We, the people
If the world's largest democracy is also one of the most corrupt ones, we are as much to blame as the self-serving politician. Is there any hope for redemption?
GOPALKRISHNA GANDHI
It is all politics.
What else can you expect of them? They are politicians after all…
We hear those remarks routinely. And we make them ourselves.
The words ‘politics' and ‘politician' are certainly in trouble.
Politicians, in fact, are in trouble. A trouble that is largely of their making.
Exceptions remain, of politicians who are neither in difficulty nor controversy. And thank God for that. But these exceptions are becoming more and more exceptional. A ‘standard politician' is now seen, unfairly to the exceptions, as someone void of ideals but replete with ambition, a pygmy in reliability but a giant in cunning, with almost no ‘law' ruling him, no ‘principle' governing him, save ruthless self-interest.
And the ‘house of politics' that once graciously roofed men of the veracity of Dadabhai Naoroji and Lokamanya Tilak is no longer regarded as a ‘good' address. This is unfortunate for that ‘ house' , even in our post-Independence, post-Nehru, post-Patel, post-Rajaji times, gave out of its ageing grace, space to men of the transparency of Jayaprakash Narayan.
Politics is no longer the house of beliefs and the home of action that we have known it to be. It has become a Ground Zero. A zone with demarcated parking, vending, loitering and berthing lots occupied or ‘to let' and of course available for being claimed and seized. As also to be ‘re-claimed' or ‘re-seized'. It is a zone into which a ‘decent' man or woman will hesitate to venture.
Politics today is about territories and power-games. It is about clout.
Democracy is meant to be about open discussion, un-coerced persuasion.
Ours is that. We do have free and frank campaigning, free and fair voting. We have deserving candidates fighting clean, fighting hard, fighting to win honourably or to lose blamelessly.
Two sides
But that, alas, is not the whole story. Our democracy is also about manipulation. It is also about undeserving candidates fighting dirty, fighting sly, winning dishonourably with a smirk or losing unsportingly with vengeance under the breath.
Our elections, instead of being a happy circle of recurring choices, have turned into a circularity of manipulations, a Giant Wheel where public entertainment is assured through cacophonous blarings and of dirt raised from slime-sodden grounds, and dangers to life and limb as well. You return from it dizzied and dazed. And dazzled, too, because of the largesse of freebies that come along with the giant gyration.
The world's largest our democracy is. Free and fair our elections are, to the world's clear awe.
But leaders in the art and science of contrivance and improvisation that Indians are, we have managed to make our large democracy grow ever larger in size, but also become ever smaller, even petty, in the actual workings.
Politics cuts deals with masters of the herding method and with the Mafiosi, whether for the success of rallies, for elections or for swollen egos to clash often with unashamed violence, for small-time scores to get settled and for money, huge money, to be spent to buy, seize, occupy turf or to retain a precarious hold on it.
It is no surprise, therefore, that if MPs schooled in the law comprised 35 per cent of the first Lok Sabha, less than 15 per cent of the law-makers comprising the present Lok Sabha have a law background. I will say nothing of the percentage of alleged law-breakers among them. There is another – surreal – fact that hits the eye. The number of male MPs who wore rings on their fingers to propitiate the Gods, or strings around their wrists to ward off the evil eye, in the first Lok Sabha led by Jawaharlal Nehru (who wore neither) must have been no more than a handful. Invoking the Almighty for Grace is natural. But He can be spared anxieties over politicians' personal prospects, or for security from the ire of those that have been hurt, harmed and made enemies of. Today, a huge number of legislators across all party divides bear those nervous adornments. This may augment their sense of security, but not that of those who have, so trustingly of their intelligence and knowledge, elected them.
How is knowledge prized amongst politicians? Ask a politican today, by surprise, what he is, what he in his heart of hearts believes or stands for and he may get genuinely puzzled. Even shocked, as if by a contact with a live electric wire. But ask him what he fights for, what he wants to win for, and he will be more at ease. And will invoke an iconic leader. Icons are a balm against the painful embarrassment of ignorance. They are a substitute for thought today.
Lack of vision
Short-termism is the ruling political philosophy, and quid pro quo the ruling political currency becoming more quid than quo with each passing day.
The politician has always gambled with political destiny. In India, and everywhere else. Gladstone and Disraeli did in their time. Jefferson and Lincoln did in theirs. Naoroji and Gokhale, Satyamurti and Chittaranjan Das did in our land. More recently, Kamaraj, EMS, Annadurai took huge risks. But they did so with gleaming dice thrown from clean hands for play on a chequer-board governed by rules. Today the politician gambles with a die so rough-used that none of the pips on its six faces can be read. He wagers, but to win what?
He probably does not know himself. Because he scarcely knows his own self. How can he? So overlaid is his face with expressions, especially obsequious smiles and ear to ear grins worn for others' (including yours, mine and the media's) benefit. Cartoon caricatures, in the hands of Shankar, Laxman, Thanu, Kutty, Abu Abraham, Puri, Sudhir Dar, used to resemble their subjects. Today, politicians have begun to resemble their own caricatures.
Can anything, anything worthwhile, be expected of so hugely compromised a person?
So, then, is this it?
Is there any hope for redemption?
There had better be!
Precisely for having known better, we cannot settle for less than a redemption.
Politicians must be helped to see, and not through the mechanism of elections alone, but through responsible and calm public articulations that they cannot afford to be seen as a byword for financial impropriety, administrative dereliction and valuational grossnesses.
But we cannot end with laying the blame squarely on politicians. They are artistes, many very gifted, many more not. Change has to come in the script of the play. It has, in other words, to start with ‘We The People'.
We have to accept the inconvenient fact that if our politics has been debased, we have had a hand in the process. We have often chosen what we have regarded as ‘the lesser of the two evils', have remained silent when politics has hi-jacked the law of the land, have condoned when we should have excoriated, looked the other way when we should have looked straight-in-the-eye. And we are as short-termist as any politician. ‘What we are', Jiddu Krishnamurti has said unforgettably, ‘the world is'.
Is it too late for this cleansing?
It is late, but not too late.
Why do I say this?
I say this, for, ‘we the people' are not alone. We have seen how, in recent weeks, our Constitutional authorities have made common cause with common sense and the common man to bring to justice great and palpable wrongs done by politicians and by those working under or with them. These authorities, headed by the Supreme Court of India and the Comptroller and Auditor General of India, are there, edifices and instrumentalities, fashioned by the higher sense of our early law-makers, to be utilised in the national interest.
Epic literature is not my strong point and I am wary of analogies drawn from mythic narratives to garnish contemporary analyses. But if Rajaji had been alive, I think the kathakar in him would have been tempted to say that these Constitutional authorities are like the Sanjivani Hill of the Ramayana where life-restoring herbs may be found for the stricken body politic. I have pictured the RTI Act and the instrumentality of the PIL as being sited on that very Hill, bringing the relief of justice to stricken people and causes. ‘Civil society' and NGOs contain energies and means for political redressal that can be truly restorative if used with due care, non-vindictively and without generating its own counter-egoism.
Possibility of healing
Herbs lie there, of healing, sharp and pungent though they may be, even bitter, awaiting use to protect exceptions from the rule of political debasement, to prevent further debasement, and to expel from the system the toxins we recognise.
No Godlike figure may be expected to descend from the sky of our political fortune. Such figures did ‘appear', in a galactic shower in the last century and the one before it. But that beneficent process seems to be on a long sabbatical right now. And so it is within the same landfill of political ambition and corruption that we must help, encourage and motivate endangered and brave political exceptions to rise. And when our Courts and our Constitutional authorities speak harsh truths, not honeyed words, we must respect those as speaking our voice, a voice that goes beyond the short-termist and the populist, the vindictive, and the sectionally selfish and become We The People in the true sense of the term.
And thereby dredge the national waters of their mire.
Gopalkrishna Gandhi is a writer and former Governor of West Bengal.
Chance to start afresh
While those guilty in the 2G scam should be brought to book, we should not forget that corruption persists in India because we have been half-hearted in our reforms, says GURCHARAN DAS .
There is a lesson in the morality play that we are witnessing today which has been triggered off by the 2G financial scandal. It comes from a scene in Malcolm Gladwell’s recent collection of essays called What the Dog Saw, and I have condensed it below:
On the afternoon of October 23, 2006, Jeffrey Skilling sat at a table at the front of a federal courtroom in Houston, Texas, waiting to be sentenced by the judge. Mr. Skilling was no ordinary criminal. He was wearing a navy blue suit and a tie. Huddled around him were eight lawyers. Outside, television-satellite trucks were parked up and down the block. Skilling was head of the energy firm, Enron, that Fortune magazine had ranked among the “most admired” in the world and valued by the stock market as the seventh-largest corporation in the United States. It had collapsed five years ago, and in May, Skilling had been convicted by a jury for fraud, and almost everything he owned had been turned over to compensate former shareholders.
“We are here this afternoon,” Judge Simeon Lake began, “for sentencing in United States of America versus Jeffrey K. Skilling, Criminal Case Number H-04-25.” The judge asked Skilling to rise. He then sentenced him to 292 months in prison – twenty-four years, one of the heaviest sentences ever given for a white-collar crime. He would leave prison an old man, if he left prison at all.
“I only have one request, Your Honor,” said Daniel Petrocelli, Skilling’s lawyer. “If he received ten fewer months, which shouldn’t make a difference in terms of the goals of sentencing, if you do the math and you subtract fifteen percent for good time, he then qualifies under Bureau of Prison policies to serve his time at a lower facility. Just a ten-month reduction in sentence….” It was a plea for leniency. Skilling wasn’t a murderer or a rapist. He was a pillar of the Houston community, and a small adjustment in his sentence would keep him from spending the rest of his life among hardened criminals. Judge Lake thought for a while, then he said “No”.
Indians are not unfamiliar with Enron. As a result of its involvement in the beleaguered power plant at Dabhol, the words ‘crony capitalism’ entered our vocabulary in the 1990s. Unlike India, persons in high places in the United States serve time in jail. American judges are in the habit of meting out exemplary punishment, as Judge Lake did to Jeffrey Skilling of Enron. Indians would dearly like to substitute in the narrative above any number of names, although Andimuthu Raja, former Minister of Communications is the one that comes to our mind today.
Wasted rage?
As things stand in today’s India, we investigate, charges are filed; we even establish guilt; but then years go by, and nothing happens. People lose interest. It would be a real shame if all the valuable rage we have accumulated over weeks in the 2G affair were to go waste. One way to ensure it does not happen is to actually put a few people behind bars this time and do it reasonably quickly. It would go a long way to restore our faith in the system.
In a recent opinion poll, 83.4 per cent of the people in eight major Indian cities believed that corruption had gone up after liberalisation, which only confirms that people still do not understand that corruption persists in India because reforms are incomplete and scams occur in sectors like mining and real estate, which have not yet been reformed. That it occurred in telecom, an otherwise reformed sector, does come as a surprise. It has happened because the minister created artificial scarcity in the spectrum and gave it away in driblets to those who allegedly bribed him. The scam could have been avoided if the licenses were awarded via open, transparent bidding on the Internet, as in the case of the 3G spectrum.
The 2G scandal should also remind us about the real corruption of India which does not make the headlines. The ordinary, small and medium entrepreneur still faces on the average 27 inspectors who have the power to close his factory unless he pays a bribe. The most notorious are those in the excise, sales, and the income tax departments. Of course, for every bribe-taker there is a bribe-giver, who is also guilty of wrongdoing. But remember, it is an unequal relationship. The citizen is always vulnerable before a person in authority. The official holds the threat of closing a citizen’s enterprise. A few states have tried to rein in petty officials but mostly they run amok, rapaciously. Hence, many young, honest men and women today shy away from becoming entrepreneurs. The ‘inspector raj’ is one of the reasons that India has failed to create an industrial revolution.
Beginning of accountability
Returning to the big picture, it is a matter of some cheer that in recent months ministers have been sacked, serious inquiries have begun, individuals have been arrested. We are also heartened by Nitish Kumar’s huge victory in the Bihar elections, which he claims was the result of good governance. We would like to believe that this is a turning point in our history, the beginning of some sort of accountability in our public life. It is sobering to remember, however, that we said the same thing in 1989 when Rajiv Gandhi’s Congress-led government was defeated after the Bofors gun scandal when the Prime Minister’s family and friends were allegedly involved in bribes and kickbacks.
We ought to take inspiration from the United States not only because it punishes guilty persons in high places as Judge Lake did in the narrative above, but it enforces its Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) vigorously. If any of the telecom licensees in the 2G scam had been American companies—for example, AT&T-- India would have quickly found its smoking gun. Ten years ago, America’s Justice Department was investigating 5 to 10 companies involving foreign bribery at any given time; today, it is 150. Under American inspiration, Britain just passed a new Bribery Act, which is even tougher than the U.S. law. To ensure that companies don’t simply consider FCPA fines as a “cost of doing business,” the U.S. attempts to jail corporate officials, both American and foreign.
The rage of the Indian public would be redeemed not only by jailing a few people but also by instituting reforms in the system similar to the American FCPA. Only then will some of the taint go away from an honest Prime Minister who seems to be presiding over one of the most corrupt governments in recent Indian history.
Gurcharan Das is an author and former CEO of Procter & Gamble India.
