Straight Talk
Crimes and misdemeanours
EVER since it began, I have often wondered about the wisdom of the anti-corruption campaign as a means to an end. It seems to me pretty clear that the entire point of the anti-corruption drive was two-fold. The primary goal was to fix a broken system. It was to this end that the institutional reforms were undertaken, and institutions such as the ACC, PSC, and the Election Commission were cleaned up and given the manpower, resources, and direction to operate effectively beyond the reach of partisan political interests.
The system is far from fixed, but certainly these institutions and the other organs of the state are today operating far more effectively and efficiently than in the past. There is little doubt that the reforms that have been put in place and the attitudes that have been inculcated have set the stage for government offices to henceforth be able to run in a more accountable, transparent, and effective manner. Whether they will be, and whether the reforms will continue to be implemented, of course, remains an open question.
But there has been second element to the anti-corruption campaign, and, indeed, in terms of resources allocated to it and public attention given to it, it is fair to say that it is this second element that is actually the primary feature of the drive.
This second element is the prosecution and incarceration of senior political figures for corruption engaged in when they held government posts or were otherwise in positions of official or unofficial authority.
Let us call a spade a spade. The purpose of this second element was to attempt to clean up politics and to somehow remove the criminal and corrupt from public life.
Would the anti-corruption drive have worked had it focused merely on the first element and not the second, as others have argued. There is a good argument to be made that institutional reform was actually more crucial than the prosecution of corrupt politicians, and that far more resources and energy should have been expended on the former rather than the latter. And it is also true that in order to effect institutional reform, it is not necessary to go after those who are no longer sitting public officials.
The anti-corruption prosecutions were motivated by a number of factors. The first of these was simple justice: those who have wronged the nation by abusing their power and position deserve to be brought to justice and be held accountable for their crimes. And who can argue with such a sentiment?
However, we all know, that simple justice was never the primary motivating factor here. This was made obvious by the selective nature of the prosecutions and the fact that bureaucrats who were equally culpable for the corruption largely escaped the anti-corruption dragnet.
The primary reason for the prosecutions was to remove the corrupt and the criminal permanently from politics. And this is a worthy goal. As long as the criminal and the corrupt have a strangle-hold over our politics, things will never be fixed. If they were permitted to return to power, to continue to subvert the democratic process with their muscle-power and intimidation, then all the institutional reforms and clean ups of the system would be for naught. After all, a system is only as clean and effective as the men and women who operate it.
So I don't think there is any reason to make any bones about what the anti-corruption campaign has really been about, nor have I ever understood the need for reticence or mendacity as to the true purpose of the campaign. The goal was always to use it as a means to clean up politics.
But what I have always questioned was whether the anti-corruption campaign was the best means to this end.
From the beginning, the anti-corruption drive has been problematic. In the first place, given the extent of corruption, the campaign was always going to be a gargantuan, if not impossible, undertaking. This meant that from the start the prosecutors were forced to selective and discriminatory. In the second place, corruption cases are tough to make, and the ones that the prosecution has been able to make do not necessarily look so serious to the public.
Perhaps it would have been better to have worked a different angle.
In the first place, as debilitating as it has been to the nation, by no means can we blame politicians for all corruption. If meter readers become millionaires, it is hardly the fault of the sitting government. In the second place, there are far worse crimes than corruption, such as the culture of gangsterism that had infected our politics from the national to the local level. It seems to me that the violence that was perpetrated by armed cadres and their sponsors is a far worse offence than corruption and abuse of office.
Certainly tens of thousands of people have been picked up, ostensibly for offences of political gangsterism, extortion, intimidation, and the like. But it does not seem as though any great attempt is being made to systematically prosecute them, and certainly no attempt seems to be being made to hold senior political leaders accountable, through the legal theory of agency, for the crimes of their henchmen.
Instead of corruption, it would have been better to see prosecutions for human rights violations, political killings, beatings, and other forms of naked gangsterism, of which there has been no shortage over the years.
The beating, maiming, and even killing of rival political activists has long been prevalent in this country. Responsibility for these crimes surely resides at the top, in the hands of the MP or senior leader whose cadres beat to death a rival party worker or who extort local businessmen or who grab land or who kidnap young women or otherwise establish a reign of terror in their localities under the sponsorship of their political benefactors.
I don't believe such cases would have been harder to make than corruption cases. And I think that they would have resonated far more with the general public. After all, it is a bit much when you have someone against whom there are credible accusations of murder (if your cadres kill someone at your behest, you are guilty of murder) or mayhem (ditto for fire-bombing rivals' houses and businesses) end up getting a seven year sentence for receiving a couple of crores here or falsifying his wealth statement there. Not all of those who are currently being prosecuted for corruption are guilty of the more serious offences mentioned here, but enough of them are that it would have made a lot of sense to explore this angle.
I still don't understand why we haven't seen such cases in court. They would be easier to prove than corruption cases. The offences involved are far graver. And if the goal is to ensure that corrupt or criminal politicians who have abused power are no longer able to control politics, cases such as these would surely have been a far more effective tool.
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