Financial
Express: New Delhi: Tuesday, October 01,
2013.
The Japanese have always had the highest standards
of accountability. Honour was/is an integral part of life and, over the years,
several leaders (both corporate and political) have actually committed suicide
as atonement for failure of strategy, execution or morals. Indeed, in the most
extreme cases, even failure by subordinates led to senior public figures
committing hara kiri.
This high perhaps, excessively high standard of
morality still prevails in some Japanese. As recently as February 2012, in (of all places) Gurgaon, “…a 45-year-old Japanese national
and senior executive of a multi-national company…[hanged] himself in the lawns
of upscale DLF Icon condominium….In a suicide note...[he] wrote “I am sorry for
what I have done.”
To my mind, this is a pretty extreme approach,
and, indeed, in terms of governance, is unlikely to be a good thing unless the
person in question had created an effective back-up. It would be more sensible
to publicly acknowledge the failing and resign voluntarily, assuming the
failure was not criminal. Here, too, the Japanese were/are leaders, although
honour is certainly not the sole preserve of the Japanese. There are honourable
people everywhere, most of whom you never hear about.
In India, while we do have our share of honourable
people, we are, tragically, pretty far down on the accountability scale in the
public realm. The list of corporate and political figures who have found ways
to excuse themselves from crimes, let alone more modest failures of governance,
would extend way beyond the word limit of this article.
The good news, however, is that the people and the
courts are demanding accountability more and more loudly and Allah be
praised the system is responding. RTI was the first, or certainly the most
potent, tool in our hands. And, as it has wrought considerable havoc in the
corridors of corruption, there have been legislative efforts to thwart the
Chief Information Commissioner’s ruling that six major political parties should
be brought under the ambit of the RTI.
Both the UPA and NDA tried to legislate this
ruling away, but the peoples’ voice was raised loudly and quickly enough to get
it pushed from Parliament to the standing committee. Note, the battle is still
on please be continuously engaged. We all know that political funding is one of
the primary sources of all of India’s ills.
Kudos too to the Supreme Court, which has
consistently been stepping out of its proper position since it is clear that
our democracy has been disgraced by declining honour and zero accountability.
The government tried to legislate away the Supreme Court’s stricture that
legislators who are convicted of crimes with a sentence in excess of two years
should be disqualified I mean, is this real? Can anyone believe that anyone
would object to something so obviously necessary? It needs to be said that it
is shocking in the very least. The UPA government’s move failed and for this
credit has to go to the BJP, which, while originally going along with the plan,
made a complete reversal of its position at the last minute. Clearly, it is
trying to burnish its election plank of governance.
But, it is equally clear that the BJP doesn’t
really believe in governance either. Or, perhaps, like a lot of entities both
political and corporate in this country, it doesn’t really know what governance
and accountability are.
Witness its promotion of Narendra Modi as its
candidate for Prime Minister in the next general elections, trumpeting his
governance achievements. Surprisingly, a wide spectrum of corporate leaders,
some of whom are renowned for championing governance, have echoed this view,
perhaps looking one-dimensionally at business returns.
As is obviously apparent, good governance requires
accountability. What this means is that if someone in my company (or my
government) fails to do his job with integrity or worse, commits a criminal
act, ultimately I am responsible. If I didn’t know, particularly if the person
was high up the chain of command, my governance had failed; if I did know, I
was complicit and should be held accountable.
There is a woman named Maya Kodnani, who is
currently in jail (possibly facing a death sentence) for her role in the 2002 riots. Kodnani, at the time, was the minister for women and child affairs
in the Modi government. Clearly, either Modi’s governance had failed (if he
didn’t know what she was doing) or he was complicit and should be held
accountable. In either case, he is unworthy to lead even a state government,
let alone the centre.
The best news is that the TINA factor that has so
driven Indian voting is also changing—the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) is, apparently,
making a strong run in the Delhi assembly elections, and will certainly provide
a meaningful alternative to all of us in next year’s Lok Sabha polls.
The author is CEO of Mecklai Financial
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