Civil Services: My Very Own Obituary

            How ironical is it that I write my own obituary today when others – notably my ardent practitioners, the civil servants – condescend to celebrate the Civil Services Day! I’m none too sure if it isn’t on purpose – to humiliate me when I am already in my terminal stage of life and afflicted with many illnesses. Without much ado, let me recount my tale of woes, which, in a manner of speaking, is my honest obituary no one else but me would dare write.

            I was spawned by the British in the mid-19^th century when the Raj held unquestioned sway across the length and breadth of India. My job, to start with, was fairly simple: to collect revenue and to maintain law and order. Slowly, and little by little, my role changed, and the task of maintaining law and order became tricky and cumbersome in the wake of the national movement to free the country from the British yoke. Then came India’s independence in 1947. I looked forward to this new and, what I thought, exciting phase of my life.

But my outrageous optimism was completely misplaced. I was in for a rude shock. Far from the deliverance I thought independence would grant me, I quickly realized that the people who rode on my back were far from the jockeys I was used to up until then. They were known by the genteel term of civil servants but they were anything but that. They were neither civil nor servants. They joined the civil service not because they wanted to serve the nation and the people but to self-aggrandize and enrich themselves: wield power and abuse it, improve their lot (financial, positional or societal), gain visibility and generally make lives comfortable for their and their unborn (and unforeseeable) future generations.

I blanched at the upstarts and the parvenus riding high on their hobby horse of power and its multi-hued abuses. I was not used to such Johnny-come-latelies. This, I felt, mostly in the 1960s through to the 70s till about the 1990s. My plight began when a certain Czarina riding the crest of uber-glory in the early-197os wanted to change my DNA summarily. She wanted me to shed my time-worn and putative neutrality tag and exchange it for commitment to her cause. I wasn’t amused. But I was helpless, even distraught.

Events were moving ahead fast. Commitment had become the buzzword in the nation’s lexicon. Even the powerful and revered judiciary started feeling the pinch. The Supreme Court bowed to supersession of its three senior-most judges, though not without whimper and protest. So who was I to protest, particularly when my jockeys were mostly made of putty clay, and turncoats and time-servers themselves, had quickly jumped into the bandwagon of the season to make hay – in their mindless quest for quick upward social and material mobility.

Frankly, this was only the prelude to my demise. The rest, as they say, is history. If permit-quota-licence raj had put a cap on dishonesty, the liberalized era that was heralded with panache placed no such set limits. It was now a world of every (wo)man for (her)himself with even devil scared off to take the hindmost! How Mephistopheles had been suitably shushed!

The game-plan was different, so were the game-changers. Unbeknownst, insidiously and incipiently, natural resources attained a Midas touch. Who cares when an impersonal, insentient entity as a Nation-State can be bled to death with impunity! And protest it didn’t – this gloriously magnificent, magnanimous body! – as robbery, thievery and desecration laid waste to its every limb.

Unfortunately, Anno Domini 2010 trumped the ingenuities of all these game-planners and game-changers. The chutzpah and loot of national resources – earthly, heavenly, other-worldly – came about with quick-fire rapidity for the ordinary souls’ comfort. Every denizen of consequence helming these bodies (the honchos thought them starry!) went about on overdrive. The loot could no longer be ignored and glossed over. The world found the rape of CWG nothing but a daylight heist. A certain (in)sane institution the fathers of the Constitution had tamped down on the Indian democratic polity screamed and telecommunicated to the Indian nation through the 2-G medium, the humongous loot of its national resources. Around this time, unbidden, the Kargil war heroes had decided to sit up upright in mudra posture in their Adarsh graves by the Arabian Sea in a megalopolis called Mumbai. Like the Greek tragedy, nemesis had come calling on these limitless hubris!

The Supreme Court too had begun its share of bashing, making the defunct CBI and other vigilante outfits do its bit to earn their salary. The media – frenetically looking around to establish their credibility in 24 x 7 times – gloatingly latched on to these dollops of offering. The civil society, till the other day droopy, somnolent and complaisant, suddenly woke up with a start. The newest Mahatma, with his time-tested fast ceaselessly transmitted in the visual medium, didn’t help matters. The die had been cast.

Today, as I stand at the crossroad of history, I see nothing but the ghost of my own past. The Lokpal Bill, now under passionate drafting by the civil society, will surely write finis to my career. Who, tell me, in his senses, will like to embrace me and become a civil servant? He will not have wings to fly literally and metaphorically. No frivolous rubbernecking across the globe at tax-payers’ expense. No nightly pillage (forget the daylight swindle!) since the CCTV and electron microscopes will scan their every move and transaction.

In hindsight’s 20-20, if the Right to Information was the ultimate act of indecency, the Lokpal shall lamentably be the last fig-leaf in this striptease. As though that isn’t enough to write my dirge, there are still some shouting themselves hoarse from the housetop and simplifying a complex, nuanced issue into an easy algebraic equation: Corruption = Monopoly + Discretion – Accountability.

So that’s going to be my unsung end, my untimely death-knell. So please do me the honours simply enshrining as epitaph on my tombstone!

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Right to Corruption-Free Governance

The events of the past week are unprecedented in the annals of independent India. The civil society has forced itself in playing a role in the democratic polity. The Jan Lokpal Bill provided the trigger. And the groundswell of support Anna Hazare’s fast received across the country – from the inelectable couldn’t-care-less youth to the unelected nonchalant non-voting middle class – was the proverbial last straw on the nation’s back.

Unarguably never in 64 years of independent India has any single year witnessed this fusillade and testosterone of scams big time that we have borne in the uber-ignoble year 2010 Anno Domini. It was a year like no other. It was a year riddled with scams that poured forth with mind-boggling regularity. CWG, Adarshgate, 2-G, Sukhna Defence land scam, ISRO-Devas deal, Prasar Bharati scam, Karnataka land scam, the CVC imbroglio, Nira Radia teletape revelations were way too gratuitous for civil society to give it a go-by. We should be eternally grateful to the Rajas and Kalmadis to have woken up the civil society from its deep slumber and united it as never before!

It is about time the civil society asked for Right to Corruption-free Governance as a part of its fundamental right to be enshrined in the Constitution. It is as important and as fundamental as the right to equality or right to freedom of expression or right to religious practices or right to constitutional remedies. It is as basic as right to live and breathe. And to think that this fundamental right has not only been given a short shrift but been torn to shreds with imperious impunity!

How vital the Lokpal Bill is will be clear if we start from the scratch. In a compact that forms society or nation, the basic unit is man. A nation exists for its people, who have decided to come together to form a state or nation through a covenant that is binding on all to govern itself and to benefit all its stakeholders uniformly. There are the necessary checks and balances to preempt malfeasance and misfeasance on those saddled with governance. Let’s start with human instinct. This, since time immemorial, is as kleptocratic as the oldest profession on earth.

So given human beings are epicures, there would forever be the impulse to improve one’s lot in a society that values hedonism – even when transactions are not always licit. So checkmate illicit impulses: by law that are not long-drawn; by transparency that makes even RTI redundant; by e-governance that posits, postulates, and posts transactions that are tamper-proof. And this is why there is a need for a feisty oversight mechanism.

There are many demands in the Jan Lokpal Bill that should be beyond reproach for all honest, right-thinking people. Take for instance the need to merge the CBI with the Lokpal. This would provide necessary independence to CBI from the clutches of governing unit. Similarly there is nothing Mephistophelean about it. The suggestion for minimum punishment of five years and maximum of life imprisonment can’t be flawed.

Nor can one fault the suggestion that there must be deterrence against frivolous complaints in the form of financial penalties. Or to provide protection against physical and professional victimization of whistleblowers. Likewise, loss caused to the government due to corruption must be recovered from all accused. The issue of Lokpal institution embracing everyone – bureaucrats, politicians, judiciary including the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court – should be welcomed by all honest denizens occupying such exalted offices, though it must be ensured that the Lokpal doesn’t become another Frankenstein.

Much as an oversight body with teeth sends a shudder down the criminal’s spine, it, paradoxically, grants spine and vim to the honest public servant to go that extra mile and outshine himself. Why must then one baulk at the thought of empowering the Lokpal to initiate suo motu investigation in any case without reference or permission from anyone? This is, of course, predicated upon the fact that the Lokpal won’t just be an advisory body but would have powers to register FIR, proceed with criminal investigations and launch prosecution. Hong Kong’s Independent Commission Against Corruption is a kind of super-body against corruption. It combines investigation, prevention, and popular participation – all rolled in one.

In effect, we are left with just three issues that can be bickered. These are fairly trivial and one would hope, given the maturity, intent, and experience of both sides it shouldn’t pose problem to arrive at unanimity. One relates to the constitution of the Lokpal. The civil society activists want this to consist of one chairperson and ten members, of which four with legal background. The other relates to investigations and trial that must be quick and should be completed within one year. Though it would be hard to lay a timeframe, the fact that investigation should be completed in quick time is indubitable.

            We must force a splash: Catching Big Fish and frying them – deep, long, hard, and crisp. Big Fish have high visibility and the more the frying the more the message roundly conveyed. The public tends to weigh effectiveness by status! Nothing kills public confidence more than the belief that the anti-corruption effort is directed only at the small fishes. It needs remembering that Italy’s unprecedented success in its fight against corruption was largely due to frying a top Mafia official, many top business executives, and several major politicians from the ruling party. This told citizens that if they denounced crime and corruption, they certainly could make a difference.  Yikes.

Today, civil society is livid – beyond words. The media has played its part with pox-on-your-face rebuke to unearth crimes notwithstanding the luminaries, caught in crosshairs, spewing venom on them for being the judge, jury, and the executioner. Let the detritus and scums of earth spend themselves out with their spiels of curses worn on their Teflon-coated shirt-fronts. It’s time for India to awake, phoenix-like, from the ashes that public servants have reduced it to. This is not a clarion call; this is a fervent appeal from one proud Indian to fellow proud citizens who would wish to live an honest and dignified life amid this encircling and unending vista of scams – and swindle of public money.

Am I a cosmic optimist to will the Lokpal Bill to galvanize the nation in its quest for honesty? Or, is it malicious to say it will willy-nilly lead one way – to resigned exasperation, as in the past?

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Friendship in a Changing World

When on a lazy weekend or on a blessed holiday, I reminisce my days with friends in school and college in the 1960s and 70s, I can see the look of disbelief in my children’s eyes. “How it could be?” their eyes popping out, seem to be scanning my mind. If they quickly change tack, it’s because they’ve, over the years, seen my childhood friends visit us, live with us, and interact with us. But that fleeting moment of disbelief is etched in my mind.
Over time friendships change, mostly due to divides – material, social, geographical, professional – that crop up as years go by. Friends become acquaintances, acquaintances/colleagues friends. But acquaintance-colleague-friendship matrix is not exactly like childhood friendship and rarely adorns the garb of uninhibited friendship of younger days. Some say you don’t make friends in later life, the alchemy of schools and colleges aids and promote friendships; later-day friends are not the same as childhood friends – they verge on acquaintanceship and border on the private thoughts’ periphery.

Not surprisingly, inscrutable time – kills as much as it heals. It kills friendships through disuse, the distance – geographical, mental, and psycho-spatial – not exactly helping the cause. In a rapidly changing possessive individualistic world with upward social mobility the leitmotif of human existence – or so we think – friendships are churned and tossed over in a limitless sea of possibilities. Quickly these possibilities hammer out their inherent probabilities that are largely mutated by social status and pecking order, material riches and professional necessities. To still call them friendships, as some protagonists do, is a travesty of any earthy friendship. They are not friendships – so devoid are they of the naturalness and the everydayness that once attended their friendship when they’re young.

Sadly this churning smothers and put pays to most childhood friendships. If they motor along with cloying symbolism for reasons of past emotion and ancient love (Alas, long lost!), they hobble about with putative crutches. Only for a while. The crutches are addenda, never convenient, and least envisioned in the original, pristine friendship’s scheme of things that freely and unhesitatingly admitted friends into the private recesses of one’s mind. The synthesis of mutual ideas and preferences, likes and dislikes – personal and familial – was the bedrock on which friendship efflorescenced.

It would be presumptuous of me to put this down to human cunning and aspiration in the societal totem pole. As paths take different trajectories, friends with humble glow feel unwanted and lost, even staggeringly out of whack, in company of humans with supernova success who were once friends. The commonality of interest they once shared is in tatters what with the turbo-charged now grown fretful to share precious time with his unfortunate proletariat also-friend for no better reason than of past childhood baggage now appearing light years away. Inequality and varying successes in life coupled with hedonistic quotients – plus the mutual spouses’ emotion deficits – crowd out the past. It is not the best recipe for a sustained lifelong friendship. Friendships – never set in stone – start withering. The meetings with little-something-to-share become scarce, the telephone vibes rarer, and text messages go missing. Time the friendship-pooper has raised its ugly head. Success begets hubris that fillets the mind with razzmatazz and places no premium on human goodness; failure begets coyness and distancing, imprisoning thoughts and emotions in private preserve of one’s mind. Amid all this, either party forgets that life is infinitesimally finite.

How old friendships fall by the wayside and new – brand new ones – pretend to take shape! This is not to say that there are no exceptions. There indeed are, but often enfeebled. It takes two exceptional human beings differently placed in life to stay the steadfast friends of yore. Each, at every point of contact, need to forget his existential place society has blessed/condemned them with/to and find that sliver of common interest that can keep the friendship going. How long, you’ll ask, such contrived relationship can last? More often than not they peter away unless the successful and rich is a human full up with the punctilio of higher code and sensibility and takes that extra care amid the encircling demand on his time. Not unoften such relationships languish and perish. You really can’t blame either though this can’t be a calming fact for the less fortunate.

Today’s friendships are different, sculpted in schools and colleges, offices and workplaces, where the mutual families rarely figure. During our times families provided the bedrock, a benevolent eye and loving glue that made friends more than friends; they became a son or a daughter (or nephew or niece) in their friends’ homes. The respective families became another family for them where the doors were open anytime of the day and where they could put their feet up and relax.

I can still recall fondly how my mother would cook 4-5 extra lunches or dinners so that my friends visiting me joined the family for the repast. Friends stayed at each others places, not because it was late for them to get back home, but because it felt nice to have them for a few days. It was like a cousin come home visiting.

Today, my children’s world is different. Rarely is it eating at mutual homes; they prefer eating Mac-Foods at in-your-mouth food courts, among themselves, and not with friends’ families. When I hear them traffic in their stereotypes, I stop trying to explain to them the fetishes of their ways. The family glue that encompassed our friendships and provided loving avuncular touch is missing. Unlike ours, we know little of our children’s friends, let alone their families. I guess there’s more independence and more distancing than the inextricability and phrasing of our days. The world’s changed; the degree of informality of our times has morphed into a more formal frame informed with individual human calculus.

Human relationship is a manifestation of the time we live in. The feudal world has given way to a capitalist-industrial order with premium on time where laidback living is an anachronism. And amid this welter of intense competition – dog-eat-dog syndrome! – it would be facetious of me to valorize that my children’s friendship or the lingering friendship of my younger days would conjure visions of a world-and-time long past. If there are some, still trundling along with the intensity of its younger days and with the same languid silkiness of time-in-hand, go count your blessings. Because, unbeknownst to us, the odds today are stacked against such luxuries.

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Throwback Nostalgia: Ravenshaw College in the 1970s

For us, youngsters, on the cusp of 1970, Ravenshaw was the college we longed to be in. It was a college of more than a hundred years old, and the grand red structure that sat majestically in the heart of Cuttack was the go-to place for higher education. It was a symbol of pride to be a Ravenshavian; fronted by tennis courts and the massive multi-purpose field in the rear, and trimmed by the newest hostels springing up off the field’s semi-circular perimeter, it was a campus that, in the small world of our minds, epitomized the grandeur of the past and the surefire passport to future success.

Apart from the impressive campus that gave us new-timers a few jitters, what was very upsetting for me the first day in the college was the medium of teaching – it was in English and not in my mother tongue Oriya. Sibanath Satpathy spoke in a monotone as he took us through the alley of syllogism in deductive logic. We understood nothing. Far from the deliverance we had thought college would be, we realized it was a leap right off the frying pan into the proverbial leaping fire.

The other classes were no better. But as days became months and a few months trundled by and we got used to our new environs, life seemed to be getting infinitely better. The freedom and independence we so fervently longed for were there at last. There was no compulsion to be in the college – from morning till evening – as in school. Even if we stayed in college there was no compulsion to attend all the classes. We could choose attending lectures!

Some lectures were of no consequence, though they provided ample entertainment. One such was Major Sir’s, always decked at his knocked-off finest: three-piece suit, Brookes Brothers tie, shiny black shoe.

But Major Sir was popular with us students. Doughy-faced and conspicuously displaying a well-fed belly, he was a cult figure for his indefatigable way of sprinkling Oriya in Queen’s English and for his inimitable transmission of nuggets of historical wisdom.

One day he moralized a student. “Bijoyanand, being a NCC cadet you’re coming hali hali!” We burst out laughing at the smidgen of Oriya-English. Major Sir wasn’t amused. He held forth in a plaintiff tone. “You children have learnt nothing. Have you forgotten how foreigners use French, Latin, German in their English? So why can’t we? You youngsters, born after independence, can’t appreciate use of Indian words in English.” We sat stock-still; our heads hung in shame, for our lack of linguistic patriotism.

Major Sir was every inch a nationalist. His lectures were laced with patriotic fervour; his tone/pitch varied as the battles he narrated swayed to the victory/defeat of the autochthonous versus the infidel. “In 1526 there was this big battle called the First Battle of Panipat: Babar vs. Ibrahim Lodi. Babar the Mughal came with generals, officers, soldiers, men, women, elephants, horses, sheep, goat. Ibrahim Lodi, the emperor of Delhi too marched ahead bravely with his able generals, loyal officers, brave soldiers, sturdy men, beautiful women, gigantic elephants, charger horses, innumerable sheep and goats.”

He scanned our faces, gauging if the crescendo he had built had put us in thrall. His right hand now simulated chopping of an onion as the left held onto a chair firmly and in three slices of onomatopoeic “fought, fought, fought!” the battle was made to get over. “They fought, fought, fought! Very deadly was the battle that was fought. Ibrahim Lodi, the brave Indian king, fought, fought, fought but sadly had to succumb to Babar.”

But within days he had the perfect comeback. “Humayun, you know,” he began with a slobbering grin, “was weak in body and mind. He was a weak administrator, a weak conqueror, a weak king, a weak husband, and even a weak father. In short, Humayun tumbled in his administration, he tumbled in his conquests/kingly duties. He even tumbled down the stairs and tumbled, tumbled, and died.” We choked at Major Sir’s carpet-bombing patriotism.

On the other end of the spectrum, stood Altaf Hussain, with his erudition and wit. He was a fabulous teacher. His reputation as a humorist is still remembered – for having conferred the moniker on the Principal. It was ridiculously simple: the first three syllables of his first, middle, and last names as spelt in Oriya were hoicked and juxtaposed to form an acronym in a delicious mix! No, I will not give out the moniker here. But old-timers will know! We never missed his lectures.

But we had plenty redundancies to potter about under the trees close to the Principal’s office or in the college portico (this avant-garde salon followed a pecking order and through an unwritten law was reserved for seniors), which provided a vantage point to espy all ingress and egress to/out of the college and happenings in the multi-hued, multi-coloured, state-of-the-apparel provided by lack of uniform, so much a part of school drudgery. Portico was the entrepot for our empirical study: who studied in the college, the sociology and proclivity of its students (particularly the distaff side that held many diamantinely charming ones who willy nilly forced us to fall in love head over heels with almost all of them at the same time – alas, in our fantasy!), the rural-urban divide, the trouserwallahs vs. the dhotiwallahs, the handsomeness of the boys and the beautifulness of the girls that made up the populace (the teachers, particularly the younger lot, not excepted), the romantic whodunits that were carried on furtively in a conservative world of Cuttack and spoken sotto voce. For the young hearts we were, emitting adolescent pulchritude, chit-chat and gossip were indeed a cottage industry.

When I returned to Ravenshaw in July 1978, this time as a lecturer, I was in cloud nine. For a Ravenshavian, nothing could be more soul-satisfying than returning to his alma mater to teach. Despite the passage of more than three decades when one has bounced around the country working in different climes, I still covet the short stint of a year and a half that I spent in my college – teaching.

I must admit I haven’t set my foot on the college (now University) in the last 28 years. Last time I went there, was perhaps in December 1982 to speak to the post-graduate and graduate honours students in the History department. A month or two before, I had written a fairly long piece titled The Changing Face of Clio in The Statesman Literary Supplement, and Altaf Hussain, then the Professor and Head of History Department, invited me to speak on this subject of Indian historiography. It was a pleasant experience to meet up with my former colleagues and many of my ex-students and travel back in time and exchange ideas with them. I can’t recall why I never went back to my college all these years. Maybe my visits thereafter have been fewer and for far shorter durations.

Notwithstanding this long absence, as I write this piece I’m filled with a sense of nostalgia. How the world has changed! My mind now is in ferment. For all the humongous blessings – liberalization, globalization, cable TV, and internet – of a shrunken virtual world where traffic has become real-time and magical, alas in one fell swoop the prioritization of study has changed. We, youngsters of yore fancied things other-worldly and romantic with no material bounty in sight; our extra-mural readings geared to life’s pleasures where marketplace and market-driven shibboleths, far from being the buzzword, were considered a pariah. The sense of history, of human civilization, of human and humane concerns, of happenings around the nation and the world concerned us more than anything else. Or so it felt; few aspired and quested for supernova material success.

I say this, my voice tinged with a quiet longing. I ask myself, post hoc today: did we value society’s circus of excess that was bridling in its leash? Not exactly, not at least, for us, free spirits. We believed in living life to the fullest, untrammelled by academic demands or familial expectations or society’s hopes. Successes and achievements, hopes and aspirations, were not exactly not something we didn’t wish for – we did; but these attributes of a fulfilled worldview were trumped by an amalgam of adolescent bravado (even grandstanding) and a vague nihilism that was a transmogrified form of Marxism gone bland to dare form different grains and strands to salt one’s real life. The youthful derring-do admitted no faux rationales, no faux- friendships, no petty or delicious bits of hypocrisy. And there wasn’t too the madcap and dizzying array of choices to spoil us.

It is invidious on my part to draw parallel with today’s youth because comparisons are bereft of context. Life is full of little ironies and tiny hubbubs to provide wings to introspect. Alas, the adult college days have well rushed past, punching up the script and architecture that can’t be changed on a later day, when one has seemingly (and arguably!) wised up. But we sure were not amid the nudge-nudge-wink-wink culture announcing its centrestage colonization with a triumphalist statement. Our times were different, our college was different, and our teachers imbued in us precious values we prize even today.

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Frying the Corrupt: A Citizen’s Prayer

Today, as we stand in the cusp of corruption – CWG, AdarshG, 2G – only one thought assails the mind: never perhaps in one’s fallible memory of corruption past has the issue reached its acme as it has today. While corruption has been endemic in our everyday governance and society, the cluster of recent diabolical scams has kicked up enough muck to bring the issue of corruption centrestage.

Like every other year, India continues to languish low in the Corruption Perception Index (CPI). The CPI 2010 of Transparency International places India at 87th place in a comity of nations of 178. With a CPI score of 3.3 against Denmark and New Zealand’s 9.3 (the nations at the top of the table), we should be abashed.

But we aren’t. On the contrary, we are least surprised and fazed that a scam or two keep lurking behind every event or non-event that involves government spending. The reason is not far to seek. Look, this has nothing to do with procedures, rules and processes. They are by and large well-crafted and in place. It is only in the execution by the managers and administrators that fail us. This is where the quality, morals and ethics of these public servants kick in. And this is exactly where the sanguine motivation of these public officials is missing.

People who delude themselves that the public servants aim to serve the nation are living in the ivory tower. Take one from the politico-bureaucrat-businessman nexus – the civil servant. Very few joined the civil service to serve the common man. Most are neither civil nor servants; they are the rulers! They joined to make a decent living, because a civil servant had a high social perch in our feudal mindset and pecking order created by the British Raj, because regardless of one’s pedigree it endowed social respectability and ensured rapid social mobility and sanskritization in the otherwise taut social structure of a government-controlled economy. On top of it, it brought goodies, freebies and largesse – perks of the sinister kinds – in its wake. Not to forget the escalator-paradigm that carried them up and up the totem-pole in their career. Result: their every act is self-regarding, prompted by that primeval instinct of a rational man acting in a self-interested way in a stinking marketplace of governance.

Liberalization and privatization, far from arresting corruption, have unwittingly acted as catalyst for elevating Mammon to a veritable God. Not only financial corruption, it embraces moral and intellectual that subsume nepotism. Multinationals ingratiate themselves to top bureaucrats and politicians with high salary jobs for their progenies; the MNCs, NGOs, and corporate houses with retired bureaucrats on the rolls luxuriate. It has unleashed an environ of material gain and magical empire for Mammon; a madcap consumer paradise of immediate gratification and online delivery, of hot images and cool gadgets, of designer jeans and eugenic genes. The limitless possibilities of cybercracy that has shrunk the world as no other invention has ever had, has had its instant approbation and deleterious effects.

Whither morality you could ask? Does it have a place in the kleptophiliac India we live today? A jog down the memory lane from Kautilya’s Arthashastra to Machiavellian devices through to the Mughul mansabdari system to Warren Hastings’ impeachment to the East Indian Company’s loot and plunders, serves as no emollient for modern India’s egregious departure from conventional morality. Government money be damned because unlike a living entity that grimaces when in pain, the no-one’s impersonal government winces not, makes no such excruciating gestures. When the fence is bent upon eating the crop, whoever can help?

That is all the more reason for the civil society to sensitize itself against corruption and the damage it is causing to the society in general and the individual in particular. I reckon most people would like to live in a corruption-free society where their life is social, easy, uncluttered, and comfortable. If only they knew that the tax they pay is going to be used for their own benefit and that the service they render is not going to be appropriated by one or a few for the personal good of ‘a’ or a ‘small’ number of people, will there be sincere honesty of purpose and action on their part.

The purported scams of 2G, CWG, AdarshG et al that keep tumbling out of the closet with quotidian monotony should act as an exemplar for the common man if only the guilty are punished and meted out exemplary treatment. It is good that the Supreme Court is monitoring the 2G Spectrum scam. It is indeed going to be a test case for all the agencies to learn from this experience as the media keeps up its unrelenting focus on the so-called scams and scandals and the common man waits with bated breath to see the outcome.

More than preaching what civil society wants today is action. These scams are acid tests for India’s morality and perhaps the last chance for establishing the credibility and effectiveness of the many vigilante outfits tasked with the job of investigation. There would be stonewalling and filibustering, lies and more lies peddled to whitewash truth, ingenious and grotesque logic to justify the heinous and defend the indefensible, but at the end if the civil society wills so, truth shall prevail. If indeed the culprits are nailed and fried, deep and long, and handed out their just dessert will it set an example and benchmark a standard that shall hold good for times to come. If it fails and follows the time-worn beaten path of past inquiries and investigations, it would succeed in further entrenching corruption in India’s body politic that shall ring down sinisterly the corridors of Indian democracy.

Up until such time the jury comes home from the outback with its findings, the common man shall nurse a gnawing sense of hurt and neglect – that kleptomania has rendered him hors de combat and an anachronism and an outrage in his own bailiwick called India.

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In The Badlands of Klepto-Society: Wikileaks From Delhi!

With the Wikileaks sending shivers down diplomatic spines all over the world, I have often wondered how the American Embassy would be reporting back to Washington on happenings in India in general, and the kleptocratic society we live in, in particular. Here’s how it most likely would be.

Of the many things immutable in present-day India and amid other uncertainties that beset this benighted country called India, the longevity of the kleptocratic society is fully assured – this, for us, how reassuring is it! Hard to believe but reassuringly and surrealistically true is the fact that there is a mad scramble, so the story goes, among all insurance companies to insure it against a chance occurrence! The insurance shall never have to be redeemed; so cocksure are all Indians about its continuance without a hiccup.

To be fair, there is no dearth of Doubting Thomases who are forever prophesizing finis to this society. Such hopes are nurtured, happily (!), on the quicksand foundation of the sporadic recrudescence of activity displayed by the CBI from time to time and on the so-called hot air unleashed by the CVC in its periodic incantation of honesty. But like quicksand they surprise you with its hollowness; hot airs are hot airs good only for the formation of monsoon clouds. They are quickly forgotten.

As a counterpoint, see the foundations of this society – built on concrete, mortar, and steel! How deep the piled foundations go! The Indian Constitution provides so much security to public servants that anyone not indulging in heroics has to be really ninny! The procedures emanating from rule of law and natural justice make the hero count his blessings. And though they are not enough, the camaraderie all around sponsors quid pro quo! The denizens of this sublime society hail the visible achiever much as they castigate the voiceless, faceless nincompoop! Little wonder the foundations have been rendered earthquake-proof of any rich vicious magnitude (inquiry)!

And see the magnificent super-structure that seems to be forever growing into the sky! Everyday there’s something to the matter, the tall imperial edifice keep ascending to High Heavens as the myopic idealist standing on the ground misses out on the happenings in the rarefied stratospheric environs. The yawn widens further making the moralist hang in midair, in animated suspension, unable to appreciate the higher “reality”. All his ranting refuses to lift off the ground. He’s an anachronism.

See the flip side of this venerable society. Its roots are firm, almost invincible, and they run deep and criss-cross one another. The result: they bind the sub-soil inexorably, making a continental drift defy the time-tested laws of geology! On the surface it meanders much like limestone topography, giving rise to stalagmites, stalactites, and columns assuming shape and size depending on the availability of the stated quantum of precious lime.

In practical terms, they are the bourses encashable in the banks that can’t get illiquid because they have the backing of the rock-hard State apparatus. Who would like to dissolve such an apparatus unless he is bird-brained to do so! The apparatus subsumes all the tricks and rules of the game, all the propitious ground conditions that make a Tehelka possible, the large and petty crimes – CWG, Adarshgate, 2-G Spectrum scams – that make up a marketplace in whose entrepot CBI, CVC and such like other vigilante outfits draw succour and offer plentiful employment.

Paradoxical as it may sound, they subinfeud the system. Trust begets trust and it is the same theory here: carnal in appetite and bacchanalian in spirit. He who’s employed the short-cut clandestine route hogs it as an aphrodisiac. He would make no compromise on that score, for the meritorious path is not so meretricious and saturnalian. He stands to lose here. And they are the vociferous lot who make or mar Indian society.

Given the scams listed above, be convinced that the kleptocratic society is here to stay – for keeps. Mercifully, Klepto-society is proactive, making things happen. It is in the same breath also reactive – quickly playacting the ideal role when certain flagrante delicto is caught out to discomfit its kleptoacts. In such rare cases it pays to look the purist. Because kleptocracy is still not a staid term in the lexicon – even here in India – though the inhered histrionics practiced over years in varied situations and climes come in handy. Every experience counts, rich as it always is.

I must elaborate here to make it less abstract. Klepto-society believes in aggressive marketing. In a way, it has to. Because without this important prop it is liable to slip into disrepute and consequential obsolescence. With shamelessness its leitmotif of existence, the exercise is none too difficult – this exercise of self-promotion with a catholic heart. Where every creature comfort is peddled and provided to the powers-that-be so that the coffin’s shroud is left alone there, not resurrected. The lies and stealth remains embalmed.

A direct outflow of this is that the straitlaced is rubbished with impunity. Because the strait gate enjoins certain decorum and civility and mouthing even the unacceptable does not pass its muster. As a result, the filth and dirt stay hidden. The promotion campaign of the Klepto-society earns its rich dividends.

This is what makes this Republic of Kleptos impregnable. Their servitor manners and bootlicking instincts make them a veritable band of achievers who can pluck the moon for their seniors, if so asked. If the moon is unpluckable, not so their pluck and confidence. They may yet rustle up an ersatz moon from nowhere for the boss to moon over his own diktat. And all this achieved with the same joie de vivre as the one that minister to basal, carnal instincts. They are loud and rambunctious, gaudy and meretricious, opulent and generous – everything that admits of no limit. You come out of such experience in a daze, wondering if the act you’ve seen and enjoyed is real or surreal, imagining if these people of the habitat are not Martian men come calling to earth.

True, an odd hiccup can put pay to such impulses. But such one-offs hardly tarnish the Teflon-image. Public memory here is frightfully short, catalyzed as it is with innumerable scams that show up its putrescent heads to lie embedded in the avalanche of its own siblings. The Teflon-coat stays as lawyers make their killings and promote such august luminaries to other such august perches in this very lifetime.

So worry not; we need to vociferously applaud their goings-on with passionate fervour and declamation much as our President did in his address to the Indian Parliament and make them feel great as an emerged world power – both economic and political. This is the Indian summer of glory! As I write, I can see more of the Indian Neros go to fiddle as the nation now a teardrop in world economy and in complete disarray, slides to invisibility and into a quagmire of its own making.

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When C Equals M + D - A

It’s been incredibly mind-boggling these past few months. The CWG scam, the Adarshgate scam, the 2G Spectrum scam, the Karnataka land scam – the litany is endless; every bit surreal and growing. Lest anyone has any qualms about a humble unelected and unelectable individual like me making bold to touch upon these touch-me-nots, question-me-nots, let me say it upfront that I write this as a citizen and that I have an inalienable right and a bounden duty to do so. So please be disabused, you the eminent sons of this country who flaunt and parade patriotism on your shirt sleeves and on television studios, rolling out spiels of pious homilies to lesser mortals like me!

By any facile definition, corruption is immoral, it is illegal, it is illicit, it is illegitimate; no country has legalized bribery, graft, extortion, pelf, embezzlement, fraud, or nepotism. But peel off the epidermis that masks these abstractions and semantics, and you’ll see that corruption is also a crime of cold immoral calculus. Individuals weigh the benefits/costs of giving and taking bribes. They include moral costs shaped by individual consciences, social values, cultural norms, and ethical standards; they subsume economic calculations including costs of the illegal transactions.

Shorn of morals or attitudes, this is as true of the private sector as the government or the NGOs. Competition is less vulnerable to corruption than monopoly. Clear rules of the game are less susceptible to corruption than systems where discretion is paramount. Systems with accountability are less prone than systems whose lack of transparency readily lends to questionable operations. As Robert Klitgaard, an international expert on the issue of corruption says, “Corruption is more pronounced in systems characterized by the formula C = M + D – A: corruption equals monopoly plus discretion minus accountability.”

Put the three magnum scams through this sieve. The CWG scam stemmed from the monopoly of the Organizing Committee to do what its high priest and his cohorts willed or desired, giving the processes a go by. The discretion was not spelt out; there was simply no accountability. It was banana republic at its worst. The Adarshgate was everything that CWG was – and more. It was a criminal conspiracy, hatched with admirable planning and flawless networking. Discretion became the Dictator and Accountability crushed asunder. The conspiracy threw up its own Monopoly. How else would you expect the high and mighty to hide behind the fig-leaf of Kargil martyrs! It was not only a criminal conspiracy but the greatest shame that could have attended the armed forces. The 2G Spectrum scam was indeed sui generis. The unholy nexus among politicians-bureaucrats-corporates-media was caused by Monopoly with limitless Discretion and no Accountability.

How must we begin? First, promote competition. But willy-nilly there shall be certain monopolies that can’t be wished away – a nation’s natural and electromagnetic resources – and inevitably has to stay with the government. When Monopoly is inevitable, Discretion needs be circumscribed and Accountability total. In the case of 2G spectrum scam, Discretion, far from being carefully delineated, was given the freest and wildest run, and Accountability didn’t exist.

What must we do? As Klitgaard says, “Corruption is a crime of economic calculation. If the probability of being caught is small and the penalty is mild and the pay-off is large relative to the positive incentives facing the government official, then we will tend to find corruption. Fortunately, economic analysis suggests that it is possible to locate areas within an organization where corruption is most likely. A heuristic formula holds: Corruption equals monopoly plus discretion of officials minus accountability.”

Given human nature, there will be the impulse to improve one’s lot in a society that values hedonism – even when it is not legal. This kleptocratic instinct may not hold fast for all but surely for the majority. Consequently, officials will veer towards corruption when the ostensible gain from corrupt means far outstrips the penalty imposed times the probability of being caught times actually punished.

How, then, to limit corruption? It could be broadly two-fold: Institutional mechanism and strong punitive action. The obvious institutional thing is to reduce monopoly to the limit possible, circumscribe discretion and temper it with transparency, and enhance accountability. Hong Kong’s Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) is a kind of super-body against corruption. It combines investigation, prevention, and popular participation – all rolled in one.

The other aspect relates to exemplary punitive action. Klitgaard suggests picking the low-hanging fruits – selecting a type of corruption “where visible progress can be made soon, without too great a cost”. This would help making a statement that rings through the citizens’ psyche – that the corrupt shall not walk away free.

Coupled with this, there is a need to upset the applecart of the pernicious culture of impunity – to disabuse citizen’s mind that has, over time of inactivity against corruption, become jaded and defeatist. Corruption today is not only tolerated but has come to be accepted as a way of life, a modus vivendi that has to be lived with.

This can only happen if the Big Fishes are fried. As a former Hong Kong’s ICAC Commissioner wrote: “An important point we had to keep in mind is the status of people we prosecute. The public tends to measure effectiveness by status! Will they all be small, unimportant people, or will there be amongst them a proportionate number of high-status people? Nothing will kill public confidence quicker than the belief that the anti-corruption effort is directed only at those below a certain level in society.” Italy’s success in its fight against corruption was largely due to frying a top Mafia official, many top business executives, and several important politicians from the ruling party. This would make a splash; big guns have high visibility, and more the frying the more the message conveyed.

The suggestions presuppose ringing in changes by simplifying laws, protocolizing procedures, and making processes transparent. Sadly, what we suffer today in India is not a lack of rules but a surfeit of them, with each caught up in tangles that makes legal interpretations – and consequential adjudicatory processes long-winded and endless – so cumbersome and infuriatingly exasperating that dares even to trivialize the constitutional performance of an august institution of Comptroller and Auditor-General.

The Big Three – CWG scam, the Kargil for Profit Adarshgate scam, the 2G Spectrum scam provide us with material that would make for excellent case studies – much like an articulated skeleton enabling medical students to understand human anatomy – to anatomize and educate the public. Given the outrage, they could be made the cornerstone for cleansing the system. Each one needs to be analyzed threadbare to lay bare how the processes were subverted and suborned and the nation deprived of its resources.

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