All for 'chai-paani'

Ever seen the expression on the faces of passengers the moment they see a railway ticket examiner catch someone travelling without a ticket? It has ‘thank-god-it-wasn’t-me’ written all over it.

Why not? We love recounting boastful stories about how we ‘got away’ scot-free, how our ‘baggage was unchecked’, or how nobody ‘asked for our identification’.

Corruption is a crime. Paying a bribe is also one. However, accepting the notion that the bribe is to be paid anyway, only worsens the malaise, since in this instance, acceptance is a sign that society has succumbed to it.

In a mission to fight corruption, in August this year, a non-profit organisation launched a website called ‘I Paid a Bribe’ (www.ipaidabribe.com), which allowed users to anonymously declare and share accounts of when they paid, accepted or declined a bribe. The website, in this way, also claims to track the ‘market price of corruption’.

Awanti Bele, one of the people behind IPaidaBribe, says, “Discussing corruption evokes a familiar pattern of reactions. Most people accept it as inevitable and unavoidable. Many even say that nothing should be done about it; that it’s a form of gift-giving and that at least, the corrupt deliver efficiently. Most people also see corruption as a social trend arising out of an erosion of value systems.”

According to the research by Janaagraha, the organisation which runs the website, there are seven common excuses for accepting and condoning corruption.

1. Corruption is everywhere. 2. Corruption always existed. 3. The concept of corruption is vague and culturally determined. 4. Cleansing will require a whole change in attitudes and values. 5. Corruption is not harmful; it is the grease that moves the economic engine. 6. Nothing can be done if the people at the top are corrupt and corruption is systematic. 7. Don’t worry, with the free market, it will eventually go away.

On Ipaidabribe.com, the most commonly reported instances of payment of bribes are related to any form of registration, police complaint, municipal service, motor vehicles department, and electricity supply.

“There’s an interesting thing about the count of reports and the amounts,” Bele says. “As registration-related bribes are of a high denomination, purely by amount, a registration department will have a larger figure collected as bribes. But the more frequent bribes are given to cops, and these include traffic violations, passport verification, etc.”

Unfortunately, in popular culture or even in real life, there is no Howard Roark-like figure of inspiration. Is there any public figure who is testimony to having resisted corruption throughout his/her lifetime? A jog in memory lane and you’ll be able to recollect only the biggest scamsters in Indian history. Art and culture, both of which have a strong role to play in creating and nurturing a mindset of zero tolerance to corruption, on the contrary, portray the futility of standing up to corruption (unless it’s a Rajnikanth film).

For example, Rang De Basanti, considered a landmark in arousing the conscience of India’s GenNext, depicts three young protagonists being nailed down by the government after they’ve assassinated a corrupt politician.

Dombivli Fast, a cult film amongst Marathi audiences, narrates the story of Madhav Apte, a middle-class professional. He gets so fed up of corruption in day-to-day life that one fine day, annoyed over an extra rupee charged for a bottle of cola, he loses his mind and becomes a vigilante. He goes on to destroy everything corrupt that comes his way, and is eventually killed in a police encounter.
On the other hand, you have Mani Ratnam’s Guru, which celebrates the crony capitalism of one of the country’s biggest business barons as the way to become a billionaire. Some may say Sanjay Dutt’s Munnabhai brought Gandhigiri to the masses, but that was only presented as an alternative way to tackle corruption, it wasn’t a solution.

At the recently held TEDxGateway conference in Mumbai, Wall Street Journal columnist and CEO, Vu Technologies, Devita Saraf championed the ‘art of jugaad’, which, she believes, will differentiate India from the rest of the world in the days to come.

‘Jugaad’, literally translated, means making sense of the chaos and still delivering results. On the topic of corruption, Saraf says, “Greasing a few palms seems like an easy and convenient option for many people. But bribes never stop at one. If you pay the first bribe, be prepared to pay another and yet another.” For starry-eyed entrepreneurs who are looking to make a mark in business, she has a word of advice. “Stay out of a business that requires regular bribes and corruption. Don’t get into a dirty industry and then complain that your hands got soiled.”

Professor Nandini Vaidyanathan, who teaches at several Ivy-league colleges and is an alumnus of the London School of Economics, says, “Bribing is not Hobson’s choice although people would like you to believe that. Corruption is a two-way street, operating under the market economics of demand and supply. If the supply side doesn’t exist, the demand will lose steam.”

She agrees that there is no reason to believe that our politicians should be morally upright and clean, considering the people they seek to serve, are more than keen to jump the queue. “We ourselves invented this hydra-headed monster called corruption and then we kept feeding it. Now that it has overwhelmed us, we’re trying to invent a Ulysses to kill it. But creating a Ulysses has to be an act of conscious volition, not empty noise.”