Seeing the light on corruption

Civic activists in India, led by Anna Hazare who led a fast unto death to demand civil society representation on the committee to draft the Ombudsman (Lok Pal) Law, have won a tenuous victory by getting the Government and the political class to agree to their demand.

A wag quipped that Anna was not even given the luxury of time to work up decent pangs of hunger, let alone an incipient fast, before the Government capitulated! Leading civil society activists like retired police officer Kiran Bedi, religious dignitary Swami Agnivesh, senior lawyer and former politician Prashant Bhushan, former judge Santhosh Hegde and thousands of young people, urban dwellers and middle class business persons flocked to the historic Jantar Mantar ground to support Ann Hazare.

The joint committee has begun work with Finance Minister and veteran Bengali politician Pranab Mukherjee as chair and retired politician and lawyer Prashant Bhushan as co chair.

The civic activists insisted that politicians on the drafting committee should be ‘untainted’. Sharad Pawar, Minister of Agriculture, regional satrap from Bombay and Chairman of the Board of Control for Cricket in India, was forced to withdraw himself from the possibility of membership of the drafting committee, due to public outrage!

This was days after Mahi Dhoni, Tendulkar, Yuvraj Singh and the Indian cricketers had just won the Cricket World Cup; Pawar should have been basking in that reflected glory! Instead he had to publicly and humiliatingly withdraw himself from the drafting committee!

Two other middling politicians (also tainted) who tried to muscle their way on to the stage at Jantar Mantar, to ostensibly be seen showing their solidarity with the civil society anti corruption activists, were booed and hounded away by the crowd! Such was the anti politician feeling!

Counterattack

But the politicians have started the counterattack. First there was a criticism of a land deal by Prashant Bhushan and his lawyer son, who is also on the drafting committee. Mayawathi, much-tainted Dalit Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh, led the charge.

The Bhushans are charged with some land deal fiasco in Madhya Pradesh, and Mayawathi also wants Dalit representatives on the drafting committee – surprising, considering that, as she should well know, corruption cuts across caste lines!

Then the role of retired judge Hegde, member of the drafting committee, as Lok Pal for Karnataka was criticised as protecting corrupt politicians there, by no lesser person than Digvijaya Singh, a Minister and office bearer of the ruling Congress Party.

Digvijaya, ever the politician with inscrutably flexible moral scruples, soon backtracked, but Judge Hedge was made of sterner stuff and would not give up his demand that the drafting committee should discuss the allegation and agree on a concerted response.

Virtual Empress of India Sonia Gandhi has written to Anna Hazare disassociating herself from these machinations. The Congress Party spokesperson has gone on record that Sonia’s position is the official party position. The politician’s idea seems to be to destabilise and discredit the civil society members of the drafting committee.

Kiran Bedi has gone on record saying that the civil society members of the drafting committee are there as professionals for their professional contribution and attacks on them of a personal nature will affect neither their work nor their commitment to the task. The issue has turned into a classic political football.

Union Minister Salman Khurshid has said that he does not expect any changes in the drafting committee whatever the allegations against members. Former Prime Minister Deve Gowda has come out to defend the Bhushan father and sons’ credentials.

One has to expect the political classes who have succeeded in holding off a strong, enforceable Lok Pal law in India for the last four decades, not to chicken out and give up the fight to protect their corrupt way of life, in a docile way. It will be interesting to watch the developments in New Delhi over the next few weeks.

PM’s stance

In the meantime economist, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, whose personal integrity in not questioned, but who is under relentless attack for being soft on corruption, in the face a whole series of scandals on his watch – including a telecom 2G license scandal by one of his own ministers, the Delhi Commonwealth Games fiasco, at the State level politicians and bureaucrats giving themselves apartments built on prime land meant for was heroes’ widows, the Indian Army building unauthorised privately-run golf courses on Defence Ministry land and India’s Auditor General issuing a scathing report on the lack of cost control and financial reporting systems in the ship building facilities of the Indian Navy – has finally spoken out.

Addressing senior civil servants, the Prime Minister, in what commentators have described as in an ‘impassioned’ manner, said that India’s civil service needs to undergo a ‘change of culture’ to confront the challenges facing India in the modern era.

“Excessive caution, reliance on precedents and following the beaten path have to give way to innovation and inventiveness and to trying out new methods,” Singh urged. “Merit, capability and quality should matter more than mere seniority,” he said.

India’s civil service

India has a legendary civil service. The Indian Administrative Service’s (IAS) predecessor, the British colonial Indian Civil Service (ICS), managed the British Raj in India. The British put in place a few hundred people, rules and procedures which ruled over one fifth of the world’s population in the then British Raj. Lloyd George, a onetime British Prime Minister, famously described the ICS as “the steel frame which held the British Raj together”.

Stories on how ICS officers ran their districts in an autonomous manner during colonial times without fear or favour, doing what they thought was the correct thing, subject to law, are legion.

One particularly legendary one is of a District Commissioner, who when sent the Viceroy’s most recent set of instructions on a particular matter, wrote across it: “This ridiculous circular will not be applied in my District, as long as I am District Commissioner,” and sent it back to the Viceroy in Delhi by return tappal messenger!

Corruption

Recent surveys have ranked bureaucrats second only to politicians and the Police as the most corrupt elements in Indian society. Most Indians routinely have to pay bribes, ‘baksheesh’ for everyday services.

A recent Hindustan Times survey showed that 53% of a national sample of young people said that they had been asked to pay bribes to obtain government services. More than 70% said they had suffered delays and harassment from public officials and politicians as a consequence of not paying bribes.

India’s Prime Minister appealed to one of the worlds ‘most formidable bureaucracies’ to show ‘moral courage’ in its governance of India’s 1.2 billion people, and not to succumb to the temptations of India’s fast-growing economy.

Great professional pride continues to surround the offices of the IAS, who are selected from among the countries top academic performers. India’s central government alone employs about 3.4 million civil servants.

Administration ethics

In his address the Prime Minister quickly turned to issues of ethics in the country’s administration and berated the vulnerability of what are widely considered outdated administrative systems.

“There is a growing feeling among the people that our laws, systems and procedures are not effective in dealing with corruption. We must realise that there is little tolerance now for the prevailing state of affairs. People expect swift and exemplary action and rightly so.”

Singh observed that India needed to revamp its administrative services. His administration has proposed legislation to parliament strengthening judicial accountability and protection of whistle blowers.

India has also undertaken to ratify the UN Convention on Corruption. Measures are being taken to increase transparency surrounding public procurement and the part privatisation of public utilities.

Singh, himself a onetime respected bureaucrat and economist issued an impassioned plea to the nation’s administrators to maintain a reputation for integrity and competence forged over centuries.

He said: “I do believe that the core of the civil service is sound and rooted in values of integrity and fair play. It is a pity that instances of individual waywardness, lack of moral courage, and surrender to pressures and temptations tarnish the image of the civil services and lead to immense criticism and dissatisfaction.”

Change

The role of the administrator in the south Asian context has undergone immense change. In pre-colonial times, it amounted only to ensuring that the king’s writ applied, law and order prevailed, no rebellion was fermented and taxes were collected.

Rural south Asia was a virtual set of self governing villages, clustered under regional satraps, whom the distant raja controlled. Economically self-reliant village clusters had little or no interaction with the distant ruler except through the local satrap.

After Western colonial penetration took place, at inception it was just maintaining law and order, ensuring colonial domination and colleting revenue. The ‘District Collector’ and ‘Divisional Revenue Officer’ were the names of the key posts in regional administration; the names themselves explain the functions.

Professional politician

Democracy brought in the whole idea of development functions and delivering government services to the citizens. Populist democracy brought to the fore a whole new type of professional politician, whose only purpose in life was getting themselves or their progeny re-elected.

Centralisation of power resulted in politicians elected under elections of dubious validity assuming humongous amounts of untrammelled power. Financial and administrative regulations which ensured accountability, responsibility and fair play were seen as an obstacle to the partisan distribution of benefits to persons of sympathetic political colouring.

An independent administrative service and an autonomous judiciary were seen as obstacles to development. The permit raj or big government, nanny governments which thought they could provide pre-conception and cradle to grave and beyond, welfare services on tax revenue, on internally borrowed (printed) money or foreign concessionary and commercial loans, further complicated matters.

Repeated years of deficit budgeting brought about the realisation that the government, politicians and the bureaucracy could not create wealth and of the need to reduce the size of government and allow private enterprise to create wealth, which can be taxed to fund a state and political machinery of an affordable dimension.

Dis-investment, selling off loss-making state enterprises and deregulation led to the need of a whole set of new skills which bureaucrats had to learn on the job. Mistakes were made and this led to political and other vendettas and victimisation of officials, which led to the bureaucracy getting into a shell and losing its dynamism.

Protecting the honest

It is important to accept that protecting honest public officials who make genuine mistakes and errors in the course of their work is an aspect which should be given priority.

As the Indian Supreme Court in Antulay vs. Nayak clearly stated: “If, it is in the interest of the public that corruption should be eradicated, it is equally in the interest of the public that honest public servants should be able to discharge their duties free from false, frivolous and malicious accusations.”

If this protection is not available, the result is what has been described derogatorily as the ‘shape niyaya,’ the line of collusive, compliable least resistance, keeping your head below the radar, not getting noticed, being more than the ‘obedient servant’ to the politician, not doing controversial things, just sticking to a safe routine and surviving in government service until you could put in the required number of years to retire peacefully with your pension intact, was seen as the best way out. On the other extreme, avaricious mercenaries got up to all sorts of tricks under political protection. Naturally there had to be a backlash – manifested by Ann Hazare at Jantar Mantar.

Politicians reacted in two ways, some like Manmohan Singh realised there was a problem and tried to move forward. Others tried their best to kill off the messenger. Civil society was repressed and under attack. It is too early to predict whether the reformists or the repressors will win the day. One hopes that good governance, the rule of law and the Dasa Raja Dharma (the 10 principles of Buddhist Governance) will prevail.

The law must rule

The need for an administrative mechanism which will work without fear or favour, impartially and objectively, applying the law, in a manner so that it is the law that rules and not any man, or woman for that matter, has been well established over the years.

An independent judiciary which can adjudicate in an objective manner, applying the law impartially, in disputes between individuals or the individual and the state is also vital. Similarly an executive and a legislature which is subject to and not above the law, is vital.

A free civil society, protected by the law, which institutions to formulate and express opinions on pressing matters of the day, which concern the citizenry at large, is also equally important.

From time to time autocrats and dictators of various hues , on all sides of the political spectrum, communists, socialists, nationalist, populists have spoken loose words on the need for a ‘committed’ administrative mechanism, a ‘committed’ judiciary, that the ‘law must be a tool and not an obstacle’.

But these views last only as long as they are in power and control these institutions. Once they are subject to these self serving institutions, under the control of someone else, whom they cannot control, they realise too late their folly. But, by that time their countries have been ruined in the process!

Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, Ben Ali of Tunisia (the former in jail, the latter in exile in Saudi Arabia), Idi Amin of Uganda who died in exile also in Saudi Arabia are a few who come to mind. Even the redoubtable Indira Gandhi had to spend time in jail, once ousted from the prime ministerial position of India under the dictatorial emergency regulations she herself imposed on India!

Retribution comes , as sure as night follows day, but it may take some time, Hosni Mubarak had over three decades to dig himself and his nation into an awful mess and end up in jail! There are examples much closer to home, which may be too traumatic to pull out just now.

Separation of Powers

The theory of the Separation of Powers is not some academic abstract politico legal theory, but in reality a method of protecting both the ruler and the ruled, the former, very often unfortunately most times, realises this too late!

The need to have policy making (legislative power) , implementation of that policy (executive power), resolution of disputes which arise from that policy being implemented (judicial power) and the freedom to disseminate news of and to comment freely on the issues arising there from subject to the law of libel (media freedom) separate from one another, controlled and limited by legal limitations imposed and the restrictions placed on each part of the process of governance, protected by a written fundamental law, is accepted today as a cornerstone of good governance and freedom of the individual, subject to law.

The Dasa Raja Dharma (10 Buddhist principles of good governance) articulated these broad principles many moons ago, but we have to accept that to say that humankind needs time to learn and accept is probably the understatement of the century!

Coming to grips with reality

India is going through the throes of coming to grips with this reality. As Swaran Das Gupta, an independent political analyst, has said: “The entire governance machinery has just been paralysed for the past 18 months, these scandals have really eroded their decision making ability.”

For the sake of the 1.2 billion people of India and us in the rest of South Asia, one hopes that civil society, the rule of law and good governance will prevail over the discredited, avaricious political class.

Sustaining the process, notwithstanding the inscrutable procrastination of India’s corrupt political establishment and self-serving bureaucracy, is a major challenge, as is the task of mobilising India’s down trodden and marginalised rural poor, for whom paying baksheesh to and fawning over politicians and officials has become a virtual way of life, unlike the urban, educated, professional, business persons, middle classes and youth who are currently the driving force behind Anna Hazare and the Lok Pal movement.

In Sri Lanka we are still awaiting the appointment of the members of the statutorily created Anti-Corruption Commission in terms of the recent amendment to the Constitution.

Meanwhile, in India things are moving very fast; Kazimozi, Member of Parliament and daughter of the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, Karunanidhi, has been charge-sheeted by the CBI in connection with the 2G scam.

Suresh Kalmadi Member of Parliament, Chief Organiser of the Delhi Commonwealth games and President of the Indian Olympic Association, has been arrested in connection with corruption charges to procurement of goods and services for the games. He has been suspended from membership of the ruling Congress Party.

The Secretary General of the Organising Committee for the Games Lalit Bhanot and the Director General V.K. Verma are also under arrest. India, finally, seems to have decided to move!

(The writer is a lawyer, who has over 30 years experience as a CEO in both government and private sectors. He retired from the office of Secretary, Ministry of Finance and currently is the Managing Director of the Sri Lanka Business Development Centre.)