to do). Admittedly this is far far below the standards required of a Chief Minister or indeed any politician. But it's not on par with having murder charges against you or being convicted of extortion. People with the latter charges pending or proven against them were, like Chavan, once shunted out of the way for a while but today they are still around as members in good standing of the ruling party.
So this is what really happens if you treat all politicians as equally (infinitely) corrupt: someone who commits murder or extortion and someone who puts in a word for their relatives is in the same boat. The action taken against them ends up being exactly the same, and over the person's life-time its impact is more symbolic than real.
This is not, I feel, a good message. It's up to us to find a more effective approach if we are to recover a lost moral compass. Such an approach will require us to believe there are both corrupt and non-corrupt politicians. Then we can try to define the degree of political punishment appropriate for the former class in proportion to the actual crime. It's not as easy as screaming for someone to be dismissed as soon as NDTV decides they should be, but it would be more correct and useful.
5 comments:
A related article about "chai paani"
http://www.dnaindia.com/india/report_all-for-chai-paani_1469703
I do not believe that a single person is capable enough of such a corruption. At every level, the corruption is shared .. and the root cause is: common people like to 'get things done easily' - meaning by bypassing the rules. I think the guilt makes people to talk loudly about corruption of big fishes.
Of course, I do not support these bigwigs in any way.
We can already see the Supreme Court has passed strictures on the media for dragging the name of the Prime Minister in all this when there was no such call. TV anchors and reporters talk so much they have no time to think, to ponder and to analyse.
Taatya: That was a nice article. It reminded me of a story I recently heard: an executive, talking on his mobile while driving a fancy car, was pulled over by a cop. He continued talking on the mobile, at the same time fishing out 500 rupees from his pocket which he handed over to the bemused cop and then drove off, not having once interrupted his conversation!
Before we can deal with corruption, all of us in middle-class India need to first confess our love of it...
Sunil, if I understand you right, in your response you say that all of us in middle-class India have to confess our love of it [corruption] before we can deal with it. I think this is a bit unfair. In our daily lives we are often forced to concede to corruption, as you know: mandatory bribes for everything from getting a blown fuse replaced by the Electricity Board so that the lights come on, renewing a driving license, etc. etc., right up to buying groceries without a receipt so that the shopkeeper can cheat on his income. At least 70% to 80% of everything we spend is a conversion of white money (taxed salaried income) to black money. I don't think a lot of middle-class people are in love with corruption, merely angry and frustrated at their helplessness, given its omnipresence.
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