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ON the day that Anna Hazare went on his ‘fast unto death’ in Delhi this week, I happened to be giving a talk to journalism students at The Indian Express newspaper’s media school. My subject was to examine the deleterious effects of the sudden advent of mass television on print journalism in India.
I told my audience of young Indians in their early twenties that in other countries in the free world television had developed as an instrument of mass communication over a long period and this had given serious newspapers time to come up with a wise and effective survival strategy. They learned that the best way to compete with the immediacy of television news was to resort to more analytical and detailed news reporting.
In India, because satellite channels dropped out of our skies overnight in the early nineties the instant reaction of even serious newspapers was to become superficial in order to compete. So colour supplements filled with tawdry ‘celebrities’ came into being and if this was not bad enough newspapers started taking their news sense from ‘breaking news’ on television.
Dangerously goofy ‘fast’
So it has happened with Hazare’s well meaning but dangerously goofy ‘fast unto death’. He is right when he says that corruption has to be stopped because it has become a cancer that is eating into the soul of India. But, he is quite wrong if he thinks that the solution lies in putting a strong, omnipotent Lokpal (ombudsman) in place with a network of junior ombudsmen under him. All that this will achieve is to create a fresh layer of bureaucracy which will end up working no differently to the bureaucracy we already have. If the man at the top is sincere and efficient, he will ensure that the institution he heads functions well and if he is not, he will merely do what most civil servants in India end up doing: enjoy the perks of high office.
Corruption will carry merrily on unaffected and uncaring. And, the Lokpal’s office will become the haunt of well meaning busybodies who will file all manner of reckless cases that will serve mostly to make the inefficient clerks who man the wheels of governance in the country even more inefficiently. The reason why the Lokpal bill has remained just an idea for more than forty years is because successive prime ministers have observed that ombudsmen in less corrupt, developed countries have ended up not being able to do very much.
In India, with corrupt practices in every nook and corner of government right from high offices in Delhi to low offices in remote villages, the Lokpal will be able to do little more than list complaints. If he is given the policing powers that Hazare and his fellow fasters unto death are demanding, then he could become a serious menace.
Corruption in public life must be reduced if India is to become prosperous and fully developed but the way to reduce it lies in other things. Hazare is only an ex-soldier whose social activism arose from the simple solutions he found in his own village (Ralegan Siddhi) to improve cleanliness, reduce disease and provide better access to water resources. This is a fine achievement by Indian standards, but does not qualify him to understand the intricacies of administrative reform without which there can be no end to corruption.
The Prime Minister promised when he first came to office in 2004 that he would implement administrative reforms on a priority basis. He has done nothing so far.
So we continue to have ministries we do not need manned by armies of clerks, most of whom we do not need either. Since they have too little work to occupy them they spend their time blocking files whenever they can until their palms are suitably greased. They succeed in this evil practice because the rules of government are antiquated and so complicated as to be almost incomprehensible. Some have not been changed since the days of the British Raj.
Above the clerks, who constitute more than ninety per cent of government servants, sit the Burra Sahibs. These gentlemen undergo a form of training that the British invented to keep us natives in check so they learn not to behave like servants of the people of India, but as their masters. Their training should have been changed decades ago but has not been and now a new kind of Burra Sahib has come into being who comes not from Oxford and Cambridge but from provincial universities in small towns. His aim is not to serve the people of India but to get a comfortable job for life. He knows that his job will be safe as long as he serves his political masters and helps them cover up their corrupt practices.
Usually, these days, the kind of people who come into politics are those who have grown up thinking of politics as a family business. Money is so easily available to those who make politics a career that no other job seems worth doing.
Unaccounted money
The day after Hazare started his fast the Mail Today reported that Election Commission (EC) officials had ‘seized Rs.5.11 crore of unaccounted money in a pre-dawn raid in Trichy.’ Since the announcement of assembly elections, more than Rs.25 crore in cash has been picked up by EC officials and this could be not even the tip of the tip of what lies beneath. All of this money ends up in the hands of politicians on account of corrupt practices of one kind or another. Making contributions to political parties legal would help stem the rot but then politicians would be deprived of a vital source of big money so they will not let
this happen.
If Hazare and his fellow travellers had done some research before going on their ‘fasts unto death’ they may have found a more worthy reason than the Lokpal Bill. Even if all their demands are conceded it will make not even the smallest difference to corruption in public life because they are asking for the wrong things. All they will do is end up losing a few kilos and getting a massive amount of publicity unless some bigger ‘breaking news’ happens meanwhile. Then they will be ignored even if they are carted off to hospital and force fed.