An Unholy Trinity

This article was first published by Tehelka (www.tehelka.com) on 28 November 2014 under the headline An Unholy Trinity.

Mission impossible? The jury is still out on whether and how well Narendra Modi is able to stem the tide of corruption. Photo courtesy: PIB

A potent and combustible mix of politicians, corporates and bureaucrats is eating into the vitals of governance. Will Narendra Modi stem the tide?

A

n Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer, now retired, received a peculiar instruction from a minister when he returned to his state cadre after a deputation at the Centre. The minister wanted the official to substitute the income certificate submitted by a student, who wanted to appear for an entrance examination, with another one so that the boy could claim the benefit of a quota for backward minorities and easily secure admission in a medical college. “Only you and I would know,” the minister told the officer, reassuring the latter that their secret would be safe with him. The officer, who had by then earned a reputation for not being a doormat for the politician, refused; needless to say, he was promptly transferred out.

Even though many years may have passed since the incident, Alphons Kannanthanam vividly recalls a sense of affront that apparently the minister felt and how his transfer order was issued the very next day.

In an earlier avatar as the commissioner of the Delhi Development Authority, Alphons demolished more than 14,000 illegal structures that had been built by certain politicians and high-net-worth individuals, reclaiming in the process acres of prime property that were then valued at several thousands of crores of rupees. Then, as later, he was shunted out at the behest of certain politicians and their associates.

Incidentally, his relocation to Delhi in 1992 had come about in similar circumstances; he was transferred out of Kerala after he wrote a dissenting note in the infamous palmolein oil import scam that had rocked the state. Alphons has since taken to politics; he contested and won as an independent candidate from the Kanjirapally Assembly seat in Kerala. He joined the BJP in 2011.

Cut to 2012 and another IAS officer, Ashok Khemka, would be transferred out for the nth time for taking on the powers that be. His fault? He detected certain irregularities in land transactions, particularly one allegedly involving a high-profile politician’s son-in-law and a public limited company. Khemka has been unceremoniously transferred more number of times than the total number of years of service he has put in so far. Today, he serves as the transport commissioner of Haryana.

When reports began to appear in the media about the extent of this VIP’s involvement in the alleged scam and when a civil society movement called India Against Corruption began to pose uncomfortable questions to the erstwhile Manmohan Singh government and the Congress party alike, this VIP had derisively remarked, “mango people in a banana republic”; in Hindi, mango people means “aam aadmi”, an unmistakable reference to the anti-corruption movement, some of whose members subsequently floated the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP).

Some politicians and political parties have wondered why a “private citizen”, like the VIP in question, should be hounded in the manner he has been. But, as the TEHELKA investigation reveals, he hardly fits the description of a private person. For, how many private citizens can claim to curry favours from a corporate (Jet Airways, in this case), and with relative ease at that? Or, as a BJP leader wondered aloud, which private citizen would be exempted from security checks, greeted with a meet-and-assist service every time he flies or accorded security at taxpayers’ expense?

The downside of corruption

India may have copied the British model of governance, but the similarity ends there. In the United Kingdom, a certain minister had to resign for even as much as asking the person concerned to fast track the issue of a visa application of the nanny of his former lover. India, in contrast, seems to exhibit a far greater tolerance of misdemeanours. (However, one of the earliest recorded exceptions to this general trend was in 1951 when Jawaharlal Nehru made an example of HG Mudgal, who, incidentally, was also from the Congress party, for accepting a bribe.)

There is no gainsaying that the intersection of political, corporate and bureaucratic classes in India presents a combustible mix and their interplay has a direct bearing on governance.

In 1993, the government constituted a committee headed by the then home secretary NN Vohra (today he is serving as the governor of Jammu and Kashmir) to look into the nexus between crime syndicates, bureaucrats and politicians. Twelve years later, in 2005, the Second Administrative Reforms Commission was set up under the chairmanship of Veerappa Moily for revamping the administrative machinery. Certainly, the two reports leave a lot to be desired.

A conservative estimate by an industry chamber puts the financial cost of certain recent cases of corruption at 36,400 crore. Also, India has slid down Transparency International’s corruption perception index rating; from being ranked 72 in 2007, it dropped to 87 in 2010 and 94 in 2013, below some countries such as China.

In Transparency International’s Global Corruption Barometer 2013, politicians, corporates and bureaucrats in India had the dubious distinction of being perceived as more corrupt than others. More than 80 percent of the people surveyed felt that the political parties and their leaders were corrupt; 65 percent felt the same way about lawmakers and bureaucrats; and 50 percent said that businesses were guilty of indulging in corrupt practices.

Corruption dates back decades

While he headed the Second ­Administrative Reforms Commission, which, among other things, examined the politician-corporate-bureaucrat nexus, Moily had said that corruption has been with us for several centuries. Even at the time Kautilya wrote Arthashastra, he had said that just as fish moving inside water cannot be known when drinking water, even so officers appointed for carrying out works cannot be known when appropriating money. Modern India isn’t any better. A perusal of the history of independent India would suggest that it is replete with scams. The earliest recorded scandal dates back to 1948 when a foreign firm was contracted for supply of jeeps to the Indian Army. Although the firm received monies, it failed to deliver the promised number of vehicles.

Nehru was not personally accused of corruption, but the same could not be said of his government. As a sitting Congress mp from Thiruvananthapuram, Shashi Tharoor, writes in his book Nehru: The Invention of India, “Jawaharlal [could not] prevent the growth of the corruption which his own statist policies facilitated. The image of the self-sacrificing Congressmen in homespun gave way to that of the professional politicians the educated middle classes came to despise, sanctimonious windbags clad hypocritically in khadi who spouted socialist rhetoric while amassing uncountable (and unaccountable) riches by manipulating governmental favours. With licences for quotas for every business activity, petty politicians grew rich by profiting from the power to permit.

“The stench of corruption reached Jawaharlal’s own circles three times in the later years of his rule: When his finance minister TT Krishnamachari was obliged to resign in 1958 over improprieties in a life insurance scam (it was Feroze Gandhi’s muckraking that brought about Krishnamachari’s downfall); when his friend Jayanti Dharma Teja, whom Nehru had helped set up a major shipping line, defaulted on loans and skipped the country; and when Jawaharlal’s own private secretary since 1946, MO Mathai, who was accused both of spying for the CIA and of accumulating an ill-gotten fortune, was forced to resign in 1959. In none of these cases was there the slightest suggestion that Jawaharlal had profited personally in any way from the actions of his associates, but they again confirmed that Nehru’s loyalty exceeded his judgement.”

History was to repeat itself, again, during the tenure of the erstwhile upa government. A series of scams, including, but not limited to, the allocation of 2G spectrum and coal blocks and the hosting of the 2010 Commonwealth Games, eventually led to the downfall of the government that was headed by a prime minister with a Teflon image.

According to former Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) Vinod Rai, if the then prime minister Manmohan Singh had wanted, he could have prevented the 2G scam. Also, recently, the Supreme Court told CBI director Ranjit Sinha to recuse himself from the 2G probe. According to TSR Subramaniam, a former cabinet secretary, that the CBI was a “hand maiden” of the government of the day was well-known but he thought it was extraordinary that no action has yet been taken against Sinha.

Will Modi make good his promise?

Candidate Narendra Modi raised the bar by saying that neither does he himself indulge in corruption nor would he allow others to do it (“na khaata hoon, na khaane doonga”.) At the same time, he qualified his remarks in an interview he gave to a private television channel by saying that the problem of corrupt practices could not be solved to everyone’s satisfaction, but that certain preventive measures could surely make it difficult to indulge in corruption. The jury is still out on whether and how well Prime Minister Modi is able to stem the tide of corruption, which, as he said in August at an election rally at Kaithal in Haryana, is a disease worse than cancer.

His government set the tone as early as June this year when it used President Pranab Mukherjee’s speech to a joint session of Parliament to underscore that the government “is determined to rid the country of the scourge of corruption and the menace of black money”. In the same speech, it was said that “the institution of Lokpal is important to curb corruption and my government will endeavour to formulate rules in conformity with the Act”. (The government hopes to push for the Lokpal and Lokayuktas (Amendment) Bill, 2014, in the ongoing winter session of Parliament.)

Subramaniam insists that it is too early to judge the Modi government; he points out that Modi has made a beginning by making it known to anyone who would care to listen to him that he intends to bring about a visible difference in the way India is governed. Already, the message seems to have had the desired impact on corporates. Recently, The Economic Times quoted Godrej group chairman Adi Godrej as saying that “there is a definite realisation among Indian firms that even in government, there is a major movement underway against corruption”.

Hypocrisy to the fore

Yet, to the discerning, it is obvious that the debate about corruption in India smacks of hypocrisy and double standards. According to a recent Transparency International report, 54 percent of Indians surveyed say they paid a bribe in the past year; that is one in every two Indians who participated in the survey.

A 2013 document titled ‘Bribery and corruption: Ground reality in India’ prepared by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) and Ernst and Young, a multinational professional services firm headquartered in London, quotes an unnamed foreign multinational company as saying, “These days, bribery is in many cases regarded as a norm rather than an evil.”

Yet, even if, for a moment, one were to accept and concede that corruption is endemic and few can claim to be untouched by it, that an ordinary Indian citizen is as culpable or guilty as, say, a VIP, the latter will still find it difficult to wriggle out because public interest is involved; and, therefore, to that extent, politicians, corporates and bureaucrats would be held to a different yardstick than the common man.

Corporates don’t fare any better, either. The FICCI document explains that “more than half of the respondents agreed that it is the lack of will of corporate enterprises to obtain licences and approvals the ‘right way’ which encourages bribery and corruption”.

Furthermore, while cash continues to be the most preferred mode of paying bribes (89 percent of the respondents selected it from the long list of possible modes), 77 percent chose “gifts and kind” as a likely quid pro quo, which, possibly, explains the behaviour of some of the dramatis personae in the TEHELKA investigation.

This, when the Central Civil Services (Conduct) Rules, 1964, stipulate that government officials are not to accept or permit members of their families (or other persons acting on their behalf) to accept gifts.

According to the FICCI document, the expression “gift” includes free transport, boarding, lodging or other services, or any other pecuniary advantage provided by any person other than a near relative or personal friend with no official dealings with the civil servant.

As the Second Administrative Reforms Commission said, “The standard should be one of not only the conduct of Caesar’s wife but of Caesar himself.” And that holds true for the political, corporate and bureaucratic classes today. And tomorrow, too.

The Challenge Before Rahul Gandhi: If the party survives, so will the Gandhis

This article was first published by Tehelka (www.tehelka.com) under the headline The Challenge Before Rahul.

Will the Gandhi scion be able to overcome the prevailing sentiment against the politics of dynasty?

DK Shivakumar’s mandate may be confined to Karnataka by virtue of his being a minister there but his sentiments seem to transcend the state’s borders and find resonance with a section of the Congress party’s central leaders. That is not to say that no one in the party’s central leadership had thought on those lines before or aired similar sentiments in the past.

In fact, first off the blocks was Kamal Nath, who, soon after the Congress debacle in the recent Lok Sabha election, sought to suggest that the party organisation was in dire need of an overhaul. He articulated as much in an interview to NDTV, in which he spoke about holding of elections to the Congress Working Committee. Perhaps, he added for good measure, it was time to put an end to the prevailing culture of patronage, too. Most recently, P Chidambaram told the same television channel that an individual from outside the Gandhi family could “someday” take over the reins of the party.

Not being exceptionally media-savvy or not having a Twitter account should be the least of Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi’s worries today. (Not that having a presence on social media is a bad idea.) For one who claims to have spent the better part of the past seven years reorganising the Youth Congress, he does not have much to show by way of outcomes. A straw poll would indicate that there is still a deep-seated resentment among a section of the Youth Congress activists at the manner in which the Gandhi scion has gone about ushering in purported reforms, which have been implemented more in the breach.

When Rahul came to head the Youth Congress in 2007, he spoke about democratising the organisation by regularly holding elections, but a common refrain even today is that family connections matter more than merit in the party and its various organs.

One sentiment that clearly emerges from interacting with some of the workers is that the Congress party seems to be woefully out of sync with the prevailing sentiment, inside and outside the party and in India’s hinterland, against the politics of dynasty and entitlement.

The asymmetry between the two principal political parties in the country today becomes even more pronounced when one considers who the Gandhis — Sonia and Rahul — are pitted against: Narendra Modi, who rose from being a chaiwallah in his childhood to occupy the highest office in the land, and Amit Shah, who rose from within the ranks to head the BJP. In such a situation, to rope in another dynast from the same family — Priyanka Gandhi Vadra — in the hope that she would pull the party out of the morass it finds itself in, is hardly going to be a solution. (The irony is unmistakable: The same Congress worker who rails against nepotism sees Priyanka as a saviour who will wave the proverbial magic wand and, voila!, make it all look good again. For her part, she has indicated time and again that she is not ready and willing yet to play a more active role in the party’s affairs.)

It should not come as a surprise that the Congress rank and file feels a sense of despair, made even more acute by the perceived absence of Rahul from the party’s affairs post the Maharashtra and Haryana Assembly elections. Incidentally, Rahul is a key part of a 12-member Congress committee constituted to “look into future challenges” but the nature and contours of the deliberations undertaken by this panel remain a mystery.

Similarly, the conclusions or recommendations by a committee set up under the chairmanship of AK Antony to examine the reasons for the party’s debacle in the Lok Sabha election did not help matters by absolving the party office-bearers of all responsibility. Instead, the committee’s report sought to ascribe the party’s loss to unspecified organisational handicaps and, oddly, manipulation of the media by its rival. Admittedly, winning isn’t everything but then again, you don’t win silver, you lose gold!

For a party that practically invented the art of election engineering, to commit the same mistake that its rivals did some decades ago is unforgivable. (In a sense, it speaks to the bankruptcy of the Congress’ present-day leaders.) The late Indira Gandhi won a landslide in 1971 on the back of a simple yet effective slogan of “Woh kehte hain Indira hatao, main kehti hoon garibi hatao (They are saying remove Indira, I’m saying remove poverty.)” The more her rivals (who had banded together in a grand alliance) conducted a personalised campaign against her, the more she gained. Cut to 2014, and the same Congress party targeted Modi at the expense of everything else, and ended up handing him an unprecedented victory at the hustings.

The Congress strategists seem to have forgotten that there is something called a law of diminishing returns and the effectiveness of a unidimensional campaign begins to wear off after a certain period of time. And this stratagem of the Congress to selectively target Modi will continue to bother the party if, as is being anticipated, it gangs up with some of its ‘secular’ allies against a resurgent bjp and trains its guns on Modi in the states where elections are due. The Congress needs to change tack to counter the Modi phenomenon.

If Rahul is missing in action, so are certain erstwhile Congress ministers who seem to have gone into hibernation after the Lok Sabha election. The alacrity with which some of them have resumed their professional careers sends out the wrong signal that they are abandoning the party when it needs their services the most. Consequently, the task of articulating the party’s views has been outsourced ad hoc to individuals who lack the requisite skills or the stature to make forceful interventions.

For the Congress party and its brains trust, now is not the time for window dressing; now is the time for a dressing down. Cosmetic surgery won’t do anymore. Rahul will have to lead from the front and ensure that his interventions are consistent, not sporadic. His cameos such as the ordinance-is-complete-nonsense-it- should-be-torn-up-and-thrown-away or his aggressive speech at the All India Congress Committee session in January this year have proved inadequate, sometimes counter-productive. On 28 October, Rahul met with his colleagues in what was only his first formal interaction with them after the recent round of Assembly elections. On the occasion, he touched upon the issue of holding organisational elections that would be transparent and fair. It remains to be seen how effective those elections prove to be in infusing new vigour into the party.

A reluctant politician Rahul might be but there is a thin line that divides being reluctant from being (or coming across as being) disinterested. This was brought out starkly earlier this year in Rahul’s interview to Times Now television channel. He was asked: “Had you not been a Gandhi, would you have been in politics at all?” His reply was neither categorical nor in the affirmative. The import of that silence (reticence?) was not lost on a discerning audience, some of whom wondered why the tenets of equal opportunity and internal democracy should not extend to his job.

As the party introspects and contemplates its future course of action, it could begin with rightsizing its top-heavy organisation, rejigging its team of officebearers at the national and state levels and spotting new talent within and outside the party, instead of paying a lefthanded compliment to the bjp by iterating that the latter marketed itself better in the Lok Sabha polls. As Chidambaram warned, the morale is low and the party’s leadership must respond urgently.

The question before the Gandhis is: would they rather perpetuate themselves than see the party revive and reinvent itself in keeping with the times we live in?

If the party survives, so will the Gandhis.