The Menace of Corruption

India suffered losses of Rs. 36,400 crores due to corruption in the 12 months preceding September, 2013, says a survey by EY (Ernst and Young) and FICCI, excluding large corruption scandals – 2G, CWG etc.

Chetan Bhagat mentions five areas towards which the new Government’s effort should be focused. One of them is Corruption. He says, “Go after corruption. It bothers Indians and needs to be fixed. However at present it also churns the wheels of our economic system. Draconian measures or finger pointing will solve nothing. It might bring the country to a halt. You don’t solve a blood contamination disease by cutting of the arteries of the heart. You make the blood pure again, one small transfusion at a time.”

To combat the cancer, we require chemotherapy which is given in small doses and is calibrated. To overcome the menace of this national termite which has rendered us hollow; we need to have clear thinking and appropriate strategy.

Corruption is of two types: meat eating and grass eating. The meat-eating corruption is almost always collusive and one transaction is enough to last a couple of generations. It is silent, stealthy and insidious!

Unaccountable wealth or better known as black money, (attained by illegal means and/or remaining outside the purview of the tax laws), remains within the calculated comfort of its owner. This includes money generated through arms deals, gun running, smuggling, drugs and narcotics, illicit trade, real estate transactions et al; and is major contributors to the tax havens abroad

Grass-eating corruption extorts millions of our countrymen in their day to day activities. Obtaining a post-mortem report, death certificate, donation in cash for admissions to school, caste verification certificate, lodging of FIRs, pre-condition for recruitment in govt. jobs at subordinate cutting edge levels levels etc. etc. This is extortionist in nature and is demanded when one is under already duress. This form of corruption is petty in scale and alienates the belief of lay public in the government . Anna Hazare lead the movement “India Against Corruption” that later significantly contributed to the electoral decimation of the Congress led UPA government.

The NDA government shall have to tackle the grass-eating variety through massive education of public opinion to say NO to corruption of this form. Every school, college and other training/professional institutions should be giving lessons inculcating values. Though a long exercise, but can give credible and sustainable results in couple of years. Incidentally the Honk Kong government faced the same menace and they started working through schools and in couple of years, the change became manifest to the relief of suffering populace. It had a tremendous impact on the states effort to combat the menace.

Manoje Nath – a former Director–General of Police, Bihar, brilliantly sums up people’s response to the menace by saying that the response of people at large is even more ambiguous because it is rooted in the fact that they are themselves “half victims, half accomplice, like everyone.” People’s lack of combativeness, venom and extraordinary passivity stems from the fact that they tend to be comfortable with the idea that corruption is an inescapable fact of governance and political morality. Nath explains;

“The ambiguity in the public attitude towards ill-gotten money is the result of our peculiar situation. Our economy is half white and half black, half over-ground and half underground. We condemn black money but deal in it, nevertheless. Under our very eyes, criminals and gangsters acquire wealth, then political power, then more wealth and with it acceptability and social esteem. Political banditry as a mode of creation of surplus value has long been accepted as a legitimate vocation. To displace the awareness of these contradictions, we have devised various overt and covert strategies to acknowledge and accommodate the criminality within our midst. Lawyers, chartered accountants, investment advisors, honestly work for the legitimization of dishonest earnings by politicians, government officials, corporate CEOs, etc. Dirty money courses through our formal and informal financial system in different ways, with different consequences. We do not seek to know hard enough about the offshore funds being routed in our economy for fear of discovering their actual provenance. We are so enamoured, even over awed with power and manipulation that we tend to ignore what David Bell calls “the economic fulcrum underneath.”

The decision to constitute a Special Investigation Team, under the chairmanship of Justice M. B. Shah, to investigate the cases of black money stashed away in foreign banks, will prove to be an acid test for the new government. It calls for a equally strong political will to fight this ever growing threat to national economy.

To combat crime, we need to have two pronged strategy: prevention and detection. Many a crime are prevented when the preponderance of probability lies in that these would become manifest at any given moment. A reasonable certainty of apprehension and conviction deters criminals. Crime swells when there is an assurance that it would not be easily detected and that in the unlikely event of getting so detected, the law as it exists, could be subverted first at the level of cognizance and subsequently during investigation, prosecution and/or adjudication. Organized crime syndicates prosper on this philosophy.

“Ideas spur crimes. A psychological, people-oriented counter strategy and approach while it is certainly not a panacea, empowers the individual citizen who ceases to ask what is there in the state system for him and instead begins to introspect on what he can do for the society/ state system given his new found status as a stakeholder,” says Prateep Phillip.

The power syndrome is that when we do not share power, the power have-nots hate us with a passion, when we share power through such a power sharing mechanism we are loved with an equal passion.

Corruption permeates at the top and it becomes a corporate activity. We shall have to put upright and competent officers at the top – selected on merit – and mind you we have plenty of them. All such officials have now been marginalised and wasted in non-sensitive departments/ assignments.

Clearly laid out policies with irreducible minimum discretion, with the help of technology to take speedy decisions, will go a long way to cut on avoidable delays, famous breeding grounds of corruption.

Creation and existence of a credible mechanism where information can be received and is welcomed, with privacy of the informer kept in absolute secrecy, will make the masses feel participants in unearthing diverse forms of unaccounted/illicit wealth. All such information leading to successful prosecution may be rewarded with tempting percentage of such money unearthed. The RT I Act has significantly contributed to lifting of veil of confidentiality from public records maintained by the government. It’s time we take a call whether we should continue to maintain confidentiality of income and assets of all those who seem to be living in a life style disproportionate to their know sources irrespective whether they are public servants or not.

Hoederer’s admonition to Hugo (who refuses to “dirty” his hands) in Jean Paul Sartre’s play Dirty Hands would induce a curious sense of déjà vu in those of us who have tried to take a stand against the contemporary wisdom:

“You cling so tightly to your purity, my lad! How terrified you are of sullying your hands.
Well, go ahead then, stay pure! What good will it do, and why even bother coming here among us? Purity
is a concept of fakirs and
friars. But you, the intellectuals, the bourgeois anarchists, you invoke
purity as your rationalisation for doing nothing. Do nothing, don’t move, and wrap your arms tight around
your body, put on your gloves. As
for myself, my hands are dirty. I have plunged my arms up to the elbows in
excrement and blood. And what else should one do? Do you suppose that it is
possible to govern innocently?”