Commentary/Dilip Thakore

Turning back the corruption tide

The Karsen urea scam, the Sukh Ram telecom scandals, the JMM bribery case, the Lakhubhai Pathak swindle, the St Kitts forgery, the Bihar fodder case, the PWD and police uniform scams. The list of scams and scandals in contemporary India could go on and on.

Several years ago when I wrote that since 20 million people were on the payroll of government and public sector enterprises, one could safely assume the existence of 20 million scams based on the calculation that all of them nurtured an illegal supplementary source of income, I provoked a mini storm of protest.

It was ridiculous to allege that every single government servant was crooked, said my critics. Consequently I was obliged to qualify my assertion (on the editorial page of Business World).

However I stuck to my figure of 20 million scams in government and the public sector. My revised calculation: that while every government employee in the post-Independence Indian soft state may not have cheated the public and/or the exchequer, the majority were nurturing more than one illegal source of income or swindle. Therefore a conservative estimate of the aggregate scams and scandals within the government sector would still be 20 million.

Contemporary newspaper headlines suggest that this estimate of live scams and swindles within the government sector should be upped to 40 million.

This is not to say that open, uninterrupted and continuous day-to-day petty and not-so-petty corruption is the monopoly of government sector employees.

Unfortunately the government sector hand-in-the-till culture has seeped into the private sector as well, contaminating the entire economy. Thus even within the non-government corporate sector the earning of under-the-table commissions on purchase and works and service contracts has become commonplace.

Alas! What a fall is there my countrymen! Like the troubled ghost of Hamlet's father which roamed the battlements of Elsinore, the restless ghost of Mahatma Gandhi is undoubtedly roaming the dusty highways and the bylanes which tenuously link contemporary India's chaotic cities and neglected villages, a witness to the depths to which the nation he fathered has sunk.

Yet the greatest tribute which citizens with consciences (and their number is not negligible) can pay the memory of the Mahatma as the nation pays lip service to his rich legacy on October 2 (his birth anniversary) would be to advance beyond breast-beating and attempt to find ways and means to dig the people of this high-potential nation out of the abyss into which they have been plunged by a procession of political leaders who - it is now clear - were unworthy successors of the Mahatma. This contribution is one such attempt.

Looking back in retrospect at the string of scandals and scams which have been suddenly unearthed during the Nineties, the only good which has flowed from these shocking disclosures of gross betrayals of public trust is the emergence of an activist judiciary.

In perhaps the darkest period of the nation's history, the judiciary has emerged as the only institution of the state which has not been overwhelmed by the tidal wave of corruption which has swamped post-Independence India's institutions of governance.

Consequently national interest demands that this sole surviving institution of government is entrusted with the task of thoroughly cleansing the stinking stables of the government and the polity. But if the judiciary is to complete this task which it seems to have taken on, it must be empowered to complete it. For the on-the-ground reality is that during the past three decades the judiciary too has suffered considerable damage and attrition and at best is an enfeebled institution serving as a thin blue line of right-thinking members of society just about holding the barbarians at the gate.

It would be downright foolish to entertain any illusions that the political class cutting across party affiliations, is well disposed towards the judiciary. Judges particularly in the upper judiciary, have long been a thorn in the side of post-Independence India's new breed of carpetbagger politicians who tend to regard public property and funds as their own.

This thinly disguised animosity explains why the remuneration of Supreme and high court judges remained frozen at the 1950 level for over three decades until the mid Eighties. Moreover over 60 reports of several law commissions have remained largely unimplemented and are gathering dust in the mouldy archives of the federal law ministry in New Delhi.

These valuable and learned reports suggest numerous ways and means to recast procedural and other laws to reduce the law's agonising delay. Currently over two million cases are pending in the Supreme and high courts and civil litigation delays of a decade and more are the rule rather than the exception.

Therefore sustained public pressure to reverse the unstated policy of studied neglect of the judiciary of judicial reform is a vital precondition of cleaning the Aegean Stables of the nation's institutions of governance and the public sector.

For a start the number of courts and judges need to be rapidly increased. Against the Western nations' norm of one judge per 30,000 citizens, the ratio in India is 1:600,000. This ratio needs to be adjusted not only numerically but also qualitatively by improving the remuneration and working conditions (in terms of premises, equipment and supportive infrastructure) of the nation's judicial officers. The familiar excuse of paucity of funds to strengthen the judiciary should no longer be accepted. This stand-alone institution of orderly governance is too important to be left to the suspect mercies of the nation's comprehensively discredited political class.

Thorough-going judicial reform apart, the nation's populace and the intelligentsia in particular also needs to end its prolonged romance with the subaltern classes which have infiltrated and suborned the political and administrative process. Though it is politically incorrect to say so, the truth is that the nation's freedom movement was led by its urbanised educated middle class. And if a second freedom movement to lead the nation out of the desolate wilderness of poverty and despair is ever to gain momentum, it is this very class which will have to re-enter public discourse and public institutions.

The electorate has to come to terms with the limitations and disastrous amorality of subaltern class politicians, who unable to link cause and effect adequately, are destroying all the institutions of orderly governance. And in creating this awareness the media, the intelligentsia and the judiciary have vital roles to play.

This is not an argument for jettisoning the democratic system of government or for restricting universal suffrage. An insufficiently understood premised or orderly democratic government is that the judiciary and the intelligentsia (both unelected communities) have critical roles to play in checking politicians' excesses and moulding public opinion. And empowering judicial institutions and the intelligentsia is a pre-condition of the re-entry of the nation's alienated educated middle class into politics and the institutions of government.

Dilip Thakore is the founder-editor of Business India and Business World and former eidtor of Debonair.