Corrupt to the core

OFFICIALS OF THE Anti-Corruption Bureau conducting a raid at the house of a government official in Ranga Reddy district, Andhra Pradesh. A file picture.-BY SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT

OVER the past few years investigative agencies, notably the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), have indicted a former Cabinet Secretary who went on to become a Governor of a State; a Chairman of the Central Board of Direct Taxes, an officer of the rank of a Secretary to the Government of India; Commissioners of Income Tax; at least two Joint Secretaries to the Government of India; and a number of officers of lower ranks. Two Lieutenant Generals are at the moment being investigated by the Army for helping a developer who was trying to set up a school on land that was next to the Sukna Cantonment in Darjeeling district.

All of us know that the officers and staff of every single municipality or municipal corporation are, for the most part, corrupt. Unless money is paid to a variety of them, one cannot build a house, alter it or do anything else; a huge number of illegal activities such as encroaching on roads and pavements, even erecting multi-storeyed buildings on them, are possible once the right palms are greased.

In the days before Manmohan Singh as Finance Minister abolished the permit-licence raj as far as industries were concerned, at least in the Central government, those of us who were in Delhi then were used to seeing fleets of imported cars (those, remember, were the days of the Ambassadors and Fiats) lined up every evening in front of Udyog Bhavan, which housed the Ministry of Industrial Development, to transport babus of different levels, from Under Secretaries to others of more exalted status, to whatever destinations they were to go to possibly even home, in some cases. All of them were provided by different private enterprises or entrepreneurs waiting for licences. Then Manmohan Singh swept them all away, and the lines of imported cars rapidly disappeared.

In recent weeks, the President of the Medical Council of India, Dr Ketan Desai, has been arrested on the charge of taking a bribe, and investigations have revealed more than the proverbial can of worms a veritable stinking cesspool of false certificates to persons conferring medical degrees on them, of blatantly illegal institutions being recognised as medical colleges and much else that is shockingly corrupt and irregular. And this man has been chairman for years together, being repeatedly elected to that post, as if election was a sanctifying process.

In the States, the situation is no less murky and laden with dirt. Virtually every office that the common man has to perforce go to be it for a ration card, or a driving licence or to get some permission swarms with touts who get the work done for a fee, a major part of which goes naturally to the babus in the office. And as for the police, the less said the better.

We know all this. We have known it for years. But the situation has not only not improved any claim that it has should be summarily rejected as an immoral set of lies but has become worse. The question is why we are so corrupt. Officers at the highest levels of the government earn, at the top of their scales, over Rs.1 lakh a month; but a number of them are nonetheless corrupt on a grand scale, with six houses here, half a dozen flats there and heaps of gold and jewellery in bank vaults and safes.

It clearly is not because they do not get enough to live on comfortably. Is it in their genes? Chennai has been declared to be the diabetes capital of the world; it is more common in India than in many other countries. India is also something like third from the bottom in the index of corruption. Are these and other traits linked? Was there any time when most inhabitants of this subcontinent were not corrupt?

We know that in 1757, at the Battle of Plassey, Robert Clive bribed Mir Jafer, one of the generals of the Nawab of Murshidabad, so that he would withdraw. His name became a byword for a corrupt traitor. We know that even earlier, Chittorgarh, which had withstood Akbar's army for years, was overrun because someone inside the fort was bribed into opening the main gate.

Is it, then, a trait that is not regarded as despicable in our societies? Is being honest in one's work something that was taught to us by the British? These are questions that must be asked, as corruption has seeped so far into the fabric of our day-to-day dealings, in government, in scientific endeavours and activities, in the practice of medicine, of engineering, in the world of journalism, academics everywhere, in every sphere of human activity that we need collectively to take a good hard look at where we are and where we are heading.

It will not do to point a finger at the government and accuse it of doing nothing. This is a social evil and the responsibility is that of society. There are a good many social activists to fight for justice for the deprived and the oppressed for women, children, the disadvantaged, the physically challenged. Can there not be similar organisations that think of how corruption can be eradicated from our mental make-up? Catching corrupt people in a municipality or a police station is not the answer.

We need to answer the first question first: why do so many become corrupt? Why is it that this is not such a problem in, say, Norway or New Zealand? They are richer countries, true. Are we then saying that it is a result of poverty? But the fact is those who have been caught, surely a very small number of the corrupt who live and have their being in all spheres of public life, have amassed enormous amounts of wealth numerous houses, cars, cash, gold, jewellery and everything else. What do they have to do with poverty? What did Mir Jafar have to do with it?

This is the issue that must be addressed by civil society first, and addressed seriously. Scholars and researchers need to study this trait in the Indian; a trait that he often takes with him to other countries, where it manifests itself in different forms. Such studies are essential, even as the CBI and other agencies set about locating the corrupt in the public administration systems, because the investigative agencies themselves are not immune; corruption exists within them as well.

That is why it is so important to know just what triggers the lack of scruple at different levels. In the policeman, the junior engineer in a municipality, in a commissioner of income tax, in a secretary to the government. To put it slightly differently: can such knowledge be obtained? Can a methodology to obtain it be evolved? We have to look on this as a disease, and while the symptoms must be treated, the disease itself needs to be identified and studied and known. It may then be possible, just possible, to think of ways of removing the traits, or of identifying them in people.

It is likely that some readers will find this very amusing, and a little daft. One respects their amusement, but one will keep insisting that, as we move toward a time of transition that is coming, transition to greater economic prosperity, as we move from being a predominantly rural country to one that is urban, this trait can assume frightening proportions, and corrode whatever gains the country may make, eventually destroying them, and returning the country to the condition in which it is now.