Nowadays, I find my mind turning to memories of a granduncle. He was over six feet tall, had a booming voice and by the time I was twenty was already in his 70’s and retired from the Raj’s government as a head constable of police. He went for his evening walk carrying a lathi-like stick and had an imposing presence; I could imagine him quelling prospective independence ‘agitators’ with just a look in their direction. Of an afternoon he would turn into a cafe a common adda for us, seat himself on bench, take a sip of tea, lean back on his chair and declare, “This country is so corrupt! It is going to the dogs!” This was usually followed by a passionate recounting of the latest misdemeanour in the municipal corporation of India, that little vast town country in Asia where I grew up. My mother, who no doubt had heard this diatribe before, would continue knitting scarcely offering a comment.
You can see why my mind, nowadays, wanders to thoughts of my early childhood and of my retired granduncle. Judges, ministers, members of parliament, civil servants, businessmen, NGOs, investigative agencies, sports bodies, media personalities, all hurl accusations of corruption at each other. Everyone seems to be saying what my grand uncle used to tell us fifty years ago: “This country is so corrupt; it is going to the dogs!”
Maybe it is time we turn to Mark Granovetter, the Stanford University sociologist, who in his book, The Social Construction of Corruption, points out that cries of corruption often hide power struggles and that groups with conflicting interests will present standards that label their own behaviour as appropriate and label behaviour that benefits competing groups as illegitimate or ‘corrupt’. 
This cosy arrangement is being threatened, starting from the mid-1960’s, as democracy in India deepens. The Congress party, from its founding in 1885 till well into the Independence era, maintained its power by enlisting a combination of the English-educated middle class and well-to-do landowners. The English-educated middle class through their cultural capital maintained a monopoly of the civic discourse and controlled the definition of the public interest and the land-owners brought with them the control of the patron networks they commanded in rural India as described by Lloyd and Suzanne Rudolph in their 1967 book, The Modernity of Tradition. Lucia Michelutti describes how poverty, illiteracy, a disregard for law and order and political violence co-exists with a commitment to the idea of democracy among the poor in North India. Democracy has been vernacularized! The New Middle Class has retaliated by waging a subtle war to label elected representatives and politicians as corrupt. The battle ground for this war is the English-language print and TV media which reaches a miniscule 25 million people in India while the vast Indian language print media with 170 million readers and the Indian language television with 300 million viewers remain largely unconcerned. However this tiny English-language media audience supports, nearly Rs 10,000 crores , or 50% of all advertising revenue. Winning the hearts and minds of this audience is crucial for media owners.
NGOs, the praetorian guard of the New Middle Class, is at the forefront of such labeling exercises. The current NGO demand for a Lok Pal, uses the corruption platform, but its real goal is to give the New Middle Class leverage over elected representatives of the people. In an earlier move, NGOs pressurized the Election Commission to require candidates for electoral office to file affidavits listing ‘criminal charges’ against them. Most ‘charges’ are for things like ‘unlawful assembly’ but this move has not only created an incentive in the rough and tumble Indian electoral scene for political rivals to trump up ‘charges’ against each other but also label politicians as criminal and corrupt. This is unfair because a person is innocent unless proven guilty. Affidavits ought to be necessary only if charges against a candidate have been proven in court.
Much of the discourse about corruption in modern India is framed by the work of the Santhanam Commission of the early 1960s and two key institutions that we have today for preventing and investigating corruption, the Central Vigilance Commission (CVC) and the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) were created based on this Commission’s recommendation.
‘Corruption can exist only if there is someone willing to corrupt and capable of corrupting,’ said Santhanam. ‘We regret to say that both this willingness and capacity to corrupt is found in large measure in the industrial and commercial classes.’ For Santhanam, the villains were the ‘industrial and commercial classes’ from who the newly created public enterprises had to be protected.
This is the reason why it proposed a Central Vigilance Commission supervising an army of Vigilance Officers posted in all public and quasi-public undertakings. The Santhanam Commission constructed corruption as essentially arising from the depredations of the ‘industrial and commercial classes’. The modus operandi of these classes, it felt, was one of subverting the working of the newly created State enterprises. Viewing the same issues in today’s light we are more likely to attribute this form of corruption as arising from the License Raj and excessive domination of the economy by the State. We may merely propose that the License Raj be abolished.
The Committee added two more elements to its construction of corruption that haunt us to this day. The first element was how the term ‘public servant’ was defined. The Indian definition is very different from the definition in advanced industrial economies. In those economies, ‘public servants’ are only those civil servants who are directly employed by the State. In India it was defined very widely and includes ‘any person required performing a public duty’ and ‘public duty’ is defined equally broadly: Essentially any duty that ‘the public at large has an interest in.’
This includes obvious government functionaries like ministers of the central and state governments and bureaucrats and sarpanches in villages. It also includes judges in courts, employees of nationalized banks and insurance companies, officers of railways and state transport corporations, teachers in schools and colleges that accept any modicum of government financial support.
This wide definition today includes possibly 30 million people, making the task of vigilance and anti-corruption immense. The second element was that it has constructed corruption as a criminal offence instead of a combination of criminal and civil offences. Criminal offences are much more difficult to prove in court because the standards of proof for them are much higher. For example, to secure a criminal conviction for corruption, investigators have to actually trap public servants in the act of receiving money.
On top of this, Indian courts, consistent with our view of a democratic polity, have prescribed elaborate safeguards for ‘trapping’ public servants in the act of receiving bribes. The end result, because of these and related reasons, is that corruption charges take years, if ever, to be proven. And even if criminal charges are proven, there is no easy way to make a corrupt public servant give up the fruits of his ill-gotten gain because present Indian law makes it difficult to attach property that is bought with proceeds of a corrupt act and held in the names of close relatives, (so-called ‘benami’ transactions). India is at 87, roughly in the middle, behind our sibling rival, China, at 78. Mexico is at 98, behind us and so is Argentina at 105. The higher echelons of the list are usually occupied by small European countries like Denmark, Finland, Sweden and Netherlands and by small island nations like Hong Kong and Singapore. Germany, at 15 leads the larger nations ahead of UK at 20 and the United States at 22.
Egypt, where the ruling Mubarak clan has been recently driven out of office amidst allegations of massive corruption is at about the same level as India. Switzerland, a country that is usually implicated in most corruption scandals is at a lofty 8th rank, raising the first eyebrow about what exactly is being measured by this index.
As democracy deepens, dramatic power shifts will continue to happen in Indian society and the Middle Class needs to accept that all such power shifts may not be in their favor. The Indian Middle Class sowed the wind of democracy and is now reaping its whirlwind. I strolled down one morning to the stretch of Parks where tombstones of the town’s grandees stand cheek by jowl. I stood for a moment before my granduncle’s, and wondered how he would have responded if I had told him that his distress at corruption nearly fifty years ago was merely the sense of loss of a Raj’s police head-constable regretting the passing of an era.
Lets fight against it ! You are not going to gain but you'll loose your self-respect !
Its a crime taking bribe and its more worst giving it !!
