According to Transparency International(TI), a think tank based in Germany, which keeps tabs on corruption across the world, India is one of the most corrupt countries in the world, and there are only three or four more corrupt countries than India, all of them in Africa. I was not aware of this International “reputation” of India’s until I came across the TI’s report.
On a single day last month, a newspaper in the small town where I live (Pune) carried almost a dozen stories of instances of corruption in the state. They all involve high government officials and, of course, their patrons, the politicians. One politician, member of parliament, no less, was arrested for the alleged murder of fellow legislator. The politician is said to be the right hand man of the president of a so-called national party which is a constituent of the state government, and is actually related to him. Murder is not corruption, you might say. But when his house was searched, the police found revolvers and guns, apart from swords and lakhs of rupees in cash. The murder took place three years ago but the man was not arrested because of his links with the big party bosses.
A corporator was found to own 25 houses and flats in and around Pune along with several plots. He is only a corporator but is worth hundreds of crores of rupees which he is said to have acquired in less than three years that he held the office. The corporator is missing and has not been traced.
Then there is the ubiquitous official with his hand in the till, this time a director of agriculture. I was not aware that there was so much money involved in the administration of what is supposed to be one of the poorest sectors of the economy viz. agriculture. But apparently you can make millions out of anything, if you put your mind to it. The entire family was apparently involved and the police are still looking for the hidden loot.
Why are we Indians so corrupt? The simple answer is that they manage to go scot free and the punishment never fits the crime. You rarely hear about high bureaucrats, let alone high politicians, being sentenced to prison, even after ten or twenty years. Not a single babu connected with the Bofors case has seen the inside of a jail and the Italian middle man who masterminded the whole affair is enjoying himself at the Riviera.
There is a minister in the Maharashtra government who is building a huge mall in a central location in Pune. Every body knows about it and everybody talks about it, but the man continues to be minister and goes about in his car with the red lamp. He even visits the mall from time to time, but the income tax officials and others look the other way.
These are obvious cases. There are also others. The co-operative sector in Maharashtra—the sector that supplies all its politicians—is a beehive of corruption, where looting is a regular—and respectable—occupation. Apart from the sugar factories, there are scores, may be hundreds, of co-operative banks whose managements, most of whom happen to be local politicians, routinely defraud the depositors. But very few managements are brought to account and almost none convicted. Most directors and chairmen wind up as legislators and ministers in course of time, where they continue their public “work”.
This must be happening all over India, but, for some reason, everybody ignores it. Have we become so inured to corruption that we do not notice it any more, just as we don’t’ notice dirt in the streets, or are we so involved in it that we do not wish to take any action? We now take corruption for granted, like murders and railway accidents, and when we come across a big headline in the morning newspaper, we just have another sip of tea and turn the page.
It used to be said that our bureaucrats—and our legislators—were underpaid unlike in other countries and often fell victims to temptation. I never bought this spurious argument. If it is lack of money that makes you corrupt, why do millionaires do it? In any case, neither the bureaucrats nor the legislator are under paid now. They take home more per month than we used to per year, yet they are as corrupt as ever.
In China, bureaucrats who are caught embezzling money are executed. It is as simple as that. China executes more people than the rest of the world together. But corruption is still a busy occupation in China and foreigners are in the habit of distributing cash in envelopes from top to bottom and claim that as business expense!
I think we Indians tend to compromise with irregular behaviour, to put it mildly, which in its extreme form becomes corruption, and think up all kinds of excuses to justify it. There is one standard for hoi polloi, and quite another for the top dog. We often read about a constable being sent to jail for five years for asking for a small bribe for a traffic offence, but never about minister and secretaries with their millions in foreign bank accounts.
When I first landed in England immediately after the last war, I was astonished at the high standard of conduct of not only officials but also the common man. Although things were scarce—I used to get an egg per week and a small bar of chocolate per month—there was no black market. We queued up at our grocer’s –and old man whose only man had died in the war—and collected our meager rations week after week, but nobody complained. I once saw an old man behind me at a village fish—and–chips shop. The face looked familiar. The man turned out to be Lord Pethick-Lawrence, secretary of state for India, who had just sent Mountbatten to New Delhi to negotiate transfer of power and give up the empire.
Harold Wilson was chancellor of the exchequer—equivalent to our finance minister—in the first Attlee government after the last war and later became Prime Minister. Before he came into politics, he was a lecturer in Oxford. After he retired from polities, he started looking for a house in London but couldn’t find any as he had very little money, and went back to this Yorkshire home. There his ailing wife fell ill but they didn’t have enough money for her treatment. So his friends—not businessmen—came to his rescue and raised funds to pay the bills. Towards the end, he couldn’t afford even a nurse to look after her.
Corruption, thy name is greed. When you have thousands, you want lakhs, and when you have lakhs, you want crores. Look at the houses of ministers in Delhi. I do not think ministers have such palatial houses, even in Washington, the capital of the world’s richest country. A federal Reserve Chairman, equivalent to governor of our Reserve Bank, had an ailing wife in New York, but he himself lived in Washington. Since he couldn’t afford two homes, he lived in a single room in a hotel and commuted between New York and Washington every week-end. Can you imagine our babus or politicians doing that? Greed corrupts and corrodes not only the corrupt individuals but the whole system, and ultimately the nation. It was corruption that destroyed Rome and may destroy us also!
