DailyPost 2783
CORRUPT: MENTALLY, MORALLY, SYSTEMIC?
Corruption is the body politic of this nation. Can you imagine, a political party comes to power on the corruption plank to be replaced by the same party again on the corruption plank. This business case scenario is just to make you realise the morass we are in. The lip service to the anti-corruption crusade is as vocal as it can be and the perfection of the practice of corruption is as robust it can be. Corruption happens to be the biggest talking point more so during election season because it has shown its capability to deliver windfall electoral gains.
Election results can be impacted by the war cry of corruption and anything sold in its name, to the gullible electorate, which are termed are matured by every political party, for their own vested interest. Interests of each of these remain the same. What has changed from the Bofors deal to now? Has our procurement process been transformed to a fair and transparent one; from the biggest procurements to the most miniscule government purchase? Procurements and allotting projects remain at the centre stage of Indian politics and governance. The corpus of money a political executive can dispense, in whichever way, speaks of his power in real terms.
What the CAG had supposedly caught in a professional audit and the fate of that famed case after so many years ended in acquittal, speaks volumes of how our anti-corruption ecosystem operates.* Does the anti-corruption ecosystem in operation is calibrated to feed into corruption? It feeds into it, in the most innovative of ways possible, the variants of it keep coming out in the open day in and day out. Where India Against Corruption has ended up is for all of us to see. What happened then was termed as the biggest and strongest tirade against corruption ever. The agency created to mastermind cleansing the governmental corruption, the Lokpal, borne out this great agitation is barely known today, even years after its creation.
Congenitally flawed at least in operation. Has the influence of corrupt money gone down in elections since the days of Seshan? Does the expenditure limit fixed by ECI work? Is anything checked but at a very flimsy level just for statistics. The total expenditure in a variety of ways defies any and every method of calculation. Who is interested anyway? Some ideas on political funding have come to public knowledge with certainty, in the electoral bonds case, the bonds being declared unconstitutional. Lack of morality at all levels has slowly made corruption systemic and any number of ways and means are deployed to keep it so. Being mentally corrupt makes every sphere termite ridden and makes it a normal activity, accepted by all, at all times. Sometimes isolated dramas are done to prove otherwise for public consumption.
IN THE INDIAN SYSTEM CORRUPTION HAS BEEN PERFECTED AS A HANDY TOOL FOR ALL.
Sanjay Sahay
Have a nice evening.