Express Buzz ; Sumit Mitra; Saturday, March 19, 2011,
Corruption, it seems, is exploding like a raging pandemic. Of course it was always hanging in the air in India’s social and political environment, like the smell of burnt petrol at busy traffic intersections. That explains the headline corruption cases in, say, the 1980’s and 1990’s. But now it seems to have crossed what author Malcolm Gladwell has called “the Tipping Point” when social behaviours, among other things, cross a threshold to tip and spread like wildfire.
To get a feel of this qualitative change, it may be useful to take a quick look at how infected by corruption are all the three arms of the Indian republic legislature, executive and judiciary not to speak of the so-called fourth estate, the media. As the latest round of WikiLeaks show though denied, predictably, by the persons concerned the UPA-1 government won the Lok Sabha vote in 2008 on the issue of the civil nuclear bill by distributing cash through two Congress MPs, one of them a minister even now, among the opposition MPs who seemed biddable. Further, while the 2G Spectrum scandal is an epitome of executive corruption, the extent to which the rot has permeated the judiciary, usually held above suspicion, is that the family members of a former CJI are now under police investigation for corruption. Nor is it likely that the dissemination of information in the media will act as an antidote. Following wide circulation of the Niira Radia wiretaps, showing that corporate houses had put the services of journalists to use for getting their favourites in the ‘right’ ministerial berths, the media has been irreversibly defanged.
But what has made the number of corruption cases cross the tipping point of late? It is clear that instances of detection of corruption have multiplied partly due to shifts in the technological and legal environment. WikiLeaks is a classic example of use of the Internet, a technology-enabled medium, to make available to the inhabitants of a country what the US government knows about it. Usually that’s a lot more than what the countrymen might have known by their own effort. On the other hand, the Right to Information (RTI) Act is a testimony to the strength of legal reform in the battle against corruption.
However, the power of WikiLeaks to curb corruption will remain limited until it is able to prise open information from the government of the target country, for news obtained from US diplomatic sources can be easily trashed as “propaganda” or “hearsay.” But wide use of RTI, and statutory obligation of government officials and lawmakers to declare their private assets on websites, as has been put to effect in Bihar, may act as an effective deterrent against mid-level corruptions, provided there is adequate policing by the revenue authorities.
But technological and legal means are not enough to eradicate big-ticket corruption, linked, as it is, to the government’s discretionary power. There are many things that appear to be non-discretionary but actually they are not so. In the case of allocation of 2G Spectrum, the catch was in the 2007 policy deviation that instead of auctioning, the frequencies would be sold out at the 2001 prices. Unpredictability of policy leaves room for large scale corruption. And so does its opaqueness. One reason why there is so much sleaze in the property market is that government bodies hold the card of future land-use changes close to their chest. So, those who have paid for the information concerning a farmland being converted to commercial use alone stand to win a bounty by buying the land earlier, and selling it after the zoning change. Information is the currency of corruption. One can imagine how valuable is the knowledge to both global players and local land developers of when will the barrier to foreign direct investment in multi-product organised retail be removed. If Player A gets the information before Player B, it will give him a head start in selecting stores and organising the supply chain and logistics. All that will put him leagues ahead of competition. Acting, reportedly, on a recommendation by UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi, the government has set up a group of ministers (GoM) to suggest ways for decimating discretionary powers of the executive. But no government can do completely without discretion.
It is applied each time somebody is appointed, a new policy is adopted or an old system is overhauled. Even a government relatively free of corruption, such as the US, relies to a large extent on its president’s discretion on several matters touching on the country’s sovereignty, security and economy. So the Indian GoM’s task is easier said than done.
Meanwhile corruption is spreading like terminal cancer, with a large swathe of the population, much larger in percentage terms to the total population, actually benefiting from it. In Mumbai, a flat measuring only 1,000 square feet in an area as unglamorous as, say, Andheri, now costs around `1.2 crore. Judging by the number of the ads of crore-plus flats in the property pages of the city’s newspapers, it may not be wrong to assume that there is no paucity of buyers.
Considering that it is an amount difficult to collect through legitimate savings, except of course for the minuscule population of high-earners, it is obvious that corrupt money is now being dispersed among the motley crowd. For example, in many cities, enterprising school teachers who run private coaching centres and enjoy the reputation of having the hottest tips for the final examination can now be counted among the rich, with large houses and swanky cars. Just how many have questionably earned money spread downwards is evident from the fact that over a million Indian students are now enrolled in various US colleges. Following drastic cuts in foreign students’ scholarship in the wake of the 2008 downturn in the US economy, it may be guessed that there are nearly a million Indian families that are shelling out `15 lakh a year for the education of their ward. It is nobody’s case that people should not live better. But there will still be a question mark on how legitimate their income is.
Now is the time to return to the question: has corruption reached the tipping point, and, if one may add here, if so, why? Gladwell, in discussing why crime rate in New York was on a runaway rise till the middle of the 1990’s, and then fell with a thud, came up with the “broken windows” theory of criminologists James Q Wilson and George Kelling. They argued that crime is the brainchild of disorder. “If a window is broken and left unrepaired, people walking by will conclude that no one cares and no one is in charge.” Soon, many more windows will be broken, and the sense of anarchy will spread from the street to the entire city.
Something similar is happening in India. A minister distributes mobile frequency allegedly for a consideration, and the prime minister does nothing except claiming that it was his “error of judgment”. There is public disclosure that a minister and a retainer of the ruling family had bribed opposition MPs to save the government. Instead of investigating the charge, the government looks the other way. These are nothing but broken windows that would prompt others to break many more of them.
Sumit Mitra is a freelance senior journalist
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