SPEAKING FREELY India: fighting corruption or adapting to it?
By Jiwan Kshetry
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online feature that allows guest writers to have
their say.
Please click hereif you are interested in contributing.
When the communist political regime collapsed in the then-USSR more than two
decades ago, the centrally planned and controlled economy saw that factor of
"control" lifted suddenly.
It was as if a huge old dam had suddenly sustained a mega earth quake, with its
water gushing out through the cracks even as the whole structure was in a
process of ultra rapid dismantlement.
In that gush and rush of the wealth, those who happened to be
attached or close to the evolving power structure had their hands full with
whatever they could wish for. But soon there was little water left in the
former dam and those unlucky to be away from the wealth-gusher at the time of
the quake found it terribly hard to navigate in the coming days.
Boris Yeltsin's terms in power were all about witnessing the process of mass
pauperization as oligarchs saw their fortunes shining, at the same time being
tutored by the International Monetary Fund and Western mentors as how little to
intervene in the process termed "liberalization".
Interestingly, the collapse of the USSR almost coincided with the beginning of
the rapid process of liberalization of the economy in India, the Asian
counterpart and an important former Soviet ally whose founder Jawaharlal Nehru
had been enormously impressed by how the Soviets managed their economic
affairs, though he had similarly big reservations about communist ideology.
India's deviation from the Nehruvian socialistic economic policy came almost a
decade after China under the post-Mao Zedong leadership of Deng Xiaoping had
shown impressive growth, marrying a communist political system with the
capitalist economic system. Thus, the events in the early 1990s seemed to
reinforce capitalism as the only system viable for periods in history long
enough to witness and celebrate the downfall of rival systems.
Now, looking back more than two decades after those changes, the contrast
between the evolution of Russia and the rising Asian economic giants China and
India can be hardly overestimated.
If it were not for the sharp rise of the petroleum prices in the past decade,
it is hard to imagine where the Russians would be now after the massive theft
of Soviet-era state assets.
The contrast between the paths taken by India and China on one hand and Russia
on the other have been in discourse for a long time. But lately it is being
acknowledged that the miraculous economic growth and apparent prosperity in
both China and India have been possible not because of good governance and
incorruptibility of the political and administrative system, but despite
appalling poor governance and rampant and deeply institutionalized corruption.
Mammoth corruption scams in India or rather the sudden exposure of those scams
to the people over past many months has caused such a furor among the Indian
public that the integrity and honesty of everyone high up in the power
hierarchy has been in question, including that of Prime Minister Manmohan
Singh, who was before the episodes praised for his integrity and
incorruptibility.
The change in perception among the people has been so prominent that, in a
desperate attempt to contain the damage, each of the political parties is busy
attacking the other for one or other scandal as most of the prominent national
and regional parties have their own share of mega scams. In the polls, in the
states like Tamil Nadu, the issue of corruption has been the single-most cause
behind the sudden fall from grace and loss in the electoral race of the
incumbent party/coalition.
Recovering the state wealth misappropriated or simply stolen by many of the
powerful persons may be very hard, but penalizing them through imprisonment may
be possible to the extent that the anti-graft bodies and courts in the country
act judiciously.
Similarly, bringing them down to powerlessness by defeating them in the polls
could be theoretically possible if people knew exactly who embezzled how much.
But penalizing only those at the leadership level is only a tiny part of any
process that aims at checking corruption. Even larger, subtler, more pervasive
and more devastating to the daily lives of ordinary people is a somehow
different form of corruption that takes place systemically with involvement of,
rather with the collusion of, people at various levels from high up all the way
down to the grassroots level.
Ironically, this is rarely taken as corruption with its ordinary meaning, let
alone the possibility of any effective drive against such malpractice.
To illustrate this subtler, more institutionalized, less obvious but more
pervasive corruption with multi-level stakeholders, I take the example of a
multi-billion dollar scam involving the health sector in Uttar Pradesh (UP)
state that came to notice and was investigated only after the collateral damage
of the continuing theft of state assets had led to two murders of high
government officials.
The trail of investigation that led to the exposure of the scam began with the
gunning down of chief medical officer (CMO) (Family Welfare), Lucknow, B P
Singh on April 2 this year. Before Singh, his predecessor, Vinod Arya, had been
gunned down on October 27 2010, surprisingly, with the same gun. After initial
clues behind the motive of the crime, the deputy CMO, Y S Sachan, was arrested
and imprisoned, but soon he was apparently murdered inside the prison.
According to the cover story published in a prominent Indian magazine Tehelka
on August 20 by Ashish Khetan, the opposition parties alleged that Sachan, the
deputy CMO and the alleged mastermind of the double murder, was eliminated by
someone higher in the government as he/she feared that Sachan could have
revealed the involvement of senior politicians and bureaucrats in the
embezzlement of National Rural Health Mission (NHRM) funds.
Apparently, the state of Uttar Pradesh, whose capital is Lucknow, had acquired
a staggering 86 billion rupees (US$1.7 billion) from Delhi since 2005-2006 for
the ill-fated NHRM program.
While millions of people in one of India's most highly populated and
impoverished states with annual incomes as little as few thousand rupees just
kept suffering from easily curable ailments, the funds to help them had been
diverted to the pockets of people from high up in the ministries down to the
health workers in the barely functioning rural health facilities.
While women kept giving birth to babies at home in extremely unhygienic
conditions - contributing to high maternal and fetal morbidity and mortality -
data in the health institutions were cooked to siphon off millions through the
scheme. Similarly, elderly people with cataracts had to pay as much as 15,000
rupees at nursing homes that had received millions of rupees from the
government to provide free cataract surgery.
This was only one among many such scams, most of which have not been exposed
because the circumstances have not led to high-profile murders.
The fact that there are such big and so many pervasive acts of theft and
treachery is shocking. But what is more appalling is the fact that the
communities, society, the provinces and the Indian state itself have adapted so
well to the persistence of such scams. The fact rarely coming to public notice
is that a significant proportion of the population is just getting poorer and
unhealthier because such scandalous arrangements are in place to divert
whatever the state attempts to spend for their welfare.
Even the most conservative statement about the economy of India will be that
corruption is not the monopoly of top politicians and bureaucrats, as often
portrayed, and those corrupt people may well form the tip of the iceberg.
The body of the iceberg has managed to remain underwater, thanks to the rapidly
growing economy that has been able to create wealth at a rate somewhat higher
than can be stolen at the same time.
But now the economy is showing ominous signs of slowing and with the attention
of politicians and policymakers fixed on mega scams like the infamous 2G scam
of the distribution of telecom licenses and the mammoth scams of illegal
mining, little is being done to fix the subtle form of corruption.
The long term costs of such barely visible scams are so profound and
accumulating that basic services like health and education for the future
generations are in severe jeopardy.
Since the coverage of the bright side of the world’s largest democracy is far
more appealing than doing the reverse, the majority of the print and electronic
media in India and outside have chosen to extensively cover the former.
The dark side has recently attained a seemingly wide and "bold" coverage, but
that too is primarily to increase readership/viewership as sensationalism
around the mega scams has proved to be a valuable commodity.
Against this background, proper exposure of all forms of corruption followed by
forceful and coordinated attempts at curbing the pervasively corrupt acts is
the only way out.
(Copyright 2011 Ton Lenssen.)
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online feature that allows guest writers to have
their say.
Please click hereif you are interested in contributing.
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
