No one can possibly dispute that the last year of the first decade of the 21st century has been India’s year of unending scams, scandals and shame. Even more mortifying is the thought that the year that has just dawned is unlikely to be any better and may indeed turn out to be worse. For, the scourge of venality, graft, corruption and gross abuse of power that has been eating into the nation’s vitals has been multiplying itself so fast and so far as to boggle the mind. Nor is there anything to show that this terrible trend is weakening.
Incredible though it may seem the shape of things to come in independent India was foreshadowed in the events that took place a decade before the tryst with destiny, to go back no farther than that. During the short period of two years between 1937 and the start of World War II in 1939, when the Congress, then a freedom movement, was in power in nine provinces under the British scheme of diarchy, the Mahatma was deeply disturbed by some incidence of malfeasance among Congress ministers.
The most notable was the case of K.F. Nariman, an intrepid and upright Congressman in Bombay who had protested against the shenanigans of those making money from the reclamation of the city’s marine lines. For his pains, he was hounded out of the party on the charge of “maligning” the Congress! Only after Independence was his honour restored. The new reclamation area south Bombay was named Nariman Point. Ironically, it later became the focal point of enormous corrupt activity.
There was corruption during the Nehru era but on a relatively modest scale compared with today’s standards. Also, some wrongdoers were actually punished which hardly happens now. A senior member of the Indian Civil Service (ICS) was sent to prison for accepting some bottles of whisky and such items in return for favours granted. A chief minister of a hurriedly cobbled unit of former princely states that eventually merged into Madhya Pradesh was arrested and jailed for taking a bribe of `10,000.
Pratap Singh Kairon in Punjab and Bakshi Ghulam Mohammed in Kashmir, both chief ministers notorious for their misdeeds, were indulged for quite some time for “urgent political reasons” but eventually eased out. Only in the case of Krishna Menon, allegedly involved in the Jeep Scandal during the first Kashmir War, did Nehru refuse to act on the ground that the charge was baseless. But his closest friend and cabinet colleague, Maulana Azad, made his displeasure known to the Prime Minister.
It was in the 1970s that the country started sliding down the slippery slope so swiftly and brazenly as to lead to today’s monumental mess. After Indira Gandhi achieved supremacy in the Congress and the country her henchmen started believing that they had earned the right to enrich themselves with impunity. When exposed or caught they told Madam that the Opposition’s attack was not on them but her. Declaring that corruption was a “global phenomenon”, she started stonewalling all demands for an inquiry. This has now become the established pattern no matter which party or combination is in power. Today, nine Indians out of every ten would not know who Tulmohan Ram was. In the ’70s the case associated with his name, like that about A.R. Antulay’s trusts, had become the byword for egregious corruption. Tulmohan was a harmless and clueless backbencher from Bihar. His superiors in the party, including fund-collectors, ordered him to sign a petition on behalf of some dubious characters in Pondicherry for lucrative licences that snowballed into a massive scam.
Since stonewalling remained the policy of the Congress (I) with its overwhelming majority, the Tulmohan case became the starting point of disruption of Parliament as the means of drawing attention to loot. Came a stage when Morarji Desai threatened to sit on a dharna inside the House. With her unfailing political instinct Indira Gandhi decided to compromise. She agreed to show Desai and some other Opposition leaders privately a top-secret report of the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) she was refusing to share with them. Simultaneously, she insisted that the report’s contents wouldn’t be made public.
At present there is, alas, a total lack of such skill on both sides of the political divide. Consequently, the fight against corruption has yielded place to a relentless, no-holds-barred fight between the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The public at large cannot be blamed for assuming that nothing would come of the current upheaval, given the unconscionable delay between the explosive exposure of the the G2 spectrum and Commonwealth Games mega scams and the CBI’s raids on Suresh Kalmadi’s homes and questioning of A. Raja. Madhu Koda of Jharkhand, the state’s mines minister in the BJP government and chief minister with the Congress support, was arrested for alleged amassing of `4,000 crore in two years. But the case against him, like all corruption cases under all governments, is proceeding at a pace compared with which a snail would be a champion runner. The “Save Raja” campaign of the Dravid Munnetra Kazhagam, a key ally of the Congress in the ruling coalition, has a message of its own.
Nearly 60 years after the conviction of the ICS secretary to the government of India, S.A. Venkataraman, a former chief secretary of Uttar Pradesh, Nira Yadav, has been sentenced for corruption. This does not mean that the evil among civil servants is sparse or less extensive than among politicians. The vertically integrated network of corrupt ministers and equally rapacious bureaucrats is much too wide. The list of functionaries, some of them fairly junior, from whose homes hoards of ill-gotten cash have been seized, without any action having been taken against them yet, is very long. And now the Radia tapes have exposed that topmost tycoons, power brokers of all kinds, mediapersons, academics and so on, indeed the entire elite, is tarred with the same brush.
In short, the all-embracing corruption in this country is constantly intensifying, reproducing and perpetuating itself on an ever-increasing scale. At some stage quantity will turn into quality and bring to the world’s largest democracy the worst possible catastrophe.