De-greasing India

“Flavour salt lassi with Worcester Sauce
Mix Chaat Masala in your Bloody Mary
Fry Madrasi keyley as a second course —
When you hear the word ‘fusion’ be very wary”
From The Hymns of
Feromonus by Bachchoo

At the beginning of the Anna Hazare agitation a young friend of mine wrote a piece in an influential space voicing his disapproval of extra-parliamentary action. He said Mr Hazare and his associates were resorting to blackmail.

They should instead rely on the Indian democratic system to redress grievances. Laws should be made by the ballot box, which has the power to uproot the corrupt.
Losing elections wouldn’t mean that these politicians ended up breaking stones at the President’s pleasure, but they could be further investigated and punished by the police and courts.
There now seems to be a deadlock in the discussions on the Lokpal Bill and on questions of who should be given the power to do what to whom. My young friend is not alone and his argument has been variously stated. It seems to be the position of all constitutional fundamentalists and with some detail added, the position of the government representatives on the panel.
It’s true that what the media calls the “civil society” representatives on the drafting committee have no democratic standing in the constitutional sense. They can even be said, if one wants to call people who have devoted their lives selflessly to reform, to be self-appointed busy-bodies or blackmailers. I have no doubt that Winston Churchill in some private moment characterised Mahatma Gandhi as such.
And yet even though home minister P. Chidambaram and human resources development minister Kapil Sibal have more democratic credentials, the government recognises that they have to speak to the upstarts because there is a very strong public tide that has carried them to that negotiating table.
The government can’t take the stance that there is nothing to discuss. The nation and the government recognise that one of the main maladies of the Indian body politic is corruption and it is not just in particular organs but permeates the DNA of the country. The “B word” (Bhrashtachar) is an apt description of government transactions from the procurement of everything paid for out of taxes to the performance of every duty by the arms and bureaucrats of the state and to the operations and deals of capitalism. The B word used to be the oil to make the mechanism go and I have heard the case, however feeble, for turning a blind eye to it. It greased the mechanism of production, consumption, legality and licensing and put a pint of rum in the pocket of the downtrodden policeman. It is now recognised that it is the raison d’etre of most of Indian politics and very much of the capitalist system. The grease is drowning the machinery.
The government representatives in the deadlocked talks which one of the civilists, Arvind Kejriwal, called the “Jokepal Bill” rely on the supreme and pure idea of the Constitution. The elected members are the people’s choice and the Prime Minister as the pinnacle of such a system, the chosen by the chosen, should have immunity from investigation and prosecution. Members of Parliament, in the pattern of democracy we inherited from the British, belong to the supreme forum and should not have to be examined by a non-elected panel. Neither do the parliamentarians want an investigative force or one that can prosecute alleged wrongdoers outside of the Central Bureau of Investigation and other existing arms of the revenue and customs departments.
In the larger debates about corruption in India it has been frequently alleged that the physician should cure himself. In other words there are no incorrupt people left to perform the duties of investigation and punishment. No one is entitled to cast that first stone.
This may be true but shouldn’t be an indictment of the character of all subcontinentals. Corruption is not in our genes. It is the defect of a democratic mechanism that affords the opportunity for vast and all-encompassing bribery, a black economy and a licence raj, which gets politicians fighting for places in even the Upper Chamber in order to secure some junior ministerial post, which will give them access to corruption. You only have to read the leaked conversation between corporate lobbyist Niira Radia and K. Kanimozhi of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam to realise how brazen the pursuit has become.
It may be that a parliamentary democracy that inevitably elects politicians on the basis of the numbers in a caste, sub-caste, religious or regional grouping throws up a truly democratic leadership. The people who elect them know they are crooks but they are “their” crooks! The power of numbers translates into billions in black money and that into more power and patronage. And so shamelessly on!
From the arguments posed by Mr Sibal and the other constitutionalists, it seems that they fear a KGB-type body emerging from the proposals that the civilists are making. Such a body would be, as the KGB was, a law unto itself and there would be no guarantee that it wouldn’t fall into the sins it was born to eradicate. In Stalinist Russia the People’s NKVD and the KGB were inevitable adjuncts of the state machinery. Russian novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said that the Gulags were inevitable because the Stalinist state needed slaves and free labour and those accused of being dissidents became the victims of this necessity.
The Indian state doesn’t have any such necessity. It would be justice indeed (and somewhat entertaining) if the corrupt of India were put to hard labour building dams and suchlike, but even that prospect shouldn’t lead us to condone the existence of Gulags. Rather, we (and the drafters of the Lokpal structure) should take a leaf out of the dying Lenin’s book. Among the last essays, speeches, wishes and instructions he wrote was the idea of a “Workers and Peasants’ Inspection”. This would be a vast and not-necessarily-Communist-Party institution which could be elected at very local levels and would be convened every month or so in order to censor, oversee, guide and even cancel the work of the Politburo and the Communist Party’s governing machinery. It would have greater powers than the Stalinist secretariat and could overrule it.
I wonder if the Communists of West Bengal and Kerala ever took those last essays of Comrade Lenin seriously. Could they have avoided Singur, Nandigram and the humiliating electoral defeat if they had?