Corruption... installment two

Consider the first case. In this instance at least, it would be simple to catch and punish the guilty, wouldn’t you think?  You would be surprised. Both petty corruption of the pecuniary sort and great big swindles of the public routinely take place in virtually all countries of the world – the variation is only a matter of degree, though admittedly, there is very considerable variation in degree between what goes on in some African countries or India and say, Japan or the Scandinavian countries. Petty bureaucrats are offered, and accept, hush money and speed money as a matter of course just about everywhere, just a little more or a little less; businessmen in cahoots with politicians regularly think up one or other variety of Ponzi scheme. One reason this ‘evil’ can never be summarily done away with is that said petty bureaucrats, policemen and other keepers of the law are paid too little to be happy; another is that the law everywhere in all civilized countries has become too labyrinthine and byzantine to make even a semblance of normal life possible if it couldn’t be flouted, or at least winked at now and then, another is that trying to tighten the kind of administrative apparatus that could drastically curb this kind of ‘corruption’ would invariably usher in an intolerably oppressive police state (our PM has recently proved, I hope to his own lasting satisfaction, that merely replacing one set of currency notes by another does not even begin to make a dent on this kind of corruption), and succeed maybe only in confining corruption to the very top of the social pyramid (read Jeffrey Archer’s priceless short story Clean Sweep Ignatius to find out what I mean). Besides, it is in the very nature of the democratic-capitalist dispensation that a lot of people are directly and indirectly running after the prospect of big and easy money all the time, so how could things be otherwise? And from what I have seen and known of socialism in practice, it doesn’t make the slightest real difference, so I do not have any hopes in that direction.

Add to that a) the situation in countries like India, heavily overpopulated, a large part either desperately poor or teetering on the brink of poverty, where every necessity is in short supply – from land to water to jobs and health care and personal security and what have you – and it is only a fool who wastes time lamenting over corruption (unless, as I strongly suspect, they do it merely for entertainment). Every sane man and woman knows that you survive and prosper in this country through jugaad, making do, and a very large part of  that involves making money and avoiding trouble by every possible means, ‘honest’ or otherwise be damned. Especially when the lowest echelons (police constables, government clerks, petty shopkeepers, day labourers, rural schoolteachers…) see the uppermost ones getting ahead through the same means, and rarely being seriously punished for it, who can stop the former with either threats or moral admonitions? And so we have made a joke for public consumption: if you steal millions you are corrupt, if you steal only a few thousands, you are a good man eking out an honest living under difficult circumstances. And no one even cares to discuss that other kind of corruption,  job-shirking, which is endemic, and which, translated into financial terms, probably costs the economy hundreds of billions a year!

…and b) that in India at least, no matter what people say for public consumption, it is understood that in whatever position of power you might be, a bank manager or a cabinet minister, your first loyalty is NOT to something vague called the nation or society but to your own family or at most clan. So when people grumble that somebody is feathering his own nest and furthering his son’s interests, the real grouch is not that he is hurting the common weal but that the accuser cannot do the same (or as much) for his own! By the same token, see how many Indians are truly happy to see their fathers or sons being ‘duly’ punished for being caught with his hand in the till.

So are things likely to change for the better in the foreseeable future, and if so, how? I am pretty sure that if they do, it will be for the same reasons that some countries have become significantly less corrupt than others – viz. greater prosperity, meaning far fewer shortages of essentials, coupled with a much better distribution of income and wealth, so that the great majority are assured of sustained access to those essentials without resorting to corrupt means, spreading ethical education which stresses at all social levels regardless of age and gender that cheating of any kind is simply not done, topped off by much more fair, firm and efficient law enforcement. Do I have much hope of seeing such a development in my lifetime? Frankly, no.

Which brings me to the second kind of situation: where values are in flux, and most people, more or less confused and scared and unwilling or unable to think through every individual circumstance as it asks to be, simply go with custom and the herd. This situation applies in this country, I think, most in matters of things like food, clothes and sexual deviance. So a very ‘modern’ and ‘liberated’ young woman who normally goes around in micro-mini skirts (uncaring that her legs are simply gross, too) wouldn’t dream of getting married in anything but benarasi saree or lehnga-choli because her mother, grandmother and all sorts of aunts will be there; the Umrica-returned IT person will swear by vegetarian food as long as he is within hailing distance of his ancestral town or village, though virtually everyone in the family knows he loves pork and beef, and the journalist who screams bloody murder at old sticks-in-the-mud who publicly wrinkle their noses at gays will have a fit if her son comes out of the closet and declares to the biradari that he is one. And the very post-modern supporter of ‘open marriages’ does the same when she hears of a grown man having an affair with a teenager, because she has been indoctrinated in political correctness far more effectively than the Soviet secret police ever managed with anyone, biology, Dushyant-Shakuntala or Romeo and Juliet be damned. These people also go to see the Khajuraho temple carvings and titter and cover their children's eyes. More of this in the next post…