Why India is likely to remain an under-developed democracy

It seems to be a classic attribute of a poor, undeveloped — politically as well as economically — country that the political debate centres round corruption, parties lose elections on corruption charges, opposition parties thrive on levelling corruption charges against those in power. And sometimes it appears that a ruling party has been thrown out of office on corruption charges. India qualifies to be a politically and economically undeveloped country because corruption is the theme song of political debates. There is no meaningful public debate on other important issues.

In its many years in office at the Centre and in states, the Congress was rarely attacked for its policies. It was always targeted for acts of omission and commission with regard to corruption. The emergence of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) was rooted in the central issue of corruption. Anna Hazare and his acolytes who had led the popular movement for Lok Pal had harped on corruption in high places. The main opposition party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), had fought the Congress on the theme of corruption, whether it was the Bofors kickbacks issue against Rajiv Gandhi, or the loss of revenue to the exchequer in the matter of spectrum and coal mine allocations against the Manmohan Singh government. Political parties seem to feel that the only way to win a political battle is to rake up the issue of corruption.

It is tempting to believe that the BJP, VP Singh and other opposition parties won the 1989 Lok Sabha election on the issue of Bofors corruption scandal, and that the Congress was punished for its passive — critics would say cavalier — attitude towards corruption in the 2014 election. But there is really no clinching evidence to take the corruption charges to their logical end. Political parties are not interested in proving a case against the corrupt.

They are content to make a case against the corrupt.

The song of corruption had risen to a new crescendo last week when BJP accused AAP of shielding a corrupt official, Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal’s principal secretary Rajender Kumar, when the chief minister protested loudly and angrily against the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) raid in his office. And the AAP countered saying that Union finance minister Arun Jaitley was responsible for the corruption in the management of the Delhi District Cricket Association (DDCA).

Both the BJP and AAP seem to believe in the potency of corruption charges and they feel it is the most effective way of bringing down the opponent. BJP leaders, including Jaitley, Information Technology and Telecommunication minister Ravi Shankar Prasad and Human Resources Development minister Smriti Irani, are already calling Kumar a ‘corrupt official’ though the case is yet to be proved in a court of law. In turn, AAP is holding Jaitley responsible for the corruption in DDCA.

Neither the BJP nor AAP are defending corruption. Each side is denying the charge of corruption. But, it seems, talks about corruption, which seems to create an intense moral revulsion and indignation among the people, especially the middle classes, act like a tonic, which energises the otherwise passive members of the public to vent their fury. 

It is inevitable that political debate, which is centred on corruption, remains unidimensional and sterile. No party justifies corruption. Everyone is in a denial mode. There are times when the Congress makes a weak attempt to rationalise it, but it has largely given up the attempt and it has taken to denying corruption charges like all others. The BJP and AAP, more than others, seem to be keen to carry forward the anti-corruption crusade against political opponents even after coming into power.

In Tamil Nadu, the corruption war was taken to nasty lengths by the main adversaries — the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) and the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) — in the 1990s. When the AIADMK lost power in the 1996 assembly election, the DMK filed cases of corruption against AIADMK general secretary J Jayalalithaa, and she was sent to prison. When Jayalalithaa returned to power in 2000, she had DMK president M Karunanidhi and his nephew and DMK leader Murasoli Maran arrested on corruption charges. The trend has abated after that.

Something similar was happening in Pakistan, where parties and leaders attacked each other for corruption. When democracy was restored in the wake of the assassination of Zia-ul Haq in Pakistan, Nawaz Sharif of the Pakistan Muslim League and Benazir Bhutto of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), fought pitched battles over corruption. When Sharif came to power, he tried to prosecute Bhutto for corruption. In turn, when she was in office, Bhutto tried to put Sharif in the dock on corruption charges. It is only after the end of the Pervez Musharraf-imposed martial law in 2007, that the PML and the PPP moved away from political vendetta based on the theme of corruption.

The impoverishment of political debate because of the exclusive attention given to the question of corruption should pose grave questions about the stage of political and economic development in any country. It would be naive to argue that corruption is the malaise of developing democracies and that developed democracies have left it behind. Many of the Western democracies, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany and France are faced with corruption scandals time and again. But political debate in those countries are not confined to corruption. 

The situation in other Asian countries is slightly different. China, which is not exactly a democracy, Japan and South Korea, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia are also rocked by corruption scandals. The corrupt are dealt more harshly in China, where many of them — it is mostly the officials and very rarely anyone from the political class — go to the gallows. In other Asian countries, corrupt leaders pay a political price. 

There would be many in India who would argue that it is necessary to adopt the Chinese method. AAP is one of the dedicated opponents of corruption and it would prefer the Chinese option of meting out harsh sentences short of death. 

It will be asserted that once corruption is eliminated, the quality of political debate would improve. It is not a persuasive proposition. The fact is that there is no genuine interest in elevated political debate in the country. India, like many of its Asian counterparts, will remain a democratically undeveloped country though it may scale economic heights like Japan, China and South Korea.