As August rains slake the earth in northern and central India, the polity of this 55-year old republic seems determined to get itself deep-fried in another scam. This time it is a scam with a difference. It does not involve select ministers and bureaucrats ?? the scope is all embracing . Union minister to organisation leadership, state legislator to municipal corporator to local party office-bearer. It is not about the fishes and loaves of office, but the crumbs. The people?s representatives run amok, trying to prove that the muck on them stinks less than the muck on others. Once again, paralysis threatens the representative legislative process, which a poor country has fashioned with difficulty and much expectation.
That the Indian politician, with perhaps the odd exception that proves the rule, seeks office ?? high and low ?? in order to make money for himself, kith and kin, is hardly news. It would be a hard task to find citizens in this land of one billion who believe that it is otherwise. Worse still, many of our traditional societal values and rules of kinship obligation expect such transactions. The steady diminution of legal authority has helped extending the boundaries of what passes. Untouchability, dowry, widow burning and child marriage are part of that tradition, as is the bullock cart, open sewers, famine and epidemic.
Through the last two centuries, Indian social conditions have been greatly changed ?? from within and without. Social reformers have drawn from both, antiquity and contemporary western thinking, and with remarkable success. One side product was modern Indian nationalism. Urbanisation, modern methods of production and exchange, and non-native rule were the external agents of this change. In any event, the social and political process that is commonly called the Freedom Movement encapsulated these higher values and sought not political freedom in a narrow sense, but also envisioned a society reflective of these elevated principles and devoid of baser, self-serving ones.
Fifty five years after Independence, the petrol pump scandal is a grim reminder — if one was needed, that is ?? as to what extent our baser conduct has risen like scum to the top. It would be futile and painfully naive to expect a system to be shorn of corrupt people and practices. All systems that live and breathe bear within the interstices of their very being, the sources of death and decay. The nature of the social discourse maintains a balance, one which permits reasonable people to function efficient lives. But the scum need not always rise to the top. Elected representatives could be much more shame-faced about pursuing their pecuniary self-interest, when they do succumb to the temptation that ever lurks. And occasionally the excessively brazen, such as Mr Trafficant, formerly of the US Congress, should be sent to jail. Just so to remind the rest that there are limits to forbearance.
Self-cleansing is a messy business, but necessary. The Prime Minister has cancelled all petrol pump allotments made over the past couple of years, and that is as good a beginning as any. Government must not allow itself to abdicate the job for which it was elected. And that certainly is not about either grabbing petrol pumps or painting everyone else with the same tar brush. The overhang on the legislative agenda is enormous. Session after session, matters extraneous to the parliamentary agenda — ugly eruptions on the body politic as Mr Hyde stares through Dr Jekyll?s pale visage — have derailed that for which the legislature was created in the first place. It is time that the standards expected of legislators be made far stricter, just as many years ago some limitations on campaign spending and electoral malpractice, quite surprisingly, made a difference for the better.
Coming to Iraq, oil prices and general uncertainty will rise. The opposition parties run more states than the ruling alliance, and the latter is obliged to run the Centre. Their collective responsibility to provide a modicum of governance must take precedence over self-destructive abuse.
The author is economic advisor to ICRA (Investment Information and Credit Rating Agency) and editor of Money and Finance, the ICRA bulletin)