What were we as a society before we became corrupt?

This year marks the silver jubilee of the Bofors scandal — the first time that we as a nation felt a collective rage over corruption. We were so pissed that we voted Rajiv Gandhi out of power. Much public money has flowed into private coffers since. And today, nobody can say that the country is less corrupt now than it was 25 years ago.

If anything, 2012 has so far yielded a bumper harvest of scams, with Wikipedia listing 38 scams as of May 31 — a new scam every 3.9 days, or 93.6 scams a year.

Of course, we are not sitting back and twiddling our thumbs, no sir. We’ve had a high decibel anti-corruption campaign going for some time now. In fact, you will not find a single Indian who is in favour of corruption. But it makes you wonder: how come then, when every single citizen of India (including Sharad Pawar and P Chidambaram and BS Yeddyurappa and Mukesh Ambani) is against corruption, corruption is so endemic?

Or is it possible that all this breast-beating over corruption is just a smokescreen that prevents people from seeing the real problems — in our society, among us, with every single one of us?
The unstated assumption of the entire anti-corruption discourse is that corruption is some external disease or virus that can be rooted out or destroyed. But what if corruption is the air we breathe, the water we drink, the people we love, the god we worship?

What if our very conscience, our inclination to think, to care, has been infected, and corruption has built its nests in our very cells and tissues and pancreas and medulla oblongata? You can’t very well chop off your medulla oblongata, can you? Obviously, the best you can do is to become conscious of the real state of your medulla oblongata, and how it is affecting your thinking and your behavior and your desires and your fears.

To take another metaphor, if you keep your house dirty, you will get cockroaches. And we all know that, no matter how many times you call pest control, the cockroaches will keep coming back so long as your house is dirty. Besides, it’s not enough even if your own house is clean. If your neighbours keep their homes dirty, or your surrounding environment is unclean, the cockroaches will not go away.

Corruption is the indestructible cockroach that will multiply and multiply so long as our society’s defining values are the moral equivalent of dirt. What then, are our society’s defining values? Simply stated, they are: power, and money as a currency of power. Most people today spend their entire lives chasing either power or money. And so do our elected rulers whose decisions shape our lives.

Some people get the quantum of power/money they need and are content to use it to get what they really want. A vast majority live without the basic minimum power/money required to live a life of dignity and fulfillment. And the tiny minority (in this, I include humans as well as non-human entities like nation-states, corporations and political parties) who monopolise a huge chunk of power/money use it only to accumulate more of power/money. If you did an X-ray of our society today, you’ll see a huge hole in its heart. The medical term for this hole: moral void.

The French philosopher and mathematician Simone Weil defined evil quite simply as ‘the substitution of means for ends.’ Power is a means. To possess power ‘is simply to possess means of action which exceed the very limited force that a single individual has at his disposal,’ notes Weil. But in a society built around a power hierarchy, the seeking of power, expanding it, and retaining it, takes the place of all, and any, ends the power was supposed to be the means of achieving.

We have seen this too many times in history — from the Roman Empire, to the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, and now in India, where the brown-skinned rulers of today have ganged up with the white-skinned ones they replaced, and together they are ranged against the dark-skinned natives across the length and breadth of the country — from Chhattisgarh, to Orissa to Kudankulam, Jaitapur, Mithi Virdi, and wherever you look.

Corruption is the logical culmination of a belief system that says the end justifies the means. Before you know it, you’ve reached a point where the means are all that matters — Weil’s classic definition of evil. So, sitting in a world where profit (a means) is an end in itself, economic growth (a means) is an end, national security (a means) is an end, it is rather naïve to talk of combating corruption without first addressing this reversal of means for ends.
Economic growth, political power and national security are all means to an end, which, let us say, is a just society. But if you read our newspapers, watch our TV channels, and listen to our businessmen and politicians, you don’t get the impression that a just society is on anybody’s agenda. But then, why will the powerful care for justice?

Corruption is simply another name for concentration of power in one or a few individuals either directly or through institutional mechanisms like the state or the corporation.

Therefore, the only way to eliminate corruption is by eliminating concentration of power, such that every person has the same amount of power as everyone else. Is that an impossible utopia? Well, if you believe it is not a value worth striving for, then you might as well go ahead and pay that bribe and get on with your made-to-order anti-corruption campaign.

G Sampath is an independent writer based in Delhi