“If you can’t deal sternly with corruption, India will break up like the Soviet Union. We should emulate China and hang highly corrupt people openly at the India Gate.”

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By chance, I had eavesdropped into a telecon between Abhijit Bhattacharya (62), formerly chief commissioner of customs and excise, and his friend and heard these words from a rare breed of bureaucrats, an ex-member of the Indian Revenue Service. Having been posted in Delhi, Kolkata, Hyderabad and Mumbai, Bhattacharjee had served in various capacities like undersecretary, Asian Games; private secretary to the minister of information and broadcasting; director of civil aviation; etc. A crusader, known to have never compromised with his conscience, he had stirred a hornet’s nest when he impounded several aircrafts imported by some of the biggest corporate bigwigs as gifts to their spouses, very close relatives. For false declaration about the use of those aircraft and in importing the aircraft at a cost to the national exchequer, he had clamped a whopping customs duty, ignoring pressures from influential quarters.

Bhattacharjee belonged to the microscopic number of high-officials who sent shivers down the spine of ministers and senior IAS officers, who today thrive on corruption. Incidentally, he has filed his nomination as an independent candidate from Bhowanipur constituency in Kolkata in the assembly polls. He will definitely lose his deposit money of Rs10,000 for failing to garner the minimum number of votes needed to get the deposit back. But his lifestyle is impressive. With a rented house in New Delhi, owns two motorbikes, and a flat at Salt Lake in Kolkata, he keeps his chin up. His candidature is a symbolic protest against the fast-polluting body politic which mocks the polity of our democracy — handed down by the freedom struggle.

Even the CPI(M) and the CPI have given up their principled opposition to corruption and nepotism for petty electoral gains, clinging to the coattails of either J Jayalalithaa or M Karunanidhi, befriending either Mulayam Singh Yadav or Om Prakash Chautala.

Trinamool Congress supremo Mamata Banerjee is no different. She may be personally honest but she has struck questionable compromises with dubious elements. She has given a ticket to a former top bureaucrat of the Left Front government, who belonged to the coterie that ruled the roost from the then chief minister Jyoti Basu’s secretariat since the mid-1980s. She protected an income-tax officer who was known to run a real estate business and who “brokered the transfers and postings of IAS-IPS officers in the state”. All this is recorded in a 3,000-plus page inquiry report, as was revealed by a former IRS officer.

Still Mamata is way above Jayalalithaa or Mayawati. That is why civil society looks forward to her as the next CM of Bengal, with a clean administration alongside a milieu where dissent will not be trampled upon.

The writer is a veteran journalist & commentator, specialising in Left politics and environment