Corruption and political hypocrisy

Nov 18, 2010

On the 1st day of Winter Session of Parliament JD (U) leader Sharad Yadav got agitated during a discussion on the corruption charges on Telecom Minister A Raja, CWG boss Suresh Kalmadi and Maharashtra Chief Minister Ashok Chahvan.  In the heat of the moment the former Union Minister got so much carried that he made a politically not-so-correct yet candid statement that once being a part of the Union Government he is aware that in India investigating agencies are so much under the clutches of the ruling party that any investigation has absolutely no meaning and corruption & political nepotism remains a way of life.
Though the allegation of Sharad Yadav was meant to target the Congress Party, it actually proved to be a revealing statement on how the respective governments in India have misused the central investigating agencies, and hypocrisy is the only buzz word on the issue. The question here is that whether corruption actually is an issue in India beyond middle class hysteria. Well, your guess could be as good as mine. Had corruption been an issue then the ruling Congress party that has been responsible for institutionalizing it had not been ruling the country uninterrupted for almost three decades since independence.
The fact of the matter is that corruption has never been an issue in India and the governments who have performed even decent on the given parameter of governance (development, social justice or just plain PR) have repeatedly been re-elected even after being declared corrupt by the investigating agencies and the court of law. The political parties that are stalling the parliament year after year seem to have learnt the art of engineering the middle class hysteria over corruption, while they are all hand-in-glove, and collectively determined to laugh their way to banks while plundering the public wealth.
What Sharad Yadav said in the House is only the tip of the iceberg. The malaise runs much deeper in the system. Have not we all seen the then CBI chief Joginder Singh saying in Patna that prima facie there is no case to charge sheet Laloo Yadav in fodder scam and then stating otherwise in Delhi in a matter of few hours? After all, he was only following his boss’ (Prime Minister) order against the wannabe Prime Minster. Did corruption charge desert the massive vote bank of Laloo? There are a number of examples where the corruption and other criminal charges have worked the other way and instead mobilized the gullible voters even further.
With the change of time, corruption has only snowballed into a kind of media trial, with the political parties more interested in engaging the public and engineering vote bank than reaching to a logical conclusion. If that not be the case why are opposition parties today demanding JPC with more members of ruling alliance than a PAC with more opposition members? The fact of the matter is that all they are interested in is a drift of DMK from the ruling alliance and not taking the corruption to its logical end. The ruling UPA alliance is playing equally smart to let the bedlam happen and in due course pass the tide. Public memory, after all, is very short.
Had public memory not been that short, the principal opposition party, BJP would not have gathered morale to raise such a hue and cry over corruption. After all, the track record of their own NDA government has been equally pathetic, filthy and stormy over the issue. The telecom scam is not just confined to the grant of 2G Spectrum; it actually started within the NDA Government. When one of the upright ministers, Jagmohan stood out as whistle blower, he was ungracefully shifted from the ministry and sidelined. Who doesn’t know how Reliance was given license for local loop phone initially and then all the norms subverted to favour the corporate house.
When the corruption scandal had surfaced in the Defence Ministry of the NDA government, did the then Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee showed the kind of leadership that the Manmohan Singh has now shown? The BJP had then gone “On Record” saying that it is the prerogative of the Prime Minister to retain and drop a minister, and he is not bound by the wish of the opposition party. It had led to a new precedent in the history of Indian Parliament when throughout the tenure of the NDA government, the opposition kept the Defence Minister George Fernandes boycotted, and never asked any questions. Of course, the common gullible middle class kept wondering that whether our leaders have stood so low that even the coffins of war martyrs at kargil were not spared.
It is due to the all pervasive political hypocrisy that a political party raises a toast over Adarsh Society Housing Scam in Maharashtra, despite the fact that their own Party President is one of the beneficiaries. How conveniently they forget that one of the Chief Ministers of their own party had shamelessly defended corruption with a couplet, “paisa koi khuda toh nahin lekin khuda ki kasam  khuda se kam bhi nahin” (Money may not be god but god swear is no less than god). May be the poor guy was just following the principles set by his Party President who was caught on camera accepting bribe, not leaving even loose currency of Rs. 10.
The country was not so shocked beyond middle class hysteria yet again. The rest had digested the first time whiff of power that brought the greed out of the holier-than-thou political party. They are any way not alone in becoming a poor Xerox copy of the Congress in terms of corruption. The respective Third Front Governments, often a by-product of disenchantment with the two leading political parties, too have been found lusting for the same booty through means fair and foul. Hence when a leading industrialist blew the whistle of being asked 15 crores for airlines license, nobody was surprised or shocked.
The moot point here is that when every political party has been equally shameless then whom to be blamed. The first blame goes to people like us for being hysterical with selective amnesia. So long we are a party to the political vote engineering in the name of whistle blowing on corruption, the soap opera called “war on corruption” will continue. As concerned citizens of the country our agenda should be to boycott the corrupt, and at the same time deplore those who have double-speak on the subject with a holier-than-thou war cry.

Oh Bihar! My Bihar! I am ashamed of you

July 23, 2010                                                                                                                                            

It is not easy for a blogger/journalist to eat his own words. But there are certain earth shattering moments when you are failed by your convictions; when your optimism falls flat in the wake of harsh realities; and when your role models ditch your trust. The obvious choice is then left between justifying your perception & assumptions to defend your ego and an honest acceptance about error of judgment.
Within a week of my last blog post on “Bihar elections and Barack Obama effect” where I had expressed pride and optimism about the state politics transforming into techno zone and opting for an inclusive dialogue with the common man through social media tools, ruckus in the state assembly has yet again shattered my faith. The world will notice the hooliganism in Bihar Assembly through the prism of collective consciousness about the state and its politics over the years. 
However, a common man from the state and a writer in me hangs his head with shame for being optimistic about the state after a spate of development and seemingly sophistication on various social media sites. “Oh Bihar! My Bihar! I am ashamed of you” is a result of this frustration with the collective failure of the Bihar legislature where all the political parties have been an active participant in turning the elected House into a den of street fighters and goondas.
Had it been the act of a few opposition members in the House, my reaction would not have been that strong. But on July 20, 2010 the entire bunch of elected representatives in the Bihar Assembly seemed to have vowed for callous disregard of every norm of civilized behavior in politics. I had earlier witnessed one such unruly incident in the Uttar Pradesh Assembly in the year 1998. While I still remember my story “Constitutional climax in UP with opposition’s Governor”, I personally feel there was no such compelling politics in Bihar Assembly now to bring democracy to this low.
Though the outrage on the democratic process can not be justified in any given situation, what had happened in Uttar Pradesh had a much larger stake in retrospect. It was the question of survival for Governor Romesh Bhandai himself, Chief Minister Kalyan Singh, coup Chief Minister for nine hours Jagdambika Pal and Mulayam Singh Yadav. I wonder was there any such situation in Bihar at the moment. The drama that continued in the House till next day clearly reflect that it was not even heat-of-the-moment kind of situation.
In Uttar Pradesh the BJP had then taken a moral high ground following the Allahabad High Court intervention. However, the same party in the ruling alliance in Bihar has a lot to answer now since the responsibility for the floor management in the House rests with the ruling alliance. But when your own legislators are part of the fighting hooligans where is the question of any moral high ground? Probably the BJP, being on the other side of the fence in parliament, should have by now learnt the art of floor management with their own conduct. Whenever their MP’s slogan shouting creates ruckus in the parliament the Lok Sabha speaker has time and again adjourned the House to prevent further ignominy to the House. 
The ruling party JD(U) is even bigger a guilty here and adding insult to the injury for the Bihar in general and democratic institutions in particular has been the statement of JD(U) national spokesperson and Rajya Sabha MP, Shivanand Tiwari. In an explicit display of no remorse for the damage done to the state and its democratic institution he defended the act by saying that this has not only happened in other states, but it happens across the world in democratic countries. It seems he is still carrying the baggage of his background with Laloo Yadav in RJD.
Nitish Kumar has over the last around four years quite successfully done the balancing act of turning his critics into admirers. However, he failed to rise on this occasion and came out of the House smiling, just dismissing the whole vandalism as the desperate act of opposition. The young lot of Bihari voters who sees in him dynamism and turnaround capabilities was expecting the Chief Minister to be the first one to condemn the legislators cutting across the party lines. He, however, was busy calculating the whole incident in terms of gains and losses in the forthcoming elections.
The Congress has to do a lot of introspection if they are looking forward to emerge as the first choice of youth in the state under the charisma of Rahul Gandhi. They seem to be making the same mistakes that created the crop of Laloos, Paswans and Nitish in the state. Of course, if a woman legislator was manhandled in the House, it needs to be condemned. But resorting to undemocratic norms and creating histrionics like the one Jyoti Devi displayed, reflects an ill designed method in her madness. There are much better democratic and civilized ways to protest, get noticed and emerge as better Brand Ambassadors of Bihar politics.
Laloo Yadav seems to be living in his own time zone that derailed Bihar from every possible Human Development Index. Crowded by fly-by-night alliances like the LJP of Ramvilas Paswan, he fails to see the larger picture emerging out of the state. It is no longer politics of poverty and deprivation with symbolic empowerment to few that he can continue with. He needs to understand that he has to replicate his performance of Union Railway Ministry and not his previous stint of Chief Ministership where lawlessness ruled the roost.
But the biggest culprit has been the Speaker of the House Uday Narayan Chowdhary for letting this bedlam happen. He failed to protect the integrity of the Chair and instead became a spokesperson of the ruling alliance. His stand that interference by any constitutional body or a statutory body in the functioning of the Assembly, its Public Accounts Committee or any other legislative committee would constitute a breach of privilege of the House, not only sets the Bihar legislature on the course of possible confrontation with the judiciary but also sets a wrong precedent in shielding the guilty and prosecuting future governments in office against scam. 
It is debatable at the moment whether or not the Patna High Court order asking for a CBI enquiry into the alleged bungling of funds to the tune of Rs 11000 crore between 2002 and 2008 amounts to scam. And if it is scam, Rabri Devi led RJD Government has to answer as much as the Nitish Kumar Government. If BJP will have to explain being a coalition partner in Nitish Government, Congress will have to as much explain for its support to RJD Government.
The question here is if the guilty of yet-to-surface scam are all or none, then who is the beneficiary of bedlam in the Bihar Assembly? Has any political party came out with the moral high ground for whatsoever reasons? If the answer is none then what was the high voltage media show all about?
Should we assume that all the political parties were hands-in-glove in diverting the attention of the voters from the real issues? May be all the parties were carrying home the point with their own set of calculations that a House ruckus at this point of time would benefit them.  It is difficult to point out which of the above two assumptions are more dangerous for the civilized Bihar, but the elected representatives have definitely put their electorates head hang in shame who are left with no choice but to so…..”Oh Bihar! My Bihar! I am ashamed of you.