The Strongest Lokpal

Anna Hazare and Team have confused and confounded discussions about the proposed Lokpal by equating its strength with executive independence and authority.

They have talked of “wiping out corruption” by enabling the Lokpal to investigate all branches and levels of government, including the Prime Minister and the judiciary, and giving it the power to suspend officials on its own findings, before conviction in a court of law. To give clout to that unconstitutional combination of police and judicial functions, Team Anna wants to put the Central Bureau of Investigation under the Lokpal.

No other country has such an institution. In fact, there is only one parallel in all of history: the Grand Inquisitor of the Catholic Church who loosed murderous persecutions on the hapless people of medieval Europe.

Unlimited and fawning television coverage of Team Anna has prevented anyone from questioning its fundamental premise that a “strong” Lokpal requires a new overweening power centre within the constitutional structure of the Indian State.

Such a power centre would be prone to corruption, and if the Lokpal turned out to be an ambitious and unprincipled individual, it would open the door to an entirely new level of evil, subverting the democratic system.

The strongest Lokpal could be one with no executive, police or quasi-judicial functions, but one empowered to investigate, report and recommend action on any matter under the purview of the State.

Appropriately staffed, such a Lokpal would have enormous moral power. Every other organ of government, every official, would feel the pressure to be honest. Far more than an institution that joins in the scrum of power, such a Lokpal would be an effective check on corruption.

Anna Hazare in Perspective

The patriotic glow cast by the mass media on the end of Anna Hazare’s fast should not blind us to the fact that the primary institution of Indian democracy, Parliament, has just survived a serious assault. The chronological sequence below shows where the threats came from and how they were defused.


1.    The essential prelude to the agitation were the "CWG scams" brought to light in August 2010 by a leak from a source within the British government, and the "2G spectrum scam" revealed by the selective leak in November 2010 of wire taps on the phones of corporate lobbyist Niira Raadia, a British national. Media coverage in both cases verged on the hysterical, but no one made a peep about the significance of the British connection.

2.    In April 2011, Anna Hazare began a “fast unto death” to force the UPA government to enact a Lokpal Bill left hanging by a succession of governments for some four decades. He called it off after four days and “Team Anna” entered into consultations with the UPA government on the proposed legislation. The Team's lead member, a former bureaucrat turned social activist, Arvind Kejriwal, has reportedly received some $400,000 in foreign funds for his NGO Parivartan. Three other members of the Team – Swami Agnivesh, Kiran Bedi and Prashant Bhushan – put their divided national loyalties on public display in a February 2011 letter to The Guardian “appealing” for the continuation of the BBC’s Hindi Service. They argue that its balanced and impartial news was needed on such matters as Kashmir and when Indian democracy is threatened.

3.    While all this was happening, Baba Ramdev the billionaire yoga teacher and apothecary, travelled around the country trying to build a national political party; his main pitch was against "black money." His foray into politics came less than a year after receiving a small British island as a “gift from a devotee.” Located off Scotland, it is easily accessed from the British military training facility for dirty tricks/guerrilla warfare. In June 2011, after his "fast unto death" against black money turned into comic opera and Ramdev was hustled back from Delhi to his ashram in Haridwar, he developed a severe case of loose lips and told the Press he would field an armed force -- next time.

4.    In July, the government's refusal to accept Team Anna's draconian (and unconstitutional) proposals led to a breakdown in talks. Hazare announced that he would resume his “indefinite fast” on 16 August. However, talks with the Delhi Police over its venue and duration proved problematic, for "Team Anna" was reluctant to accept safety and traffic control constraints. In an overzealous effort to prevent trouble the Police arrested Hazare before he could begin fasting and took him to Tihar Jail, making him an instant martyr.

5. Although released the same evening Hazare elected to stay in Jail for a further two days. In that time massively disproportionate and sensationalized coverage of public protests and demonstrations appeared on all 24-hour television news stations and the "elite" print media. Hazare left Tihar to adulatory media coverage and made a heroic trip atop a flower bedecked carriage to Rajghat and then to the Ramlila Grounds where a giagantic photograph of the Mahatma served as backdrop to his fast. Unlike Gandhi’s fasts, which were always in private and devoid of all show Hazare was surrounded by flag waving, chanting, dancing, singing crowds. There was also non-stop gluttony all around as people scoffed down free food and left massive amounts of garbage. Faced with television reporters asking for their opinions, film stars and other celebrities provided statements of support. (Kiran Bedi was so enthused her inner Sita Ram Goel emerged and declared: “Anna is India and India is Anna.” Kejriwal, evidently a man of refined tastes in propaganda, disasociated himself from that statement. Congress Party spokesman Manish Tiwari's unfortunate observation that Anna was corrupt from top to toe did nothing to balance public perceptions.)

6.  Anna also seemed chuffed up by the outpouring of support from the television channels and in a fit of arrogance demanded that the government withdraw its own Lokpal Bill and have Parliament adopt his Jan Lokpal Bill. He set 30 August as the deadline for its adoption with only “minor changes.” When told that those demands could not be met he called on supporters to gherao the houses of Members of Parliament and Parliament itself. This attempt to replay the 1975 scenario that led to the declaration of Mrs. Gandhi’s "Emergency" could easily have snowballed out of control, but the crowds that turned out at MP’s houses were too thin to precipitate a crisis.

7.  An all-party meeting of Members of Parliament unanimously rejected the idea that a civil society group could contravene Parliamentary procedure that requires legislation to go through a Standing Committee charged, inter alia, with listening to all shades of opinion before formulating a proposal. As Government-Team Anna consultations continued it became clear that Hazare himself was not being accurately informed by his supposed representatives. Science and Technology Minister Vilasrao Deshmuk, a long-time acquaintance of Hazare began to liaise with him directly. Bedi and Kejriwal were excluded from the last phase of consultations.


8. The end came into sight after Hazare announced new conditions for breaking his fast. They were: (a) that the Lokpal’s jurisdiction should cover the lower end of the bureaucracy; (b) that states have their own Lokyuktas mirroring the Lokpal; (c) that all government departments have their own Citizen’s Charter; and (d) that Parliament debate his proposals. After his announcement Team Anna brought in the demand that the debate must be followed by a resolution of Parliament. The debate on Saturday, 27 August, made clear the wide diversity of views; however, all agreed on the primacy of Parliament. At the end of the debate Finance Minister Pranab Mukherji made a perfunctory statement mentioning Hazare’s conditions and members respond by thumping their desks. The “resolution” was deemed adopted. In comments later, MPs made clear their action did not bind the Standing Committee which will report a Bill to the House based on its own deliberations. Team Anna, thoroughly chastened, did not react to the brush-off. Bedi, who a day earlier was prancing around the Ramlila stage with a scarf around her head, mocking the government, appeared meekly on television to thank members of Parliament. Hazare set 10 A.M Sunday for breaking his fast.

9. Hazare broke his fast by accepting a drink of coconut water from two little girls rounded up for the occasion, one Muslim, the other a Dalit. The tokenism made clear Team Anna had no members or helpers who belong to the minority or underprivileged sections of society. Mendacious to the end, the media declared the outcome a great victory for Hazare. Headlines Today declared it “Anna’s August Revolution.” Times Now declared “Anna’s Complete Victory.” The Sunday newspapers continued the flow of lies.

This sorry train of events has underlined not only the very serious deficiencies of our “elite media,” but the dangerous extent to which foreign funding has bought up the loyalties of civil society. At any time during the last two weeks a few determined individuals could have precipitated a national crisis. Kejriwal's midnight announcement from the Ramlila podium that a move was afoot to arrest Hazare could have resulted in panic and mayhem, poisoning the political atmosphere and leading us down the path to a new "Emergency." If key leaders of the Government and Opposition parties had not been so adept at dealing with a confused and risky situation, we could easily have gone the way of the countries overtaken by post Cold War "velvet" and "color" revolutions. In India's case, the primary aim of foreign manipulators is not regime change for its own sake but the destabilization of the country at a critical juncture in international economic affairs.

As the Lokpal initiative seeks to rid the government of corruption, it is imperative to begin a parallel process to cleanse the media and civil society. The "new awareness" lauded by television analysts should not be directed only at the government; there is need for independent oversight of the media and NGOs.

Hazare Hysteria

The cheerleading for Anna Hazare by the major television "News channels" is so blatant I almost felt embarrassed for the poor field journalists.

For the two days that Hazare sat in Tihar jail making the authorities squirm for their stupidity in arresting him, TV journalists were called upon to provide wall-to-wall coverage of a story that consisted of nothing more than crowds hamming it up for the cameras. They were reduced to asking ridiculously leading questions to elicit halfway intelligent responses from people who clearly had little knowledge of what the whole stir was about.

Some reporters with more integrity than is probably good for their careers noted the general ignorance about the issue, as well as the fact that most of the crowds seemed to be curious sightseers. Other reporters were enthusiastic propagandists. The station managements did their bit too, with crawlers and repetitive headlines that said things like “India say ‘I am Anna’” (sic), “Anna corners Government,” and “Stand up and be counted, support Anna!”

The “elite” newspapers were also unashamedly partisan. “Anna jailed, but India takes battle to govt,” screamed The Times of India’s six column headline on 17 August. The next day, in even larger type, it said “Govt Buckles, Anna Wins Round 1.” The New Indian Express declared in an all-caps headline “LOK POWER DEFEATS UPA.” The Hindu was staid by comparison, declaring in the main head: “Government arrests Anna, then Blinks,” and under it, “Mass protests across India catch Congress by surprise.” The paper diplomatically did not say what numbers of people constituted a “mass protest.”

In the two days leading up to Hazare’s emergence from Tihar Jail CNN reported there were “hundreds of people” demonstrating in Delhi. Times Now and Headlines Today reported “thousands” of demonstrators in the same period. At the Ramlila Grounds on Friday it became “tens of thousands.” The largest crowds outside Delhi were in Bangalore, a BJP stronghold.

 Television reporters and the "elite Press" studiously avoided noting the politicized nature of the support for Hazare. It was left to the lowly Business Standard to note that detail. A piece by Sreelatha Menon on 19 August reported that many who “you would imagine to be supporters of Anna are against him for being exclusivist, high handed, and a stooge for right wing parties.” Public support for Hazare, she wrote, was “perhaps more a testimony to the mounting public anger against brazen acts of corruption in the country, than any indication of concrete knowledge about Anna's Lok Pal Bill draft.”

 The article said "the number of civil society stalwarts who have lined up to speak out against Anna and his methodology for civic protest” was “remarkable."

Actress and communal relations activist Shabnam Hashmi recalled 1992 when "a similar frenzy led to the demolition of Babri Masjid."

Aruna Roy, the Right to Information activist who was part of the consultations with the government and Team Anna was “bitter about the way her views” were consistently “attributed to wrong intent and viewed with suspicion and mistrust” by Team Anna. Disagreement with Team Anna’s draft was deemed “tantamount to promoting corruption.”
Prominent activist Purushottaman Mulloli thought the whole campaign was "being scripted by political players with agendas—namely right wing ideologues like the BJP and the RSS, specifically the youth wing.” He thought it “strictly an upper caste, middle class urban phenomenon.” The BJP at its national conference in Lucknow last year had declared that corruption would be its electoral plank, and a few months later the ‘India Against Corruption’ campaign was launched.
Despite the vast amounts of airtime and print expended on the issue there was nowhere a critique of the Jan Lokpal Bill proposed by Team Hazare. Even the government did not make clear why the draft is problematic.

As far as I can see, the Team Anna draft is unacceptable for the following reasons:

1. It concentrates too much power in an unelected, unaccountable body. To open the judiciary to investigation and to put the CBI under the Lokpal is to create a Frankenstein's monster. If we call the Lokpal the Grand Inquisitor that problem should become readily apparent to everyone (or at least to anyone who knows the history of the Catholic Church).

2. To include all the lower ranks of the bureaucracy in the purview of the Lokpal is to condemn it to be ineffective. No amount of investigative power will be enough to deal with the volume of petty corruption at those levels. The solution to that sort of bribery is to set up in every Ministry a public email reporting system monitored by an outside invigilator. Anyone who is asked for a bribe should be able to report it. That should immediately reduce the volume of corruption, and if properly implemented, eliminate most of it.

3. To make the Prime Minister open to investigation by the Lokpal is to ask for trouble. If an adversarial relationship develops between the incumbents of the two posts it could tie up the whole government. The government Bill allows the investigation of ex-Prime Ministers; that should be enough.  
 

Anna Hazare is not "Gandhian"

Anna Hazare’s supporters are trying to present him as a “veteran Gandhian.” The most vocal of them, the BBC, has termed him Gandhi’s “heir,” and one of its ersatz Indian correspondents even claimed to have found people here who consider him “a modern day Gandhi.”

Hazare himself has not been shy about invoking the Mahatma as model. The BBC report had a clip of him saying it is time to “Do or Die, just as in the independence struggle.” Karenge ya marenge was, of course, the phrase Gandhi coined for the fateful Quit India Movement in 1942

The “elite” English-language Press in India that usually takes its cues from Britain has not gone to the BBC’s silly extremes, but it has frequently termed Hazare “Gandhian” without once explaining what that means. There is nothing in his life to warrant it.

Kisan Baburao Hazare was born in 1940 to an unskilled worker in the small town of Bhinagar in Bombay Province. He was raised by an aunt in Bombay and stayed in school until the Seventh Standard; after that he became a flower vendor and later the owner of a flower shop. In 1963, he enlisted in the Army as a Jawan and spent the next 12 years driving a truck. During that time, he became an enthusiast of Mahatma Gandhi’s ideas about village development, and after quitting the Army in 1975, became an activist in his father’s village, Ralegaon Siddhi, in Maharashtra.

His first initiative there was to found a Youth Association. It became his primary instrument for a variety of campaigns, most importantly, alcohol prohibition. Those who persisted in making and selling alcohol in Ralegaon Siddhi had their shops smashed; alcoholics who got drunk in other villages were beaten. Hazare lobbied successfully to get the Maharashtra government to allow villages to impose alcohol prohibition by majority vote. His young acolytes also drove tobacco, cigarettes and beedis from the shops of Ralegaon Siddhi.

There were also constructive reforms. Hazare mobilized the village to improve management of water runoff and undertake the planting of trees. He had village cows bred with other breeds to increase milk production, and organized a cooperative to market village produce in the nearby city of Ahmednagar. Caste issues were resolved peacefully, and a cooperative effort made to improve the living conditions and ease the indebtedness of the Dalits. The Youth Association arranged for group weddings to help couples avoid the onerous costs of their own ceremonies. The village school was rebuilt and expanded, its curriculum extended to the secondary level, and students instructed in traditional agricultural practices. These achievements won Hazare a number of awards, including the Padma Shri (1990), and the Padma Bhushan (1992).

His anti-corruption efforts began in 1991with an attempt to expose and end the collusion between forest officials and lumber merchants. In 1997 he accused the Social Welfare Minister of Maharashtra of corruption, and was sued for defamation. He lost the case and was sentenced to three months in prison. A public outcry freed him, whereupon he renewed the attack on the Minister, who subsequently exited the cabinet.

In 2003 Hazare accused four Maharashtra Ministers of corruption and went on a “fast unto death” to demand action against them. He broke it after 8 days when the Chief Minister ordered a judicial probe. The report of the investigation found incriminating evidence against three of the four Ministers. The report also noted financial improprieties on the part of Hazare: a Trust fund he managed had not filed an audit report in two decades, and he had reportedly spent Rs. 2.20 lakh of its funds for his birthday celebrations. (An industrialist friend is said to have repaid the Trust.) What that episode made clear was that Hazare was not entirely his own man. A second “fast unto death” in August 2006 lasted 10 days; it got the government in New Delhi to rescind its decision to exclude handwritten notations on files from the purview of the Right to Information Act of 2005.
The third “fast unto death” began on 5 April 2011 and lasted four days, in which time the government promised to act on a proposal, left hanging by successive governments since 1969, to create a Lokpal or Ombudsman. The fast set to begin on 16 August reflects “Team Anna’s” dissatisfaction with the terms of the official draft the government has submitted to Parliament.

Specifically, Hazare’s wants the judiciary, the Prime Minister and the lower ranks of the bureaucracy to be subject to investigation by the Lokpal; and he wants the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) moved from the Home Ministry to the ombudsman’s office. “Team Hazare” has not dealt with arguments against concentrating so much power in an unelected and unaccountable body. For “Team Anna” – itself unelected and unaccountable – to insist on assuming the prerogatives of Parliament in framing a critical piece of legislation is unbelievably arrogant. That arrogance has come through in Hazare’s increasingly shrill attacks on the government. Nothing about him is “Gandhian” in this situation.

Corruption in India - 4

There is a tendency among elitist Westernized Indians to think of corruption as an obstacle to the coming of the corporate Promised Land where “People Like Us (PLU)” enjoy the benefits of the free market untroubled by government gnats.

There seems to be no awareness that the joint-stock corporation has been the greatest fount of corruption in human history.

Since 1600, when a group of merchants in London founded the first one, the East India Company, corporations have been the primary vehicles of colonialism, the transatlantic slave trade, and the production of increasingly deadly weaponry used to kill some 250 million people in the wars of the 20th Century. They have poisoned air, land and water, promoted the widespread use of carcinogens, and trafficked in opiate drugs that ruined the lives of millions of people, mostly young. (“Heroin” was a Bayer trademarked drug promoted as a treatment for menstrual cramp and colic in babies.) The giant “scams” that have kept us entertained in India over the last few years, from the Satyam boondoggle to the 2-G auction shell game, have all centered on corporate interests.

The reasons for the inherent tendency of corporations to generate corruption are set out in Adam Smith’s classic work on the operation of free markets, The Wealth of Nations. Published in 1776, the year of the American Revolution, it noted two reasons.

One was the corporate tendency to establish selfish monopolies regardless of the cost to society. In making that point, Smith pointed out how the enormous economic potential of the Americas and Asia had, by the “savage injustice of the Europeans” been rendered “ruinous and destructive,” how “all the benefits which could have resulted” from free trade had “been sunk and lost in the dreadful misfortunes” visited on the native populations. Only the imperial monopolists profited from such policy; the British people certainly did not, for they not only paid for the products of the colonies but bore “the whole expense of maintaining and defending the empire.” Just the interest on the debt incurred by the government to retain the American colonies by force, Smith argued, was “greater than the whole extraordinary profit, which it ever could be pretended, was made by the monopoly of the colony trade.”

The second reason was that the ease with which investors could buy and sell stock and their limited exposure to the liabilities of the company resulted in its directors having command of very large sums of money. Smith held out the example of the South Sea Company, established to carry on the slave trade. Its trading stock at one point amounted to over £33,800,000, some three times the entire capital of the Bank of England, which at the time was £10,780,000. With “an immense capital divided among an immense number of proprietors” the company had been run into the ground by the “folly, negligence, and profusion” of its managers and the “knavery and extravagance … the profusion and depredations” of their “factors and agents; some of whom are said to have acquired great fortunes.”

Such profligate corruption was the rule, not the exception. The “managers of other people’s money” did not exercise “the same anxious vigilance” with which private partnerships “frequently watch over their own,” Smith wrote. “Negligence and profusion, therefore, must always prevail, more or less, in the management of the affairs of such a company.” He cited as another example the East India Company, also a behemoth. In telling its story, Smith noted that after the acquisition of Bengal in 1757 the Company had an income of over £3 million a year (about £3 billion now). Despite those “splendid earnings” it “was sunk in debt” by 1773, and had to be bailed out with a government loan. Its story of incompetence, greed and arrogance continued long after Smith's time; it culminated in precipitating the Indian revolt of 1857, a disaster too large even for the profiteers of London to ignore, who finally put it out of business.

On average, over the 400 years that joint-stock corporations have been around, they have been involved in major financial and/or moral scandals once every two years. Smith listed 55 for the first 165 years, and they have grown in frequency as corporations have grown into transnational giants outside the control of any government.

Why haven't governments done more to control them? For one simple reason: the corporation is the most efficient form of wealth creation yet invented. It allows a small group of people to package capital, technology and labour to profit from available resources. This is the reason a country like India or China, with huge and growing populations, cannot afford to turn away from the corporate economy. But we might be approaching a situation where the choice is between growing rich faster and national self-destruction.

To see why, we have to look at a factor that Smith did not note in his analysis of the negative aspects of corporations: the concept of “limited liability.” It had originated in the corporate guilds of medieval Europe in which each individual was responsible only for his own business. With the joint-stock company, that limitation of liability took on an altogether new and sinister meaning. Limited financial liability became moral impunity.

That change occurred initially as corporations dealt with distant lands and “lesser breeds without the law,” but with the Industrial Revolution, European society too became a victim. Investors who had remained untroubled by the miseries of far off peoples were equally unperturbed as workers, including children, were subjected to inhuman conditions in mines and factories; they even remained quiescent as industries poisoned the air, water and land around them.

Today, as that assault on Nature expands in scope and seriousness, as we watch the atmosphere heat up and the polar ice caps melt, as species go extinct at a rate faster than at any time since the dinosaurs disappeared, investors still continue pouring money into "development."

Although social activists and trade unions have managed over four centuries to improve working conditions gradually and put in place some environmental standards, the stockholder tendency to ignore everything but the bottom line has only grown stronger through the 20th century.

As corporations grew into gigantic transnational concerns, they became ever less sensitive to ethical, social and environmental considerations. They took control of the mass media and clothed themselves in a “free market” theology founded on the preposterous claim that The Wealth of Nations commanded the pure pursuit of profit in disregard of the social good. The separation is actually a legacy of the time when the emerging entrepreneurial class of Europe had to fend off feudal authorities; it has stayed in place long after the roles reversed and governments became instruments of the corporate elite.

During the Great Depression of the 1930s when corporations themselves felt the need for government help, a distinction was made between “macroeconomics” and the “microeconomics.” Governments were accorded a continuing macroeconomic “pump priming” role, managing the money supply, keeping a weather eye on business cycles and ensuring a policy framework supportive of business; but they were not to interfere with the running of individual enterprises.

The net result of all this has been the emergence of a global corporate elite that effectively controls what governments can and cannot do. The power of sovereignty thus constrained has been further hobbled by the post-Cold War dispensation of the World Trade Organization that promoted a wide range of corporate freedoms masquerading as “free trade” between hugely unequal participants.

Developing countries have fought a rear-guard action to keep themselves from the tender mercies of giant corporations that have revenues dwarfing the GDP of many of them. India has been one of the leaders of that struggle, but as its own corporations buy into the global network, there are privileged and powerful people within its borders now arguing for seamless integration into a system that is killing the planet. The voices in opposition are a jangle of confused interests ranging from doctrinaire Marxists to tree-hugging environmentalists and farmers desperately fighting to hold onto their land.

How that situation will play out depends very much on how India fares in the current global crisis, now building to an unpredictable climax. (China is already completely at the mercy of foreign corporations and cannot be a factor; other countries do not have the necessary heft to make a difference.) And how India fares will be decided by the efficacy with which we deal with the massive corruptions rooted in the immoral pursuit of corporate interests.

The Lokpal debate is thus actually about much more than the criminal malfeasance of those in power. It brings into focus a set of issues that will determine how creatively India engages with the world, and thus the future of our civilization.

More on that in Part – 5.

Corruption in India -2

The confused controversies surrounding Anna Hazare and Baba Ramdev have made clear the low level of public understanding of corruption.

Ramdev’s fatuous proposal to force Indian “black money” to return from foreign banks should have won him instant expulsion from serious public discourse but that came only after his comic descent into infamy. “Team Hazare’s” proposal for a new supra-investigative body seems more sophisticated but its premise – that government malfeasance is central to corruption – does not bear close examination.

Corrupt politicians/judges/bureaucrats are indeed a key element of one aspect of the problem but they are more symptom than cause. Subjecting them to an independent public watchdog is unlikely to have much effect because the social dementia of which they are victims remains undiagnosed. To find a remedy we must identify the common denominators in the multiplicity of corruptions afflicting India (see list in the last posting).

The most obvious common denominator is the sense of impunity shared by the corrupt: the belief they can get away with crime. However, the reasons they think so fall into three categories.

Underlying the criminal manifestations of male and caste dominance, the use of child labour and the abortion of female fetuses, is the belief that State mechanisms will not or cannot implement the law. In contrast, gangsters and other low-life know very well that the State will actively pursue and punish them; their sense of impunity reflects the learned lessons of harsh predatory lives in which violence and bribery buy security. The calculus of the third category -- which now dominates our attentions -- is  altogether different: top politicians, bureaucrats and business figures believe their power and privilege will insulate them from detection and punishment. Their corruptions spring from cold-blooded decisions to betray the collective interest in pursuit of private profit. In key sectors such as energy, policing and defence, the injury they inflict is not primarily financial or social; they strike at the safety and security of the State.

These very different sources of impunity underlie different genres of corruption and a Lokpal would be largely ineffective in dealing with two of them, the massive social crimes that flow out of our history and modern organized crime. Even in dealing with crimes within the structure of government, the Lokpal cannot be, in that popular expression, a “watchdog;” for a dog can prevent crime and is immune from corruption itself.

The only preventive element in Team Hazare’s version of the Lokpal Bill is the severity of punishment: initially it required the death penalty for high-level offenders, now toned down to life imprisonment. (The government draft calls for a 7-year prison term.) Both versions of the Bill deal with corruption as individual malfeasance; they ignore its existence as a systemic disease with social, economic and political dimensions.

The next post will take up the social aspect, focusing especially on the genesis and coruptions of the caste system.

Corruption in India - 1

Does anyone expect the Lokpal to make any real difference?

Suppose Civil Society gets its entire wishlist and we end up with an unaccountable supra-governmental body with wide-ranging powers to accuse, investigate, prosecute and more or less prescribe punishment for the people it decides are corrupt.

In which of the following situations (all in the headlines in the last few days) will it be able to make a dent?

1.      Widespread smuggling and sale of rice meant for distribution to the poor.

2.     “Ghost workers” receiving funds from the National Rural Employment Guarantee scheme.

3.     The hundreds of illegal mining operations under way in a number of states.

4.      The widespread illegal quarrying of rock, with some operations threatening archeological heritage sites.

5.      The widespread illlegal "sand mining"  from beaches and watercourses.

6.      Widespread use of child labour

7.      The resort to gender-related abortions by educated, middleclass people that is causing an increasing tilt in the male/female ratio of the Indian population.

8.      The private theft and public "seizure" of land belonging to the poor in all parts of the country. While private gangsters make no bones about their motive -- profit -- public officials make a grand pretence: the POSCO steel mill on tribal land in Orissa, the nuclear power station on tribal land in Maharashtra, and the Delhi-Agra highway in UP, are all for that distant god, "Development." .

9.      The bribery of voters by political parties. According to the Chief Election Commissioner all political parties tried to corrupt voters during the recent state elections, using  clandestine contributions from corporations.

10.  The thievery of public goods by the wealthy curled darlings of the nation. The government's auditor, the Comptroller and Accountant General (CAG), has just reported that when Murli Deora was Minister for Petroleum, he did all kinds of favours for Mukesh Ambani's Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL), causing massive but unquantifiable losses to the public exchequer. (Younger brother Anil Ambani, is already neck-deep in the 2G auction scam and has two of his senior aides cooling their heels in Tihar Jail.) The CAG noted that the Ministry had allowed Reliance (and Cairn India, the subsidiary of a well connected British firm extracting oil in Rajasthan), to hold onto areas they should have forfeited because of failure to drill. That prevented the government from re-auctioning the areas, depriving it of potentially massive revenues.

11. The $7.2 billion deal Reliance Industries made in February to sell a 30 percent stake in its offshore gas fields (acquired under the abovementioned questionable contract) to BP, the British oil giant. In June, the Home Ministry issued a terse one-page security clearance  necessary for BP to proceed with the purchase. The Ministry noted that BP was already in the Indian market, selling lubricants. Selling grease is significantly different from owning a sizeable chunk of the country's strategically important energy sector, but that didn't seem to count with the biggies at Home. Nor did it seem to matter that BP has the worst safety and environmental records of any of the oil majors. Or even that it has a long history as an imperial arm of the British government, and had a notorious role in destroying Iran's homegrown democracy and manipulating it into its current miseries. (Would the Lokpal be able to take cognizance of the fact that the current Home Minister, P. Chidambaram, was in charge of the Finance Ministry when it cleared the contracts the CAG has faulted? Or that he is a former corporate lawyer who represented Enron in India and sat on the board of Vedanta, the company owned by the predatory Anil Agarwal, a Mumbai scrap metals trader who morphed into a British billionaire with a stinking human rights record?)

12.  The reported oversize loans the State Bank of India made in contravention of ReserveBank rules to Reliance Industries, Indian Oil Company and BHEL.

13.  The reported provision of an entire telephone exchange of unlisted high-speed lines by BSNL Chennai ,to benefit the television station run by the brother of Dayanidhi Maran, who held the Telecommunications portfolio in the central cabinet before A. Raja, who emceed the 2G spectrum auction.

14.  The reported routine use of torture by Police all over the country to extract information from suspects.

15. The brazen daylight murder of a prominent investigative journalist in Mumbai, and the revelation of connections among foreign-controlled gangsters, high level Police officers and Mumbai businessmen.

16.  The rotting of hundreds of thousands of tons of food grains lying exposed to monsoon rains in states across India because storage facilities were inadequate for a bumper crop.

17.  The involvement of some top Army officers in the illegal construction of a multistory residential building on property owned by the Defence Department in Mumbai.

18.  The flow of foreign institutional investment into Indian stock markets primarily from “tax havens” where “shell companies” hide the identity of the real owners of the money. Over 40 per cent of the flow comes from a single source, Mauritius, with which India has a three-decade old treaty preventing double-taxation. Negotiated to encourage bilateral economic ties before Mauritius became a tax haven, the treaty now serves as a cover for “black money” to enter the Indian economy.

19.  The tax avoidance of Vodafone, the British telecommunications giant, which moved funds from a Caribbean tax haven in 2007 to buy the Indian interests of Hong Kong-based Hutchinson Whampoa (then in partnership with the Essar Group in India). Vodafone is contesting the Indian government’s demand for over $2.5 billion in taxes on that deal, arguing that it was between two off shore entities (itself and Hutchinson Whampoa) and thus outside Indian jurisdiction!

20.  The gullibility of millions of people from whom the late lamented “Sathya” Sai Baba extracted the treasure trove he left behind in his private room and in his fabulously wealthy "Trust."  

That list does not include India’s enormous burden of preventable infant and maternal deaths that results from grossly disordered political priorities and multi-layered negligence. It omits the massive toll of misery exacted by discrimination and violence from poor women, the cases of child marriage, payment of dowry, and of blatant and even murderous caste prejudice that are all deep-rooted social corruptions not even acknowledged in the current debate. Even with those exclusions, the list makes clear that “corruption” in India is not a simple phenomenon centred on the culpability of bureaucrats and politicians. It has strong social, economic and political components, and we must understand them in order to take effective action. Without a strategic sense of the nature and origin of corruption in Indian society (to be taken up in the next posting), it is futile to think a watchdog body will make the slightest bit of difference.

(By the way, shouldn't it be Logpal? Lokpal makes it sound as if the institution is out to save the world.)