From ‘shy’ to ‘shameless’ politics
S Gurumurthy
Here is a sample for the extent of anger against the corrupt today. “If you can’t deal sternly with corruption, India will break up like the Soviet Union. We should emulate China and hang highly corrupt people openly at the India Gate.” Who says this? Abhijit Bhattacharya, formerly chief commissioner of customs and excise. A newspaper correspondent, who overheard him saying so to his friend on phone, quoted it in his report. Here is an entry in Abhijit Bhattacharya’s bio. He impounded and taxed the aircraft imported by Mukesh Ambani as gift to his wife. See just the three scams and the volumes of bribe which make responsible people like Bhattacharya talk of hanging the corrupt in public: 2G ($40 billions). CWG ($1.5 billion) and Hasan Ali ($24.8 billion) – totalling $66.3 billion or over Rs 3 lakh crore.
Nobody denies, indeed no one can deny, the fact of high corruption. Yet, no one dares to identify the face of the corrupt high. Raja, Kanimozhi or Kalmadi do not exhaust the faces of the corrupt. Are they main players? Or just side actors? Raja himself says that he will “reveal all later” — implying undisclosed actors. They cannot be his peons. They have to be above him, not under him. If the comparables of Rajas and Kanis were the ultimate face of corruption, then, with chargesheets against them, the UPA government has effectively contained corruption. But even the ruling party does not dare lay such a claim. No one is satisfied with chargesheeting the buccaneers and second and third line corrupt political leaders. Everyone knows that corruption on such a massive scale is not possible without the tacit or active involvement of those at the very top.
There are speculations about the big names involved. No seer is needed to say who are bigger than those named. Those at the top are answerable irrespective of who is the culprit. But instead, they are lecturing and pontificating on the evil of corruption, swearing zero tolerance to it! And more. They have even joined the crusaders against corruption! And paradoxically, neither the neutral crusaders against corruption nor the partisan opposition dare name or hold those higher than Raja, Kani and Kalmadi responsible. The reason is the shift in the political discourse on corruption. The corrupt have started applying to themselves the norms of criminals in courts. Mere charges are not adequate now to make the corrupt respond: a chargesheet in court is a must to make them answer. Even the media and the crusaders against corruption seem to have accepted this shift. How did this shift take place? Read on.
Recall the Bofors scam, which decided the outcome of 1989 elections. The Bofors bribe in millions fade in comparison today’s bribes in billions. The entire non-congress political spectrum — from the CPM to the BJP — made Rajiv Gandhi answerable for the Bofors scam, and united to defeat him on that issue. Rajiv’s political mistake was that he claimed to be clean. The Bofors scam hit his clean image. He denied there was any payoff in the deal at all. That proved a lie, as the media exposed payoffs to Quattrocchi, Hindujas, and Chaddas. There was no photographic evidence of payoff to Rajiv. He was suspected mainly because the payoff taker ‘Q’ was his wife’s (Sonia’s) friend. That made him the direct target of the opposition. For, credible allegations were considered adequate to make politicians answerable to the public. Chargesheets were required only to make criminals answerable to courts. This distinction between norms of politics and the rule of courts has been obliterated in the political discourse of today.
So, like criminals, corrupt political leaders are considered honest today unless they are charged in court. They even insist that they are innocent till charges are proved in court. Criminal jurisprudence has been imported into political process.
This shift has made political class shameless. Shyness, which was the norm of politics, has been replaced by shamelessness. Now all that a politician has to do is to turn a blind eye to the allegations against him or her; remain shamelessly silent when charged in public. He or she will be considered honest, so long as charges are not proved beyond reasonable doubt. See how this shift works now.
Despite the huge scams Manmohan Singh is repeatedly certified as “personally” honest. The scams are the product of the UPA led by Sonia Gandhi. Yet she is perpetually celebrated as saint. More.
Apart from Sonia’s link with Bofors payoff through ‘Q’, there are serious charges by credible investigators that she has inherited bribe monies abroad. She remains silent. That is accepted adequate response. The neutral crusaders against corruption did not demand any answer from her when she supported them for tough laws against corruption. Seeing her, even B S Yeddyurappa began supporting the Lokpal Bill! This is shift from shy to shameless politics at work.
PS: By insidiously making corruption an apolitical issue, the corrupt have robbed its potency. Corruption is potent only as political issue, rulers Vs opposition affair. Jayaprakash Narayan never made the Bihar movement a war of the honest against the dishonest. He united the opposition, with its share of corruption, against the bigger corruption of the rulers.
Mulayams and Laloos of today are after all the products of his movement. So, JP, an idealist, was equally strategic too. Neither Anna Hazare nor Swami Ramdev can succeed in their mission unless they, like JP, united the opposition against the rulers. Are they prepared to drop their high claim to neutrality? Ramnath Goenka, a battle veteran, used to say that the neutrals fall between two stools. That seems to be the fate of the neutral anti-corruption movement today.
(The writer is a well-known commentator on political and economic issues.
E-mail: comment@gurumurthy.net
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