ELECTIONS '98
COMMENTARY
SPECIALS
INTERVIEWS
CAPITAL BUZZ
REDIFF POLL
DEAR REDIFF
THE STATES
YEH HAI INDIA!
ARCHIVES

This Judgement Defames Me

I am fully aware that you should have incontrovertible proof, solid evidence, before you accuse a man of corruption. I am also fully aware that the corrupt are not exactly strewing the streets with evidence of their underhand acts. I am even more fully aware that the corrupt are also the powerful, thus very able to manipulate the strands of justice so that they remain untouched.

Nevertheless, I am outraged -- and that may explain the incoherence I think you will find in this column -- that a man called Anna Hazare has been sentenced to jail for defamation. As a similarly outraged friend of mine wrote in a letter to the press: "If this single judgment does not arouse the angst of the media and the people, we are a Nation of corpses."

Let's see. We have been unable to punish the guilty in, and forgive me, but this is a necessarily incomplete list: the Bofors gun scandal. The Urea scam. The Fodder scam. The St Kitt's forgery case. The Delhi Sikh massacre, 1984. The Jain diary case. The Stock scam. The J J Hospital glycerine adulteration deaths, 1986. The Bombay riots. The Bombay bomb blasts. Sukh Ram's money-in-the-sheets and telecom scam. The Housing scam. The LPG allotment scam. The Bhiwandi riots, 1970. The Babri Masjid demolition case. The Pickle baron bribe case.

Fifteen major crimes, off the top of my head, in which the guilty are laughing at me from behind their starched white suits and top-grade bristling-gun-variety security that I have to pay for. Yet the court sends to prison for defamation a retired soldier. Anna Hazare.

I know nothing about Anna Hazare but the few details that I will lay out here. He retired from the army and poured his own savings into the uplift of his home village, Ralegan Siddhi in Maharashtra. Though that is not very important to our story, Ralegan Siddhi is now a model in many respects. Hazare has done for its people more than all Maharashtra's politicians, ever, have managed together. Today, he lives what is, by all accounts, a simple life there.

Over the years, Hazare has had to deal with various departments in the government. He found signs of massive corruption in some of them. He spoke his mind about those signs, saying the minister concerned must accept responsibility for them. What the rest of us quite naturally understood from this was that the ministers themselves are corrupt. This is a contention I am willing to bet 95 per cent of India will agree with.

One of those ministers filed a defamation suit against Hazare. Now this case moved at what can only be labelled the speed of greased lightning. In less than a year, Hazare has been found guilty of defamation and sent to jail for three months. In contrast, and picking just one example, 14 years have been inadequate to punish the murderers of 3,000 Sikhs in New Delhi.

I know even less about Babanrao Gholap, this particular minister. I have no idea if he is or is not corrupt. I can only say, from looking around at all that goes on in this country, that I am convinced nearly every minister in the land is corrupt. That there is only a handful of them that is clean. Perhaps that is irresponsible for me to say, perhaps I damn even some clean ones by saying so, but that's just too bad. I cannot be alone in thinking that most ministers, most politicians, are crooks and thugs.

It seems clear to me that by sentencing Hazare to a jail term, the court has only helped ensure that crooks and thugs stay untouched. Of course Hazare should have produced evidence. But let's see, how many of us have access to evidence, hard evidence, that ministers are corrupt? How many of us are optimistic about finding, about anyone finding, evidence of corruption?

I would have liked to see the court recognise this. Section 500 in the Indian Penal Code, which addresses punishment for defamation, prescribes that someone found guilty "shall be punished with simple imprisonment for a term which may extend to two years, or with fine, or with both." That is, the judge can decide what the term of punishment should be. So I would have liked the judge in this defamation case to say: "Yes, Hazare has no evidence for his allegations. Therefore, I am sentencing him to imprisonment in this room until the court rises at the end of the day."

I would have liked that because every one of us, including that judge, knows that the majority of ministers are corrupt. Every one of us knows, too, that while it is a fine principle that you must have evidence, in practice it has turned into a smokescreen that covers up for continuing corruption.

This is how twisted the situation has become: today, at least in our minds, it is the minister who has to prove his innocence. Until then, we will assume he is guilty. If this muddies the occasional lily-white minister, it is also quite unavoidable. This upside-down state is entirely the fault of the ministers themselves. The lily-white ones too, for tacitly acquiescing in this mess.

But all that said and done, let's get back to evidence. Let's also be frank: if hard evidence is so hard to find, there is other evidence of corruption that surrounds us, visible to everybody. I think it is time the courts took notice of it. I'll offer up one example to make my point.

In Bombay, this monsoon season, the roads are in positively the worst shape I have ever known. Potholes are everywhere and several major roads are no more than a collection of stones and holes. What could be the reason the Municipality -- run from this year by a gang of politicians -- has not cared to repair the roads? Could it have something to do with contractors who are not being co-operative enough?

The point is that the services we get from our governments for the taxes we pay are simply pitiful. Dozens of scams beset us, steal our money. The country is steeped in sordid, criminal mediocrity in every direction we look, making life here a struggle for most Indians.

What might be the reason for all this? Who are we fooling if we think corruption has nothing to do with all this?

On the condition they have reduced this country to, and that's evidence enough for all of us, every politician, every mayor, every minister, stands accused. Guilty. That's why the court insults the country by punishing Hazare instead. It seems to me we should sue for defamation.

But as always, the greatest perversities in this whole sham come from the rest of us ordinary folk. For we are just as responsible as those possibly lily-white ministers for ourselves, as I wrote earlier, "tacitly acquiescing in this mess." After all, even knowing the corruption and criminality that afflicts the political class, we vote thugs into power over us. Time after time. This man speaks for the lower castes, that one protects Hinduism, that one over there is a defender of Tamil interests ... in our minds, we spell out all these rationalisations of the one truth we all know and acknowledge to ourselves: practically every one of these people is corrupt. Their only interest is in how much money they can cram into their pockets.

And there is one perversity that may be, if you can believe it, even greater. A substantial number of people reacted to Anna Hazare's sentence by saying: the court has shown that nobody is above the law and even "big men" get punished.

Now the day a court puts a Laloo in jail for his fodder machinations; or a Thackeray in jail for his instigation of rioting; or a Rao in jail for getting documents forged to implicate a political foe: the day one of these things happens, I will myself shout in delight that the court has shown that indeed, nobody is above the law.

Until then, it seems to me that nothing serves as well to keep politicians free of punishment as this particular attitude.

Fine, we may deceive ourselves pleasantly by thinking that Hazare's jail term proves nobody is above the law. But one day we will know: that is precisely why politicians remain above the law.

How Readers reacted to Dilip D'Souza's recent columns

Dilip D'Souza