Corruption is perhaps the most familiar word of today in India. It has become a part of every vernacular language of India although it is English world in origin. It has become a way of our life. Two things are most abundant in India and they are—corruption and inefficiency. It is a great wonder that inspite of that we have progressed so much as to become a nuclear power and world power in technological force and education! May be, we have evolved a productive kind of corruption that gets things moving and with that the country also gets pulled forward.
It is wrong factually to blame the corruption on politicians or to say that all politicians are scamsters and corrupt to the bones. The corrupt politicians can’t survive without public support. Infact politicians are the alligators who breed in this big river of corruption. What is causing this river? Our entire system is rotten and corrupt and we revel in it. When the political parties offered honest candidates to choose from, the people made those candidates lose their security deposits even. So serious drubbling the people gave them! And the public choice again was the corrupt one. So, what is wrong with we people?
The malady is deeper than the politics. There is something wrong with our mindset. A person sitting amidst his brood of 11 children wonders how the population of India reached to an exploding point? An official who is notorious for asking fat bribes opens newspaper in the morning and reads some scam involving a politician. He laments—‘The corrupt politicians will drown the country!’ In our country every one is like that. Whatever I do is okay but the other person doing the same is a criminal who deserves to be hanged. That is how we think. The real cause of the corruption is that we only know how to point finger at others. As far as our own corruption is concerned, it is our smart act that deserves to be applauded. We start our day with throwing some coins or low denomination notes before our deity idol to make it accomplice in all the corrupt deals we shall go through during the day. The deity becomes a licence of corruption.
We must remember that same mindset is responsible for evils our society suffered from. It sustains widow burning, dowry system, caste prejudices, superstitions, communalism, bigotism, hypocrisy, sycophancy, feudalism, chauvinism, double standards, irrationalism, blindfaiths, social and personal corrupt practices. Administrative and political corruption are just by- products.A husband taking his wife as a hostage asks her parents to keep yielding ransoms (dowry demands) or their daughter will be subjected to tortures in domestic confinement. The same person sitting as a clerk in a office would take some public person’s case file as hostage and ask for ransoms (bribes) or the file would not move remaining bound in red tap or the case would receive unfavourable treatment. In spirit, the two are identical situations and the mindset at work is the same. Some psychological analyst needs to study this unscrupulous mindset to unravel the Indian corruption phenomenon.
At a cursory look, we find that nothing works in government offices unless palms are greased. Common man is a harassed lot who has to stand in queues, offer bribes and do whatever they wish, right, wrong or illegal. The people openly say, if you get caught for accepting bribe, you can get off the hook by paying bribe. No government department is free of corruption. The people who lament at corruption do not think twice in getting things done by bribing when it is their own turn.
All the Inquiry Commissions and Probe Committees are merely an eyewash. The truth gets buried in bulky sheets of reports that nobody cares to read if there is no scope for gaining any political mileage. When the cases go to courts the proceeding drag on and on for years and decades. Convictions are seldom. The entire exercise itself becomes scandalous. We have seen the ‘Bofors Gun’ case. It involved 64 crore pay off. Investigations, probes and litigation has cost the country hundreds of crores of rupees and the bill is still adding up. There is no end to it and no one has been nailed down. It is getting nowhere. Infact, the commissions have themselves earned a bad name as being the tools of political vendetta.
It is really a comic situation about corruption. Anti-corruption Bureau itself becomes a centre of corruption. To get a corruption case registered one needs to pay a bribe. A corrupt official gets away by paying a bribe. The utility of Lok Pal and Lok Ayukta has come under criticism as biggest sources of corruption. Their trade union spirit shields the guilty. The motto is—‘Touch me, touch all, therefore touch none’. The politicians spend astronomical suns to win elections. They have to recover that investment somehow. An aspiring youngman pays huge sum to get recruited in the police force. Upon getting posted, he must raise money through corruption to pay off the debts he had incurred for his selection. It is a vicious cycle. Everyone is in this corruption loop. The only way to deal with the corruption is to cleanse our individual lives, society and the entire system fostered by corrupt mindset. In this exercise every citizen has to participate. No single institution can free us of the corruption. We must change our corruption savvy attitude instead of blaming this or that for it.
