Needed: a 'Bharat Marammat' campaign

In this season of sun, sin and slogans, here is an idea – Bharat Marammat or Repair India. This country is broken and needs ‘Marammat’ as desperately as ‘Nirman’. Building a nation is a noble idea but whatever is built has to be maintained, and whatever is broken has to be repaired. Otherwise, the whole building collapses sooner or later.

Right now, most worryingly, India’s spirit is breaking down. Even the briefest glance at newspapers or the least amount of time spent watching television is enough to make you feel that nothing and no one can be trusted any more. The country is drowning in a dazzling variety of corruption scandals in every sphere. Corruption per se has lost its shock value. We are now more intrigued by the logistics and ingeniousness of the corrupt.

The latest revelations over ‘spot fixing’ in the Indian Premier League (IPL) touch a sensitive nerve. That cricket matches are ‘fixed’ time and again has been known for long. But still, for most of us, this is a heartbreak moment. Call us romantics or incredibly naïve, but when we watch cricketers doing their teams proud on the field, we want to be inspired.

We do not want to believe that what we thought was inspirational is actually part of a make-believe world where more than your bowling, how you wield a towel is pivotal.

Cricket is the national religion. Even those of us who do not fully understand the game pretend to do so because we do not want to be left out of the general mirth and merriment each time a cricket tournament starts. But now we are all broken-hearted.

Harsha Bhogle captured it poignantly in a recent article when he observed that “the sportsman is important but the fan is vital. Every time a ‘fixing’ story emerges, a little bit of the love (for the game) diminishes.”

The list of those whom we no longer trust grows longer every day. The latest crop of reports about the annual sale of medical college seats to the highest bidder have come more or less at the same time as the IPL scandal. So has the report that a CBI sleuth investigating Coalgate allegedly accepted a bribe for a land dispute. There is even a lighter side to this trust deficit. Even  those savouring delicious idlis at Amma’s subsidised canteens in Tamil Nadu have come under a cloud. Guards are being deployed to prevent them from walking away with the plates and spoons at the end of the meal.

Hurtling from a low-trust society to a no-trust society is seriously injurious to the national spirit. Since 2009, a year before Delhi hosted the Commonwealth Games, the main topic of conversation in cafes, buses and metro trains has been how so-and-so has made so much money through a crooked deal. This steady drip-drip of tales of corruption has had a numbing effect. There is now no sense of anger or injury about corruption, among  increasing swathes of people, leave alone any sense of shock. The talk is all about the nuts and bolts of corruption – how a contractor bribed a bureaucrat and then used sand instead of cement.

This cynical acceptance of corruption bludgeons people into thinking and saying that they cannot prosper or even survive by sticking to the straight and narrow path. Clearly it is still not the first choice of the majority of the population, but they are affected by a sense of hopelessness, a feeling that they are being left behind simply because they are not corrupt.

The authorities have had one stock response to the spreading cancer of corruption – they say they are catching the guilty and prosecuting them wherever and whenever the guilty can be found. That is clearly very necessary. But just as clearly, it falls far short if being sufficient. Prosecuting someone for corruption, or even convicting him and putting him/her in jail, has not always deterred those determined to game the system.

What will rebuild the trust that the average Indian can get ahead in life without being corrupt? This is a critical challenge today. India’s body politic needs healing, needs repair, if it is to regain the trust of the citizens. If this is not done, citizens are willing to go the barricades, as we saw last year. It did fizzle out without any Bastille being stormed, but it can easily break out again.

So if jailing alone is not enough, how do you do Bharat Marammat? One important way is to drastically improve public accountability. If communities become more vigilant and demanding, the despair and despondency will diminish. There is a growing body of anecdotal evidence to suggest that when citizens feel empowered, when they unite, and hold a politician or a bureaucrat to account, governance improves, and corruption goes down. People have used the tools they have before them: public interest litigation, the Right to Information, the media, social media, community mobilization.

We need positive examples of such initiatives to hold up to the public eye and battle the overall sense of helpless cynicism that is overtaking the country. We should be playing that up, to challenge the narrative that everybody is corrupt and it is the only way to the top. At a more structural level, India’s Constitution and its amendments do have such day-to-day accountability built in through the establishment of local self-government, whether it is a panchayat or a municipality. But perhaps it is for that very reason that the Central and state governments have kept local self-government bodies impotent.

Bharat and Marammat rhyme. Now it is time to make the two words chime with the pulsating energy of this nation.

The author is a Delhi-based writer.