Column

Questions of corruption and scams in high places have come to define the UPA government. It is often argued that corruption is a part of human nature; therefore, as long as human societies exist, there is no escape from corruption. However, such historical attributions are mostly advanced as justification, if not actual abetment and perpetration. That apart, it is necessary to understand the dynamics of corruption and evolve an appropriate response to stop public money moving away from the wellbeing of our people to the coffers of the high and mighty.

Corruption in India is structural and systemic. A prognosis of the scams establishes that they emerge from the overwhelming and disproportionate role that big corporates, both Indian and domestic, play in accessing, owning, and controlling the nation’s natural and community assets to the detriment of our people.

The contentious issue in the high-profile scams has been the price at which natural assets — spectrum, minerals, petroleum and gas reserves, and prime urban and rich agricultural land — were made available to powerful corporates, leading to huge losses for the public exchequer and the people. This is not to discount the debilitating effect that such transfers engender in terms of safety and security (possible hazardous affects of nuclear plants), sustainability, and food security in the case of agricultural land, and so forth.

In order to facilitate the transfer of ownership or its functional variants like lease rights, operational license, PPP route, etc, the hitherto existing constitutional and legal provisions are contravened and regulatory mechanisms breached. It is here that the government – politicians and bureaucrats at the helm of decision-making – play havoc. Obviously, such ‘cooperation’ with the corporates is ensured for material consideration. This is the basis for corruption and scams.

It is not only a moral issue but has ramifications for the economy and the people. The paradigm of neo-liberal globalisation enjoins an ideological veil for the nation-state, which puts up the specious argument that in this current phase of economic reforms, the State must withdraw and allow market forces to play out without any inhibition. This is a pretentious positioning. Without the State taking active steps, such unshackling of the market forces, often a euphemism for big corporates, the objectives pursued by a neo-liberal paradigm cannot be achieved. And therein lies the question of complicity and corruption in the various scams.

In order to obfuscate this dynamic, it becomes imperative to insulate such a course from public attention and intervention. This has been the defining aspect of the neo-liberal discourse: to undermine the role of political parties and, more importantly, elected representatives. A substitution of intervention of elected representatives by ‘experts’, often of a dubious Fund-Bank lineage, has been preferred. This has now been taken a step further by bringing in the concept of civil society intervention. Not that the civil society should be denied a rightful space in the public discourse. But that should be more in the way of informing and sensitising the people and as a countervailing force against government unilateralism. It cannot hijack the parliamentary process and the independence of the legislature, which are the major bulwark to enforce accountability of the executive.

Unfortunately, this is precisely what is happening. Stung by charges of corruption and scams centring on the handing over of natural assets and faced with growing demand for reform of the processes and institutions to plug corruption, the government has embarked on engagement with several variants of civil society. At times, it has been with Baba Ramdev and, at times, with ‘Team Anna’. The government has worked overtime to undermine the role of the political process and elected representatives.

And, painful as it may sound, civil society groups have also painted the entire political process as corrupt and irrelevant. Even more painfully, these groups have remained conspicuously silent on the role of powerful private corporates, who have been a major player and beneficiary of these scams.

It is time to fight this obnoxious process. People have to rise in revolt. Not just an effective Lokpal, we need a National Judicial Commission, an effective electoral reform in ensuring State funding, and transparent and credible steps to break the corporate-politician-bureaucrat nexus and stop the generation and interplay of black money. This is an agenda that can morally cleanse India and stem the negative transfer of resources from the aam admi. This is an imperative for our present and for the future.

The writer is a member of the central committee, CPI(M)