Don?t mislabel 2010 as the year of maha corruption cases. For Indian democracy, it?s the first year that saw each corruption case taking down at least one public figure from the office where the scam was hatched. This is a record of which we can justifiably be proud. India?s reputation as a rent-seeking polity will take some more time to be erased, but we seem to have arrived at a way to handle corruption that was earlier missing from our arsenal.
Just look at the list. The Commonwealth Games scam has nailed Suresh Kalmadi, the IPL scam took down minister of state for external affairs Shashi Tharoor, the Adarsh society scam has forced the resignation of Maharashtra CM Ashok Chavan and now the 2G telecom scam has accounted for telecom minister A Raja. This is a strong lineup and gives us enough reason to expect that, at the beginning of a new decade, our new-found impatience with corruption will get more powerful and better-directed.
It is even more instructive if one compares this record with the way corruption cases have shaped up since 1991. Except the Sukhram case, again in telecom, few corruption charges have been pinned to perpetrators if they were, or are, public figures. The fodder scam for which Lalu Prasad
Yadav spent time in jail was one of the exceptions. Writing in The Indian Express this week, Seema Chisti has made the pertinent point that in some of the rare cases that created more of an uproar, the person has sometimes just lost the elections. The loss has served as reason enough to exorcise them of the ?sin?.
The cases that made progress, that too desultorily, are instead those related to stock market episodes. Here too, it took the agencies over a decade to establish the charges of fraud against Harshad Mehta, a slightly shorter time-frame in the Ketan Parekh case, while the Satyam case is just plodding on. By any standards, the movement from the establishment of the prima facie charge to the resignation of a public figure associated with the case has been amazingly fast, in 2010.
What happened? As the Indian growth story has become stronger, every year a few million (repeat million) Indians are associating themselves with it. Their tools are hard work and skills but not sleaze or pushing contacts. Simultaneously, the pace of urbanisation has acquired critical mass. Because of these two developments, the number of upwardly committed Indians living in urban spaces has shot up exponentially. They are now a significant determinant of the national political mood and a huge constituency that no party will annoy.
A related development has been the spread of media that has helped to shape the debate in every urban lane. Just watch how the pieces came together in the Commonwealth Games episode. For three year and more, some of these Indians, viz the 40 million of Delhiites faced all sorts of hassles to make the games successful. When the reports of massive purloining of money and mismanagement by the organising committee broke out, they could all feel embarrassment and anger instinctively.
Ten years ago, telling the story of a games gone wrong to a rural audience would have seemed far removed from their daily concerns. But not now. The same has been the contour of the Adarsh society scam. In a city where procuring a reasonably-sized flat is a tall order for most inhabitants, this report of corruption touched a raw nerve. Moreover, as the housing shortage has spread to all cities and even the small towns, the collective sense of indignation has been fantastic. But having revelled in the public’s short fuse on corruption, the more difficult part of the scams will now surface. That is, how and which agencies will track the cases from here.
As I had written recently, India has no centralised agency that can track all aspects of corruption. The CBI, in its emasculated form, is just not up to the task. Moreover, it was set up to track corruption cases in government with personnel enough to track only small-time crime. The sophistication of cases like Satyam or the intricacies of the allotment of the 2G telecom are way beyond its ability. In fact, the primary reason the CBI exists is to file cases, as it is the only one among investigative agencies with the powers to file a police case. This means after a case is filed, it depends on agencies like the Serious Fraud Investigation Office to supply it with their case diary. The CAG report, for instance, cannot be used as a basis to prosecute any company or agency.
The other aspect of corruption is that there is no government agency that knows how to deal with corruption in the private sector. As a result, the Indian government has not signed the UN Convention on Corruption, leaving us the only major democracy not to have done so. Keeping India company are Sudan, Saudi Arabia and some of the former Soviet Union republics. Having raised the expectations of the Indian public on the one thing that makes them wince, the government can hardly let the current stasis continue.
?subhomoy.bhattacharjee@expressindia.com
