Formula of honesty

It sounds very exciting just like the prospect of ceasefire does in a strife-torn country. But the question is: can it happen? I ask this question because corruption is not in our flesh, it is in our blood. I also ask this question because corruption is not a matter of choice. Rather it is a state of our mind. It will not be easy to disabuse us of corruption because so much has been already lost in translation.

Of course, we have still got the basics. We know bribery, nepotism, opportunism, falsehood, deception and other obvious things are very wrong. One of the most deplorable things about corruption is that it has the mischievous quality of lingerie. You can see through it, yet the person who wears it is not naked. There is so much corruption around us, the expensive cars, expansive houses, extensive shopping centres, pervasive mobile phones, impulsive foreign trips, and compulsive clothes. It is writ large all over us, yet when we see it we cannot state the obvious.

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Let us say we have bollixed up big time. We have invited the evil to sit in our heart and let it run our lives. How do we get rid of it now that we are tired? Can we drive it out simply by asking it to leave? Can we expect to curb its power simply by screening election candidates? I am not so sure we can heal a deep social wound by pasting it with a Band-Aid.

Instead what we need is much more than that, a kind of purple fury that will be relentless in striking at the evil until it is gone. We need mobilization, a ruthless awakening of our souls which have long lived in the slumber of complicity and acquiescence. We have lived amongst friends, relatives, colleagues and neighbours, knowingly or unknowingly complicit in their questionable fortune. We have condoned their actions by being dinner guests at their homes, taking gifts and favours from them, desperately seeking their company to embellish our own social status and connections.

Many of these people have used their money and popularity to get elected. Perhaps they will do it again and again. How does it help if they are not allowed to seek election? These people will still influence our elections by bankrolling candidates like they used to do in the old days. A culture can not be destroyed by destroying some of its adherents.

In all these years corruption has spread its tentacles. If we carefully look, perhaps all of us have got some kind of link with it. Most of us would find themselves touching corruption through a membrane in their daily life. In careerism and conformity, relationship and restitution, greed and need, favor and fervor, confusion and conviction, we have been tainted by its radiation.

Is not it important to know the symptoms before we eradicate the disease? If corruption is perversion of integrity, it may be equated with dishonesty. So, it is corruption if you tell a lie. It is corruption if you take bribe or use your office to give undue favours to family and friends. It is also corruption if you adopt unfair means in the examinations or use your uncle to get a job. You are corrupt if you evade taxes, break laws, steal from others, or ingratiate with corrupt people to get their favours. It is corruption if you pretend, lie, cheat or harass anyone. Corruption is anything that deviates from the straight line, any elusive turn, however smart, from the long stretch of moral shoreline.

Now political candidacy may be used as a shill, but will it bring the lasting solution? No doubt lot of people who bring money into politics can not explain its source. Still once they get elected, some of them try to maintain at least a facade, looking good to their constituency so that they can get re-elected. What will happen if we stall that process, and keep them out of elections? Corruption proliferates because there is no accountability. How are we going to make them accountable if we tell them to go to hell?

So when we talk about honest and competent candidates, we talk about the end not the means. People who get to that point are already the finished products, the top of the corruption class, who have beat others in the game. But that also brings another question to mind. If we know who they are, why should we just leave it to that? If we have enough evidence to screen them as candidates, why not use that evidence to challenge them in the court?

This is where rebellions fall through the crack. Remember the rebellion of Spartacus? His army of seventy thousand insurgents crushed the best Roman legions and marched through Italy. But they halted and wavered once they arrived within the sight of the sacred walls of Rome. They were paralyzed with fear standing in front of the city of Gods. They retreated without having fought, thus beginning their defeat and martyrdom.

The moral of the story is straightforward and simple. We should not tickle what we can not tackle, and scratch the wound we are not ready to open. In that sense, corruption is like a disease, which does not get well if partially cured. Year after year the government has been allowing black money to become white. Many of our "respectable" people sit on the board of companies owned by rogues. The hot dogs who steal do not get their comeuppance. Intelligent people tell me how some of the most money-grabbing politicians have turned into successful venture capitalists. TV channels, newspapers, garment factories, restaurants, some of the best things in life are gifts from them.

As the saying goes, if all your solutions are hammers, then all your problems are nails. We identify the solution before we identify the problem and that is where corruption perpetuates. It perpetuates in the wind of convenience blowing in the happy land of hypocrisy. In the end, distorted solutions always create distorted problems.

The result is endless scuffle. The leader of the opposition has announced that she would declare her wealth and that of her party MPs, but the government also should do the same. The government will probably say the converse and ask the opposition to go first anyway. Then some of the politicians are going to ask, as they are asking already, that those who are on the Citizens' Group should reveal their wealth before asking others to do the same.

In the scuffle over who should go first, we might miss the train as well. Unless we learn that a contrived formula does not work for honesty, because it does not withstand meddling. It needs decency, conscience and purity of mind, if not fear of next life or shame in this. Honesty does not thrive in pretentious stand just like nothing grows on arid land. So we need to decide if honesty and competence can come together before anything else. There are honest men who are incompetent as there are competent men who are dishonest. Let us find both amongst us and then go after those wicked candidates.

Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a banker.