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| Mission impossible? The jury is still out on whether and how well Narendra Modi is able to stem the tide of corruption. Photo courtesy: PIB |
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n Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer, now retired,
received a peculiar instruction from a minister when he returned to his state
cadre after a deputation at the Centre. The minister wanted the official to
substitute the income certificate submitted by a student, who wanted to appear
for an entrance examination, with another one so that the boy could claim the
benefit of a quota for backward minorities and easily secure admission in a
medical college. “Only you and I would know,” the minister told the officer,
reassuring the latter that their secret would be safe with him. The officer,
who had by then earned a reputation for not being a doormat for the politician,
refused; needless to say, he was promptly transferred out.
Even though many years may have passed since the incident,
Alphons Kannanthanam vividly recalls a sense of affront that apparently the
minister felt and how his transfer order was issued the very next day.
In an earlier avatar as the commissioner of the Delhi
Development Authority, Alphons demolished more than 14,000 illegal structures
that had been built by certain politicians and high-net-worth individuals,
reclaiming in the process acres of prime property that were then valued at
several thousands of crores of rupees. Then, as later, he was shunted out at
the behest of certain politicians and their associates.
Incidentally, his relocation to Delhi in 1992 had come about
in similar circumstances; he was transferred out of Kerala after he wrote a
dissenting note in the infamous palmolein oil import scam that had rocked the
state. Alphons has since taken to politics; he contested and won as an
independent candidate from the Kanjirapally Assembly seat in Kerala. He joined
the BJP in 2011.
Cut to 2012 and another IAS officer, Ashok Khemka, would be
transferred out for the nth time for taking on the powers that be. His fault?
He detected certain irregularities in land transactions, particularly one
allegedly involving a high-profile politician’s son-in-law and a public limited
company. Khemka has been unceremoniously transferred more number of times than
the total number of years of service he has put in so far. Today, he serves as
the transport commissioner of Haryana.
When reports began to appear in the media about the extent
of this VIP’s involvement in the alleged scam and when a civil society movement
called India Against Corruption began to pose uncomfortable questions to the
erstwhile Manmohan Singh government and the Congress party alike, this VIP had
derisively remarked, “mango people in a banana republic”; in Hindi, mango
people means “aam aadmi”, an unmistakable reference to the anti-corruption
movement, some of whose members subsequently floated the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP).
Some politicians and political parties have wondered why a
“private citizen”, like the VIP in question, should be hounded in the manner he
has been. But, as the TEHELKA investigation reveals, he hardly fits the
description of a private person. For, how many private citizens can claim to
curry favours from a corporate (Jet Airways, in this case), and with relative
ease at that? Or, as a BJP leader wondered aloud, which private citizen would
be exempted from security checks, greeted with a meet-and-assist service every
time he flies or accorded security at taxpayers’ expense?
The downside of corruption
India may have copied the British model of governance, but
the similarity ends there. In the United Kingdom, a certain minister had to
resign for even as much as asking the person concerned to fast track the issue
of a visa application of the nanny of his former lover. India, in contrast,
seems to exhibit a far greater tolerance of misdemeanours. (However, one of the
earliest recorded exceptions to this general trend was in 1951 when Jawaharlal
Nehru made an example of HG Mudgal, who, incidentally, was also from the
Congress party, for accepting a bribe.)
There is no gainsaying that the intersection of political,
corporate and bureaucratic classes in India presents a combustible mix and
their interplay has a direct bearing on governance.
In 1993, the government constituted a committee headed by
the then home secretary NN Vohra (today he is serving as the governor of Jammu
and Kashmir) to look into the nexus between crime syndicates, bureaucrats and
politicians. Twelve years later, in 2005, the Second Administrative Reforms
Commission was set up under the chairmanship of Veerappa Moily for revamping
the administrative machinery. Certainly, the two reports leave a lot to be
desired.
A conservative estimate by an industry chamber puts the
financial cost of certain recent cases of corruption at 36,400 crore. Also,
India has slid down Transparency International’s corruption perception index
rating; from being ranked 72 in 2007, it dropped to 87 in 2010 and 94 in 2013,
below some countries such as China.
In Transparency International’s Global Corruption Barometer
2013, politicians, corporates and bureaucrats in India had the dubious
distinction of being perceived as more corrupt than others. More than 80
percent of the people surveyed felt that the political parties and their
leaders were corrupt; 65 percent felt the same way about lawmakers and
bureaucrats; and 50 percent said that businesses were guilty of indulging in
corrupt practices.
Corruption dates back decades
While he headed the Second Administrative Reforms
Commission, which, among other things, examined the
politician-corporate-bureaucrat nexus, Moily had said that corruption has been
with us for several centuries. Even at the time Kautilya wrote Arthashastra, he
had said that just as fish moving inside water cannot be known when drinking
water, even so officers appointed for carrying out works cannot be known when
appropriating money. Modern India isn’t any better. A perusal of the history of
independent India would suggest that it is replete with scams. The earliest
recorded scandal dates back to 1948 when a foreign firm was contracted for
supply of jeeps to the Indian Army. Although the firm received monies, it
failed to deliver the promised number of vehicles.
Nehru was not personally accused of corruption, but the same
could not be said of his government. As a sitting Congress mp from
Thiruvananthapuram, Shashi Tharoor, writes in his book Nehru: The Invention of
India, “Jawaharlal [could not] prevent the growth of the corruption which his
own statist policies facilitated. The image of the self-sacrificing Congressmen
in homespun gave way to that of the professional politicians the educated
middle classes came to despise, sanctimonious windbags clad hypocritically in
khadi who spouted socialist rhetoric while amassing uncountable (and
unaccountable) riches by manipulating governmental favours. With licences for
quotas for every business activity, petty politicians grew rich by profiting
from the power to permit.
“The stench of corruption reached Jawaharlal’s own circles
three times in the later years of his rule: When his finance minister TT
Krishnamachari was obliged to resign in 1958 over improprieties in a life
insurance scam (it was Feroze Gandhi’s muckraking that brought about
Krishnamachari’s downfall); when his friend Jayanti Dharma Teja, whom Nehru had
helped set up a major shipping line, defaulted on loans and skipped the
country; and when Jawaharlal’s own private secretary since 1946, MO Mathai, who
was accused both of spying for the CIA and of accumulating an ill-gotten
fortune, was forced to resign in 1959. In none of these cases was there the
slightest suggestion that Jawaharlal had profited personally in any way from
the actions of his associates, but they again confirmed that Nehru’s loyalty
exceeded his judgement.”
History was to repeat itself, again, during the tenure of
the erstwhile upa government. A series of scams, including, but not limited to,
the allocation of 2G spectrum and coal blocks and the hosting of the 2010
Commonwealth Games, eventually led to the downfall of the government that was
headed by a prime minister with a Teflon image.
According to former Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG)
Vinod Rai, if the then prime minister Manmohan Singh had wanted, he could have
prevented the 2G scam. Also, recently, the Supreme Court told CBI director
Ranjit Sinha to recuse himself from the 2G probe. According to TSR Subramaniam,
a former cabinet secretary, that the CBI was a “hand maiden” of the government
of the day was well-known but he thought it was extraordinary that no action
has yet been taken against Sinha.
Will Modi make good his promise?
Candidate Narendra Modi raised the bar by saying that
neither does he himself indulge in corruption nor would he allow others to do
it (“na khaata hoon, na khaane doonga”.)
At the same time, he qualified his remarks in an interview he gave to a private
television channel by saying that the problem of corrupt practices could not be
solved to everyone’s satisfaction, but that certain preventive measures could
surely make it difficult to indulge in corruption. The jury is still out on
whether and how well Prime Minister Modi is able to stem the tide of
corruption, which, as he said in August at an election rally at Kaithal in
Haryana, is a disease worse than cancer.
His government set the tone as early as June this year when
it used President Pranab Mukherjee’s speech to a joint session of Parliament to
underscore that the government “is determined to rid the country of the scourge
of corruption and the menace of black money”. In the same speech, it was said
that “the institution of Lokpal is important to curb corruption and my
government will endeavour to formulate rules in conformity with the Act”. (The
government hopes to push for the Lokpal and Lokayuktas (Amendment) Bill, 2014,
in the ongoing winter session of Parliament.)
Subramaniam insists that it is too early to judge the Modi
government; he points out that Modi has made a beginning by making it known to
anyone who would care to listen to him that he intends to bring about a visible
difference in the way India is governed. Already, the message seems to have had
the desired impact on corporates. Recently, The Economic Times quoted Godrej
group chairman Adi Godrej as saying that “there is a definite realisation among
Indian firms that even in government, there is a major movement underway
against corruption”.
Hypocrisy to the fore
Yet, to the discerning, it is obvious that the debate about
corruption in India smacks of hypocrisy and double standards. According to a
recent Transparency International report, 54 percent of Indians surveyed say
they paid a bribe in the past year; that is one in every two Indians who
participated in the survey.
A 2013 document titled ‘Bribery and corruption: Ground
reality in India’ prepared by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and
Industry (FICCI) and Ernst and Young, a multinational professional services
firm headquartered in London, quotes an unnamed foreign multinational company
as saying, “These days, bribery is in many cases regarded as a norm rather than
an evil.”
Yet, even if, for a moment, one were to accept and concede
that corruption is endemic and few can claim to be untouched by it, that an
ordinary Indian citizen is as culpable or guilty as, say, a VIP, the latter will
still find it difficult to wriggle out because public interest is involved;
and, therefore, to that extent, politicians, corporates and bureaucrats would
be held to a different yardstick than the common man.
Corporates don’t fare any better, either. The FICCI document
explains that “more than half of the respondents agreed that it is the lack of
will of corporate enterprises to obtain licences and approvals the ‘right way’
which encourages bribery and corruption”.
Furthermore, while cash continues to be the most preferred
mode of paying bribes (89 percent of the respondents selected it from the long
list of possible modes), 77 percent chose “gifts and kind” as a likely quid pro
quo, which, possibly, explains the behaviour of some of the dramatis personae
in the TEHELKA investigation.
This, when the Central Civil Services (Conduct) Rules, 1964,
stipulate that government officials are not to accept or permit members of
their families (or other persons acting on their behalf) to accept gifts.
According to the FICCI document, the expression “gift”
includes free transport, boarding, lodging or other services, or any other
pecuniary advantage provided by any person other than a near relative or
personal friend with no official dealings with the civil servant.
As the Second Administrative Reforms Commission said, “The
standard should be one of not only the conduct of Caesar’s wife but of Caesar
himself.” And that holds true for the political, corporate and bureaucratic classes
today. And tomorrow, too.
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