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| It has not been a pretty sight. Judeo, Jogi, Badal and R S Sharma, not to mention a host of others, including a high court judge, top-rung excise officials, inspectors-general of police...it's a long and growing list. |
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| Ordinary people might sense that, at long last, the crooks are being brought to book. If this is the case "" and we will have to wait for the actual convictions in court "" it is indeed a matter for some guarded rejoicing. As they say in Urdu, deir se aaye, durust aaye. |
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| There is, however, another way of looking at it. This is that corruption has become so blatant and pervasive that some of the rogues are inevitably overplaying their hands. |
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| When, as a consequence, they have been exposed, the government has been left with no choice except to arrest them. |
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| After all, when the circumstantial evidence is as strong as it has been in some of these cases, even the most unresponsive government has to be seen to be doing something. (Bihar, of course, is an exception.) |
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| But if you then take account of the fact that there has not been even one conviction following the to-do over the Jain diaries, and that MPs who took money to vote for Narasimha Rao's government in a no-confidence motion, were allowed by the court to go scot free, the conclusion becomes altogether different. |
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| Even politicians who were found with stacks of cash under their bed have continued to function, uninhibited. So the initial flurry of action is usually a surrogate for final punishment. |
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| And, of course, there is still no conviction in the 16-year-old Bofors case. At the same time, the honest engineer who complained of corruption in the Golden Quadrilateral road project has paid for it with his life. |
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| Until the reforms began in 1991, most people attributed corruption to three causes: shortages, the need to finance elections and excessive discretion vested in public servants. |
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| The dismantling of the licence-quota-permit raj eliminated discretion of one type. Shortages, too, disappeared because the reforms focused on the supply side. But, as it has turned out, discretion was not wholly or even significantly eliminated. |
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| The criminalisation of politics has brought in its wake another set of problems, namely, the co-opting of the police and, in at least one case, a prominent judge. |
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| Thus, while some kinds of corruption have been eliminated (no one has to bribe anyone to get some steel or cement), there is an increase in corruption in many other areas "" as reflected in India's poor rankings on Transparency International's corruption perception index. |
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| Even in cremation grounds, a bribe is extracted for the privilege of buying dry wood from the government stalls and you are not allowed to bring your own! Conversely, of course, there is nothing that a little greasing of the palms will not achieve. |
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| Corruption, in other words, has become an accepted way of life. It is not easy to solve the problem, but the minimum that needs to be ensured is that those who get caught should in fact be booked and then convicted. |
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