Less mud, please……Mihir S Sharma
You want to end corruption? Start by accepting that some people aren’t corrupt
You want to end corruption? Start by accepting that some people aren’t corrupt
Once upon a time, India’s middle class seemed to have made a bargain with its politicians. Look, we said, we believe you are of two sorts. Some of you steal a lot of money and don’t do anything for us with it. Some of you steal a lot of money but get stuff done anyway. The first type, we’ll lavish with contempt. The second type, we’ll lavish with contempt — but shrug, and say that at least something’s getting done.
That bargain worked for us because we knew we could focus public anger on individuals every now and then, and force them out. Corruption was simple, wasn’t it? Somebody wanted a contract, a licence, a quota increase, and a suitcase of money changed hands. Just like what we went through to get a gas connection, a phone, a driving licence, though of course we were just innocents, not real participants in the system at all.
But, this time round, the anger everywhere feels a little too formless. A hundred people on television ask, dramatically, why the prime minister allowed the DMK’s telecom ministers to have their way, causing one to realise that they all flunked out of middle school before they learnt to count to 273. The Left moans gustily that they were complaining about spectrum pricing all along, and how could anyone make this sort of compromise for power, modestly not reminding us of their principled non-withdrawal of support to UPA-I on the issue. The BJP, rolling their eyes and scenting blood while hoping it’s not their own, is trying to shout loud enough in Delhi to drown out any outraged squeaks from Bangalore. (They’re expecting, no doubt, to occupy the high moral ground without anyone noticing they had it de-notified first.) Which leaves Subramanian Swamy, and, please, let’s just leave Subramanian Swamy.
The moral outrage has no direction, folding in pointlessly on itself, because the old certainties have vanished, but we haven’t adapted. There should be suitcases, we think, not this bloodless accounting of opportunity costs running into too many zeros to fathom, birthing odd factoids in our imagination — the number of VIP suitcases Raja would have needed, if laid end-to-end, to reach from Delhi to Chennai! It would pay for two NREGAs, three loan waivers and four weddings in Chhatarpur Farms!
We know we’ve been had — but, this time, we can’t pin down that satisfying individual immorality as much as we’d like. Raja, after all, was just helping out his party the way he was supposed to. The DMK, after all, was just buying elections the way they had to. The Congress, after all, was just looking for partners the way they were forced to.
How, then, should we break out of this circle of finger-pointing?
One way we won’t: focusing our ire on individuals we believe have betrayed us, our accustomed method. Our confusion about culpability must not allow us to go after the wrong targets. Manmohan Singh might be an inarticulately soft target; but also an eminently pointless and self-defeating one. So are journalists talking as ever to both sides in a newsy dispute. So too are influence-peddlers, the oldest civic profession, impossible to legislate against. India is changing: and changing with it is corruption, moving from individual, atomised, traceable, low-income corruption to systemic, imputed, high-level corruption. It would be foolish to use intuition born of one to fight the other.
So, let’s realise three things. First, those laws we have? Implement them, impartially. The telecom regulator has made a start, recommending the licences be withdrawn from various operators who haven’t fulfilled their side of the bargain. Just demolishing one apartment block, making a people resign, return flats and land and licences, again privileges the individual over the systemic. Insufficient. Instead, ensure corruption cases reach closure. Demand prosecutors who can be held accountable if they don’t indict the guilty — which takes the pressure off the political class.
Second, follow up by reducing the discretion available to politicians in power. India’s political class is no different from the rest of us; we have merely given them excessive opportunity to lavishly display their human failings. No more land de-notification at the stroke of a pen, Karnataka CMs. No more arbitrary licensing, ministers. No more assignation of captive mines as financial crutches for industry, no more giant land grants for “public purposes” that miraculously change end-use when nobody’s looking. We must iron out the kinks that discretionary powers leave in the fabric of governance.
Third, and most important, believe this: we’re in a different India now.
These things come with double-digit growth: our cities are a construction site. Our infrastructure is expected to double overnight. Our institutions are palpably creaking under the strain. And we have no idea who’s making how much money off all of it, and how. No matter how we yearn for the simplicity of the past, when it seemed simple enough to identify the corrupt, make a clear moral judgment, and so end it, that time will not return. Double-digit growth doesn’t just scale up urban India’s economy, it transforms it utterly to something immeasurably more complex, where pointing at an offending individual and shrieking “off with its portfolio!” doesn’t approach a solution.
Low-income countries have low-end corruption, the corruption of the suitcase and the petty under-the-table bribe. And, bless their politicians’ mortgaged souls, Bombay and Bangalore show that brazenness about straightforward corruption still has a home in our states. But Delhi’s moving to high-end corruption, the corruption of difficult-to-quantify opportunity costs, of pressure groups and groupthink, of CBI restraint and ATM ministries instead of outright vote-buying, of post-retirement “consultant” sinecures for bureaucrats instead of fat envelopes. And in high-end corruption, we might never find the ultimate culprits;so you’re stuck needing systemic reform.
Which needs us to change our bargain with those we elect and end that old, outdated compact. And then the Congress will have to choose: is the obvious political cost of trying for an honest-but-works alternative worth any imaginable benefit? Or, since competition is the lifeblood of change: can they afford to let the BJP pick up the mantle Bangaru Laxman dropped into his drawer? And here’s the problem: it’ll only be worth it for them if we make it so. If we stop tolerating the corrupt-that-seem-to-work. (Your mobiles work, don’t they, scam or no?)
But, equally, we can’t assume everyone must be corrupt and make of every dubious, tenuous connection a hanging offence. In the time of systemic corruption, we must make place in our hearts finally for the possibility of individual probity, or fail.