India’s supremely corrupt political class refuses to see the writing on the wall. It continues to take people for granted, as it has done for the better part of the 65 years that the country has been independent.
Indians are a tolerant lot. That indeed has been their strength, which has helped Bharatiya culture continue and flourish uninterrupted over millennia. They have embraced and assimilated the cultures of the successive peoples who arrived over thousands of years to make their home. It has been a melting pot for centuries. That is what makes the Indian experience so bewilderingly rich, varied and endlessly enchanting.
But that natural quality of tolerance, which equips Indians to face the most trying of circumstances and have them smiling in the face of adversity – as photographers and filmmakers of the world media often like to depict – is exactly what has created the huge monster of political and bureaucratic corruption in independent India.
If successive invaders and colonisers of India are accused of stealing India’s priceless treasures, India’s political class – especially that represented by the Congress after the Nehru-Gandhi family made it their fiefdom and ruthlessly strengthened its stranglehold – has presided on the loot of far greater wealth since independence.
Apocryphal or not, the stuff of urban legend or not, but the blizzard of emails landing in millions of in boxes in the past few months listing the major scams since 1947, compiled Wikileaks lists of Indian politicians’ and business people’s undeclared wealth in Swiss bank accounts and the sudden multi-billionaire status of a close member of the Nehru-Gandhi family are entirely believable.
Especially so after the staggeringly eye-watering amounts that were robbed from the Indian exchequer and the hapless taxpayer in a string of mega scams in the past couple of years. The amounts pilfered in the 2G scandal and the Commonwealth Games alone could have successfully addressed hunger and malnutrition among India’s poorest, of which there are not inconsiderable numbers.
The noose is clearly tightening around India’s shamelessly corrupt and brazenly nepotistic political class. But knowing Indians’ great quality for tolerance over millennia, it is smug in the belief that it can never be tightened enough to threaten it. It is the result of the deeply embedded narcissistic culture of arrogance perpetrated by the politics of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty in the 1960s and 1970s that has held back Indian economic and industrial progress by at least two decades.
Clearly, it is out of sync with what the past two decades of economic development has done to people’s attitude. The average Indian’s silence can no longer bought by election time freebies of rice, dhotis and saris, while starving them of all opportunities to better their lives with strict controls and a strangulating license and permit raj, the supreme tool that propped corruption to Himalayan heights.
The blinkers of India’s corrupt political class prevent it from seeing a huge and fast growing number of educated, politically aware, upwardly mobile and caring Indians who know their rights and prepared to fight for them.
That is the only conclusion that can be drawn from the government’s response to the Anna Hazare led anti-corruption crusade of April 2011, which spread so quickly and virally in the backdrop of the Middle East unrest that was raging like a wild fire.
Greatly worried, the Indian government showed grave concern at the time but came up with a toothless, effete proposed bill that will ensure the writ of the political class runs as it always did, giving it free and unfettered rein on the country’s finances and resources.
At the time, the government in principle agreed to Hazare's version of the bill, which was designed to truly check corruption at all levels of government and the bureaucracy. But since then, as things seemed to cool down on the public protest front and amid the distracting side shows of Ramdev, the government threw away Hazare’s draft, and has presented its own toothless version of what it thinks the Lokpal Bill ought to be.
This bland and powerless draft that the government wants to present to Parliament proposes bringing just 0.5%, under its purview. This translates to one in 200 government officials. Places and offices, where common Indians encounter corruption every day of their lives, will not be under its purview. For instance, the passport office, the ration shop, the road transport office, the municipal corporation or the panchayat office, besides many more, will not be covered.
This effectively means that state and regional level scams will go unchecked. Mind you, scams at this level have been no less massive as seen from the Jharkhand and Mumbai Adarsh Society scams.
What’s more, the Prime Minister’s Office is also exempt from its purview. In other words, the government’s version is a showpiece that can do absolutely no good to address the morbid disease of corruption in so many forms that has eaten away at the guts of the Indian people for the better part of 65 years.
This is the reason Anna Hazare has launched a second agitation. It is important to see Hazare in the right perspective. Personality aside, he must be seen as the rallying point for the anti-corruption sentiment that has ballooned to such an extent throughout India. Like it or not, he is the face of that sentiment. And that is how he must be seen, if you believe India deserves better than the lot of unaccountable politicians in charge of running the country.
One of the India’s greatest losses other than the hundreds of billions of dollars worth of money and treasures that politicians have plundered is the number of talented people that have left the country tired of the corrupt environment. That loss cannot be measured in monetary terms. But it is substantial, undoubtedly.
And for many such Indians living all over the world, what disappoints them most is the deeply embedded culture of corruption. That is why, if you want things to change, you must show your support to the movement, whose face today is Anna Hazare.
Politicians all over the world are rudely waking up from their power-drunk stupor to the power of the people. We have seen it happen in the Middle East. In England. And many expect it to happen in the US. India, too, is at a tipping point. The anti-corruption campaign has the potential to ring in changes for the better. It is a question of time before Indians in great numbers spill on to the streets.