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Tuesday, November 20, 2018

Corruption, part three


Continuing with the discussion of the type I ended the last post with, the problem with this type has become rather serious of late. This is because of the intolerant majoritarian tendencies that have become highly visible (and politicians are stoking the fire with very short-term goals in mind, blithely unaware that they might be releasing a Frankenstein’s monster) of late in many countries, certainly in India. When I mention majoritarianism, a lot of people will think that I have only religious divides in mind, but that is not so, though I am definitely thinking of that, too. But let me first talk about the Hindu majority community in India, which is the milieu to which I belong, and which I know best.

The problem with India is that it is far from becoming a true nation in the sense that much smaller, far more culturally homogeneous communities became nations centuries ago. ‘Hindu’ is a vast, portmanteau term that denotes nearly a billion diverse people, and these people are sharply divided by looks, language, caste, tradition, and local customs, to the extent that a lot of nominally Hindu folks do not recognize many others as proper Hindus at all (there are brahmins in the south and the Deccan who refuse, for example, to acknowledge any Bengali as a real brahmin, seeing that he eats fish, and even – horror of horrors! – meat, and casteism, unfortunately, still divides one Hindu from another at least as sharply and cruelly as religions do; some, especially educated high-income urban types find it quite okay that a girl has multiple sexual partners before marriage, which anyway has become just an option, while millions still shudder to think that their daughter can know a man before marriage, or that there could be any other goal of a girl’s life). Regardless of the – I believe misguided – efforts of numerous strong-willed individuals and organizations, there has not emerged any monolithic Hindu community, no matter how much we gush that we all have roots in the vedas, epics, puranas and Manusmriti. So what we do in real life is give primacy to local – very, very local – custom and tradition. Wherever you live, you must do as your mummy and neighbours do, or else. It would not be very wrong to say, I think, that, except perhaps in urban condominiums where nobody knows anybody else nor cares what she is doing, India is a vast congeries of little villages under the sway of absolutely local majoritarian tyrannies. In the neighbourhood I live in, despite the fact that most people fear me enough to give me a wide berth, and despite the fact that I don’t socialize, I could not openly declare I am gay if I were and continue in my present profession; a quite decent Hindu middle-aged gentleman confessed to me without a trace of shame a few years ago that in the housing cooperative he lives in, there is an unwritten law that no flat owner can rent it out to a ‘Mohammedan’, and the very smart female who lives it up mini-skirted late nights in Bangalore pubs will be seen in very proper saree-sindoor-bindi during the puja days at her neighbourhood pandal back home – nyaka chondi as she is, she would neither notice the absurdity nor quarrel with it. And I have always had to live with the knowledge that many of the same mummies who desperately shove their kids into my tuition because they are convinced I know some magic to get those kids the all-important marks in examinations also sternly warn them not to pay heed to all the ‘nonsense’ I say in class ‘outside the syllabus’.

What has all this got to do with corruption? Well, if I have to spell it out, I have actually lost you already. Anything that the local Mrs. Grundy says is out stays out, and who cares what the Constitution of India says? Mummies and aunts hold far stronger sway over the minds of the young – and by that I mean even people in their twenties and thirties, beyond which age you, of course, have safely become clones of them! – and the best you can do if you are a young or very old woman living in a tribal village where people have begun to look askance at you because you mumble to yourself and wander about at nights, is to get out and go far away if you don’t want to be burnt alive as a witch one fine evening. The majority has dubbed you corrupt and dangerous, so your dignity, freedom, life itself, is not worth a busted nickel. If anything, the millions of bigoted idiots slogging all sorts of ‘issues’ out on Facebook and twitter are merely strengthening these atavistic tendencies: you call someone a thief and he becomes a thief overnight, no proof needed. Which is why I decided long ago not to make a single friend on Facebook, and never to use twitter. Those who frequent those sites take great care to see that they interact only with ‘people like us’, wasting days, months and years persuading people who are already persuaded beyond the reach of fact and reason! How pathetic some people can get, really. You and I live in a democratic country, so you have every right to agree with me, as long as I myself am comfortably ensconced in the politically correct cocoon; if you don’t, we shall ostracize you or hound you out of the country. Notice anything ‘corrupt’ about all this, or do I have to spell it out further?

Coming to the third category, this is the most pitiable of the lot. I find this type particularly distasteful, so I shall pass lightly over it. Suffice it to say that it is this (very numerous-) category, people who cannot help doing what they have been told is wrong, that ensures that prostitution, legal and otherwise, remains one of the largest and most profitable professions, and pornography rules the roost on the internet.  Humans make rules which most humans find it impossible to obey, at least all the time: hence cheating in examinations, and job-shirking, and breaking traffic rules, and shoplifting and marital infidelity, etc etc. Talking pruriently about these things and pretending to be horrified and condemning them serves nothing except fill the gossip columns of our rags and clog our courts; at best we drive them underground, and they find ever new ways of making themselves evident. The only remedy for such ‘corruption’ is to be more understanding and forgiving in making laws, and administering those laws with more fairness and leniency, too. Also, when you accuse someone’s dad of being a serial molester just because you hate him or are jealous of him, remember your dad is just as vulnerable, unless he is just too insignificant for anyone to take note of his existence: when others do that sort of thing to you, you suddenly discover that it is not a good thing to do at all. People who live in glass houses should not throw stones.

For the rest, we shall always have to live with them, as long as human beings are the way they are; there is no help for it. I believe that some societies are generally more moral and law-abiding than others: how they have managed to become that way without tyranny is something I still haven’t been able to figure out. Maybe education of a certain sort helps; in India, at least, that kind of education has never been available for the masses, rich or poor. All my pupils write essays about how their parents teach them to be ‘good’ people: I have never stopped wondering how, then, this country remains one of the most corrupt in the world (if you think of cheating in exams, breaking traffic rules, taking bribes, job-shirking,  shoplifting… maybe our only true moral is that it’s alright when I or my dad does it, but wrong when you or your dad is guilty of the same?).

The long and short of the matter is, after observing and thinking for several decades, I have decided, once and for all, that the issue of ‘corruption’, so popular a talking point in this country, does not arouse my interest any longer. This three-part series of essays was my effort to explain why. Unless we are truly interested in taming the monster, which would require greatly changing ourselves first, we had all better stop talking about it: that by itself would make a considerably cleaner country.

5 comments:

Joydeep said...

Dear Sir,

I just finished reading this three-part essay series and I thank you for taking the time and effort to write so elaborately on an issue that has been a burning topic in India for such a long time.

The problem with the sort of corruption you have discussed in the concluding essay has become exacerbated with the accelerated growth of social media in the last decade. As you have rightly pointed out, millions of bigoted morons have now took it upon themselves to opine, fight and smear each other over all sorts of "issues" about which they know nothing, or even worse, know only a little. The old Bengali adage "alpo bidye bhayankori" is an apt way to describe this lot, many of whom have formed convenient echo chambers for themselves on these platforms, and their one and only purpose is to earn immediate gratificaion from their clan. I would have laughed at their stupidity, if not for the fact that as I grow older, their hypocrisy angers me more and more every passing day. The semi-educated moron who has not picked up a single book in the past 10 years overflows with devotion on the day of Saraswati puja on Facebook, and the jingoistic pinhead whose heart bleeds for the Indian army on Twitter is quietly slobbering for a Green card in the US. These are not made up examples, but representative of people I personally know. I can cite many similar stories, but I think you get the point: social media has significantly helped to expose, and even encourage, the inherent corruption of a huge number of people in our country. There is no solution to this ailment, at least not that I know of, except perhaps to appeal to all sane and reasonable and good hearted people out there to use these sites as little as possible.

By the way, I read a book by Mihir Sharma named "Restart: The Last Chance for the Indian Economy" around 2 years ago in which the author has a very similar take on corruption as you do. It's a nice book, and I will recommend reading it if you haven't already.

Thanks,
Joydeep

Suvro Chatterjee said...

Thanks for commenting so quickly and pertinently, Joydeep.

Yes, your comments about what social media are doing tally exactly with my views, and for exactly the same reasons, stemming from just the same kind of experience with watching/reading uncouth morons puking their most despicable base emotions all over the internet. I just hope this is a passing phase: very soon there will be a very sharp reaction from all decent, informed, sane people all over the world against this gross kind of pollution, and then that sort of riff-raff will be automatically identified, tagged, and removed from these social platforms. Till then, we just have to grin and bear it, and as far as possible, stay away. I, for instance, haven't used twitter for years, and make use of Facebook only as a professional noticeboard: no 'friends' allowed, and no conversations at all. Haven't missed anything, either :)

Thank you also for the book recommendation. I shall certainly try to find and read it.

Sir

Joydeep said...

Hello Sir,

Of all the social media sites available, Facebook is probably the worst offender. Designed to penetrate all classes of society and headed by a morally corrupt, power-hungry tech tycoon, Facebook is definitely the front-runner in causing the most online pollution as of now. This article offers some good points in this regard: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/11/sorry-mark-zuckerberg-facebook-isnt-a-positive-force/?fbclid=IwAR0d9sCF2r5lENO2X-ctap2mEPTrTtFyD7SC6Sd8DQZaXZjgTwlISvnu5fk

I am happy to see that already a lot of reasonable and sane voices have started to speak against this sort of filth. Let's just hope to keep that momentum going.

Regards,
Joydeep

Rajdeep said...

Part 1

Sir,
Allow me to quote the following:

"But at a deeper level, he also pointed to a three-way split at the heart of Indian business. First, there was state capitalism, meaning those many companies that were still run by the by the government in areas like steel and mining. Second was liberal capitalism, meaning those sectors that tended to be most connected to the global economy, and which were also the most competitive and least corrupt. Finally, and most troublingly, there was crony capitalism: the sectors dominated by the Bollygarchs, most of whom enjoyed deep connections with the state. A fierce battle was under way between them, one whose outcome would define the kind of country India would become."

"The rise of India's billionaires mirrored changes that had swept through the world economy over recent decades, bringing with them new anxieties about inequality. Data compiled by Thomas Piketty showed the share of national wealth held by the richest Americans hitting levels not seen since the 1930s. A similar story was true in many advanced European economies. Yet while hedge fund magnates and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs came to represent the excesses of Western capitalism, it was in countries like India, with its newly powerful Bollygarch class, that the super-rich was expanding quickest of all.

In the mid-2000s, developing countries accounted for around a fifth of the world's 587 dollar billionaires. A decade later that figure had jumped to more than two fifths, while the overall total of billionaires had shot up to 1,645. China made up the largest part of this increase, but India, with its hundred or more billionaires, made a sizeable contribution. India was unusual too for the proportion of national wealth held by its super-rich and the speed at which its fortunes were growing. In 2016 research from Credit Suisse showed that India had 178,000 dollar millionaires, just a fraction of America's total and only a tenth as many as CHina. But over the coming decades the investment bank predicted the millionaire population would expand more quickly in India than in any other country bar China."

" More recent research has proved beyond doubt the depths of India's social divide. Churning through new data in 2016, Branko Milanovic, an economist at the World Bank, found India had higher income inequality levels than America, Brazil and Russia, leaving it 'more egalitarian than only South Africa', a country famous for its jarring stratification. Other surveys found similar results. An IMF working paper from the same year showed that India had one of the highest and fastest growing inequality rates in Asia. Its score on the Gini index - a measure of inequality where 0 means total equality and 100 total inequality - rose from 45 in 1990 to 51 in 2013. China's increased even more quickly, from 33 to 53. But 51 is still unusually high: a level common in Latin America, but far above Asian economies like Japan and South Korea.

The threshold for entry into the wealthiest 'one per cent' differed wildly across countries, according to research from Credit Suisse in 2016. In North America it required $4.5 million in assets; in an average European country $1.4 million. In India the same figure was just $32,892. Yet within that group, the richest one per cent owned fifty-eight per cent of wealth, one of the starkest gaps,up from thirty-nine per cent at the start of the decade. Meanwhile the bottom half of the country owned a paltry four per cent."

Modi targeted the 19th century India of the villages, the 20th century of urban middle classes, and the youth of 21st century India who use smartphones and communicate online, by using mass rallies to reach the first and spending heavily on TV ads for the second. The younger voters were reached via Facebook, Whatsapp and the NaMo youtube channel.

- The Billionaire Raj by James Crabtree.
May I request you to read this book if you can if you haven't already?

Rajdeep said...

Part 2

While US ad agencies and political strategist Prashant Kisore (formerly at the UN) helped Modi's campaign, the exhausted Congress took the help of the Japanese advertizing giant Dentsu etc. who did not have a clue how to reach the Indian masses.

References
1. https://www.livemint.com/Politics/r8mxrPeaMsUR7IfLQGSTgL/The-ad-agencies-behind-BJPs-successful-campaign.html

2. https://www.businesstoday.in/current/perspective/advertising-political-parties-work-affect/story/202120.html

The Indian media was largely silent about the prosecution of the Adani group in Australia.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-09-05/adani-prosecuted-over-release-of-sediment-near-barrier-reef/10204374
In India, the Bollygarchs are making hay while the sun shines, with almost limitless access to the countries public and natural resources...

p.s. The tiger economies in south east Asia also invested heavily on health and education, something India has not done yet. Also, recent research has shown that spectacular income inequality actually slows down growth.