The elephant in the room

Many months ago when the cloud of doubt first settled on Rajat Gupta’s handsome head I wrote a meditation on Greed in this column: “[W]hereas the words hubris, a sense of reckless entitlement, insecurity and unaccountability come to mind, we can’t escape rubbing up against that wonderfully biblical concept of Greed. Ah, Greed; part of Christianity’s seven deadly sins, the Gita’s third door to hell, and the Koran and Buddhism’s particular anathema — Greed has been the subject of economists, Hollywood scriptwriters, rock songs and all manner of popular culture,” I wrote, while asking why Rajat ,”for all his corporate success, his access and his recognition in the Big Boys club, became greedy for more?”

But today, as the global poster boy for corporate India faces arrest and trial, I think the time has come to raise that awful question that has been the elephant in our drawing room for years: are we (how do I put it gently?) endemically corrupt as a people ?

Think about it. Some of the world’s biggest scams originate here, our bandwidth for unscrupulousness takes in intricate Byzantine multi-crore schemes as well as the petty potholes-on-the-street-kickback-to-penny-pinching-authority variety.

We know scams, rackets, tricks and cons in all their creative genius (and now, word has it that we even lead the world in the shoplifting stakes), while our heroes, leaders, poster boys and icons all tumble off their pedestals with sickening regularity.

In India misconduct or fraud or wrongdoing has no caste or class barriers, it is common to all, the great unifier, the one truly democratic creed that we all subscribe to.

The holy river that we bathe in to cleanse ourselves of all sins is muddy and filled with garbage, the milk that we drink first thing in the morning is adulterated, the air that we breathe has been mortgaged to polluting industries, we elect people with criminal records to Parliament, our leading film stars have served a sentence in a jail or two and our cities are vast sprawls of vested interests.

What is it in the character of our nation that makes us this way? Last week I read a haunting piece in the New York Times (“Why I Left India (Again)” by Sumedh Mungee). My first response was that perhaps the author was being precious. Every place, each situation has its hypocrisies and contradictions and yes, we do face moral challenges on every street and at every traffic light (should I give the begging urchin money to eat, am I being a sucker — or worse — conned? ) but we address them with as much nobility as we can muster, I thought.

But over the next few days the situations Mungee wrote about came back to haunt me. Especially over Diwali. Especially as great packages of shiny gifts and mithai passed through the corridors of the well-endowed, watched by the perennially wretched.

The thing about Indians and corruption is that I don’t even need to offer empirical evidence to make the point, though Google for any sites on global standards of venality and India almost always leads the pack.

Scholars, philosophers historians can debate why and how we are this way. But as

I watch Rajat Gupta’s great fall from grace the words “we are like this only” come back to haunt me.

Malavika Sangghvi is a Mumbai-based writer
malavikasangghvi@hotmail.com