Mera Bharat Baiman

After understandable national joy and jubilation over the World Cup, it is time to turn our attention to the harsh realities on the ground of which steadily mounting corruption — both in its shocking spread and staggering scale — is obviously the worst. Corruption is indeed eating into the country’s vitals by corroding the entire Indian system from top to bottom. The reprehensible process, in the words of experts on the subject, is both “systemic and systematic”.

There are those — especially in the ruling establishment who are main beneficiaries of cancerous corruption — who argue that there is no need to return to the painful subject after the mother of all scams, the 2G spectrum allocation, is being pursued in law courts, the Shunglu Committee’s report on the mega scandal of the Commonwealth Games is being “processed”, and Hasan Ali Khan, the Pune horse-breeder officially described as the “biggest tax-evader” and “hoarder of black money in foreign banks”, is in jail. To them I would offer three major reasons for pressing ahead with the struggle against corruption, graft, malfeasance and perversion of the rule of law.
First, if the law is now taking its course in the horrendous 2G case and its principal perpetrator, former telecommunications minister A. Raja, is in judicial custody, no credit is due to the leaders of the United Progressive Alliance government. In full knowledge of his misdeeds in 2007, they reappointed him to his old job two years later and then protected him until it became impossible to do so. Their reasoning was that coalition politics has its “compulsions”.
Moreover, this case would never have proceeded so speedily as it has were it not for the Supreme Court’s supervision of all activities in this connection of the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI). Even so, some competent observers have pointed out that there are “serious omissions” in the comprehensive chargesheet that the CBI filed on April 2: some persons obviously complicit in the 2G loot or direct beneficiaries of “huge kickbacks” have not been included in the list of accused. However, the apex court can be depended upon to take care of such matters.
Mr Hasan Ali Khan was left completely free for well over three years; he could do what he liked. Nobody bothered when he went to Singapore for months, allegedly on a fake passport, and opened several bank accounts there. Only after the Supreme Court made some sharp observations in February did the Enforcement Directorate (ED) take the Pune stud farm owner into custody. But since the ED is not under the direct supervision of the apex court, on March 29, after reading the transcript of the ED’s “custodial interrogation” of Mr Khan, their Lordships were constrained to express their “displeasure” with the directorate’s failure to put to Mr Khan questions about the sources of black money — questions that should have been asked but weren’t. The point is whether the directorate had been dragging its feet on its own accord or under instructions “from above”.
The second reason why attention should not be diverted from burgeoning corruption is that only eternal vigilance can help India rid itself of this scourge. Gone is the era when scams were infrequent; now there is a scam a day. Over just a few days there have been nearly a dozen, of which let me mention only a few. The most chilling of these is the growing number of airline pilots who are being arrested for securing their jobs by using forged documents, sometimes issued by fraudulent institutions such as a training academy in Baramati, Maharashtra. It is no mere coincidence that many of these “fake fliers”, endangering the lives of passengers, are relatives of senior executives of the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA).
A Chandigarh-based businessman who is also a Trinamul Congress member of Parliament flew to poll-bound Assam in his private jet from Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport with `57 lakhs in cash and nobody batted an eyelid. Only the Chief Election Commissioner has asked for the transfer of the airport staff that allowed him to take off. The Punjab and Haryana high court has quashed a whole series of appointments, ranging from relatively senior posts to those of drivers, by the Haryana government. In neighbouring Punjab, the Vigilance Bureau has “booked” an Indian Administrative Service officer, now retired, and three others for allegedly “embezzling crores of rupees” from the funds — hold your breath — allocated for celebrating the birth anniversary of Shaeed-e-Azam (Great Martyr) Bhagat Singh.
Against this backdrop the third reason for remaining focused on corruption assumes great importance. A two-day seminar on transparency and accountability in governance at the Vivekananda International Foundation in Delhi over the weekend, attended by eminent Indians and some foreigners, warned the powers that be that the dynamism imparted to the campaign against corruption by the public in general and activists in particular, as well as the media and the judiciary, would grow, not subside. Indeed, the conference formed an Anti-Corruption Front under the “patronage” of Baba Ramdev who is already trying to mobilise the masses over this issue.
M.N. Venkatachaliah, a former Chief Justice of India (CJI) who inaugurated the conference, regretted that the government was showing no political will to fight corruption and black money stashed abroad, two problems with a symbiotic relationship. He suggested that Parliament should immediately pass a law to declare illegal all bank deposits maintained abroad by Indians. Thereafter, only the accounts of proven legitimacy should be released and others confiscated. Most countries of the world, he believed, would cooperate in this. The gathering endorsed the idea. Some scholars pointed out that black money in India was four per cent of the gross domestic product in the 1950s when Nicholas Kaldor estimated it, and it was now close to half of the economy!
Another former CJI, J.S. Verma, concentrating on Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s role, argued that it was no good for the latter to claim that he was honest, that and nobody brought to his notice what was going on. As the man in charge, said Mr Verma, the Prime Minister was accountable for whatever his colleagues and subordinates in the government did.