Corruption has come to dominate the media and the public debate in our country as the most important subject of national concern, thanks to the series of scandals and scams which exploded in 2010 and the angry response of the citizens and covering practically the entire spectrum of society in 2011.
The civil society organisations protest was focused on two issues lead by two charismatic leaders. Anna Hazare was following the Gandhian tradition of non violence and stayagragha. He focused on the issue of Lokpal which gripped the attention of the nation, immediately. This was because, Lokpal was the anti corruption agency to check corruption among the politicians and bring them to book. It is widely perceived that the root cause of corruption in our country is politics and politicians. The vicious cycle of corruption starts from them and goes on to include four other players. The five players are, corrupt neta, the babu, the corrupting lala, the corrupt jhola walla [the NGO] ending with the criminal dada. The frustration of the citizen against corruption is due to the fact while at least in the case of the other four players in this vicious cycle, there are anti corruption agencies designed to check them and bring them to book. So far as the political sector is concerned, there is no anti corruption agency. It is true that the politicians can still be brought to book by the judicial system. But the assumption that every person is innocent till he is proved guilty in a court of law and the enormous delays in the judicial system have led to a situation where corruption has become a low risk high profit enterprise. The conviction rate in our criminal courts as pointed out by the leading lawyer, KTS Tulsi is only 6%.
The issue of corruption became a matter of concern as early as in the 1950s when the Mundra scandal emerged as one of the major scandals in the era of Jawaharlal Nehru our first Prime Minister. A Committee under the Chairmanship of K. Santhanam, one of the leaders of the freedom struggle was appointed to suggest measures to check corruption among public servants including the bureaucracy and the ministers The Committee submitted its report in 1962. As recommended by the Committee, for tackling corruption in the bureaucracy of the Government of India, particularly at the high levels of class 1 and 2officers the Central Vigilance Commission was set up in 1964.
The Santhanam Committee also had recommended that there should be another institution called Lokpal which should be empowered to bring the corrupt political leaders to book. Nor surprisingly, the political class was not keen to set up this body. As a result, an exercise has been going on to introduce Bills to set up the Lokpal for the last 42 years. The Lokpal bill has been introduced in different Parliaments for nine times and never has it seen the light of the day.
Therefore, when Anna Hazare led the demand for drafting a Lokpal bill which will be really effective and empowered to check corruption not only from the lowest to highest level in the bureaucracy and also the politicians there was an immediate national response covering the entire spectrum of our society. Thanks to the 24 x 7 News channels and the enormous reach of internet particularly socials networks like Facebook, a strong buzz was created about the Anna Hazare led civil society movement against corruption The 24 x 7 news channels discovered an excellemt and almost in exhaustible ource for boodsting TRP and the resulting profits .
Hazare was joined by another charismatic leader Baba Ramdev, who was a yoga guru in television, with enormous following especially in the Hindi belt. Baba Ramdev focused on another aspect of corruption, namely, the humongous amount of black money stashed away in Swiss bank accounts and places like Cayman Islands St Kitts and so on. His demand was that if this amount could and should be brought back to India by the government of India, immediately. This action will help in boosting the infrastructure and development aspects of our country and will bring about a sea change for national development.
Both the leaders had enormous public appeal and provided a ready forum for the hitherto impotent, frustrated and angry citizens right across the spectrum of society to show their support for their ideas. Anna Hazare launched a fast on 5th April 2011 with a specific demand that his fast will be indefinite and will be broken only if his representatives of his civil society organisation abelled as Team Anna was included in the drafting committee of the Lokpal bill was accepted. The government had already constituted a committee of five ministers to draft the Lokpal and Anna Hazare raised an obvious point that how can some of the ministers who are perceived to be corrupt themselves can draft the Lokpal bill? The response for the fast which was undertaken in the heart of Delhi at Jantar Mantar was tremendous.The government facing the situation on the eve of state level elections in five important states came under he pressures of political compulsion and yielded to the demands of Anna Hazare and associated the Non government organisation collectively known as Team Anna in the drafting committee already set up by the government for the Lokpal.
This is perhaps the first case of participation of a civil society organisation openly in the drafting of a Bill, hitherto an exclusive preserve of the government. Earlier, in the UPA-I when the concept of the diarchy of power between Sonia Gandhi as the leader of the Congress Party and Dr. Manmohan Singh as the head of the government and the official face of the government, was introduced, a bunch of civil society activists were selected by her to form the National Advisory Council headed by her. This became virtually a super cabinet giving policy inputs and shaping even the legislative programme. The Right to Information Act 2005 is a singular achievement of this body. The formation of flagship program like NREGA, the Food Security Bill and the controversial and Communal Violence Bill are the other significant inputs emanating from the NAC.
Officially, under the Constitution, the three pillars of governance are expected to play their role in the governance of the country. The legislature representing the elected representative of the people makes the law, the judiciary interprets the law and the executive consisting of both the permanent bureaucracy and the council of ministers executes the law. The media and the civil society organisations have a limited role so far as the operation of democracy is concerned. The media is the main instrument through which the people can voice their views on different issues. It plays the role of informing educating if necessary shaping the public opinion as well as reporting on the events as they take place. The civil society organisations supplement the democratic system by providing a forum for expression of the views of the citizen and getting relief. It is only through the instruments like the NAC which is closely linked with the power system that the activists had a direct means for shaping and even drafting of legislation as well as defining the contours of various programs. This represents a new horizon of participatory vigilance.
The practice of observing the Vigilance Awareness Week was initiated by the CVC in 2000. 31st October was chosen as the commencement date for the Vigilance Awareness Week, because that was the birthday of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, who represented the best tradition of integrity in Indian politics. He is an inspiring role model. It was Sardar Patel who left a permanent stamp on the Indian system of governance, firstly by the historic achievement of integrating the 600 plus states which were independent after the British paramounts had lapsed in 1947 and secondly by preserving the core of the civil service system by persuading the ICS to continue and setting up the IAS as a successor service to the ICS.
The basic idea behind the CVC in launching a Vigilance Awareness Week was to generally make the entire governmental machinery as well as the public at large aware of the dangers of corruption and the importance of vigilance as an effective instrument to check corruption. In the earlier Vigilance Awareness Weeks during the last decade, the focus had been on issues like preventive vigilance and also highlighting advantages of vigilance in the context of changing global environment. As far as I am aware, this is the first time, a theme like ‘participative vigilance’ has been suggested by CVC for Vigilance Awareness Week .
This suggestion is excellent and timely. As we have seen above, in the last two years, we have seen the whole nation realising that just as war is too important a matter to be left to the generals, corruption and checking it through vigilance are subjects which are too important to be left only to the CVC or the agencies of the government charged with the responsibility of checking corruption in the respective organisations. Hence the need for associating all sections of the government and the society at large in checking corruption.
When any subject becomes a matter for which a particular person or organisat alone is not responsible but everybody is, then it ends up by being nobody’s responsibility. This is what the economists call as the ‘tragedy of the commons’. Checking corruption and vigilance are matters for which there are specialised departments starting with CVC and other anti-corruption organisations police organisations like CBI and so on, why should others also take action?
After all, by merely complaining and highlighting malpractices they may feel that their responsibility is over. This is the week in which we are focusing that checking corruption through vigilance is an issue which concerns not only the CVC or the vigilance officers or the anti corruption departments, but everybody. Just as national security is not only that of the armed forces but that of every citizen is a reality that has been driven home by the wars in the past, the realisation that every citizen has a stake in vigilance has been driven home thanks to the events from 2010-2011.
Nevertheless, while the idea may be good and the concept may be vital, the proof of the pudding is ultimately in the eating. How do we ensure that every citizen participates in ensuring that corruption is checked and controlled?
This issue can be looked at from different angle. The Vigilance Awareness Week, by a stroke of luck has also evolved into a time when some of the public sector undertakings encourage competition amongst schools and other educational institutions with the students focusing attention on the dangers of corruption and the steps that can be taken to check corruption. Perhaps in this year, the focus should be on what they can do to check corruption and thus make participatory vigilance meaningful.
When John Kennedy took over as President of USA way back in 1961, in his inaugural speech, he made the famous statement, ‘Ask not what America can do for you. Ask what you can do for America’. The same question will have to be answered by every Indian citizen when we talk in the context of participatory vigilance. What is it that I can do to check corruption in my country instead of merely saying what somebody else can do to check corruption. At the individual level fortunately, there are adequate resources available for any concerned citizen to play a role in checking corruption. The first of course, is the legal power conferred on every citizen under the Right to Information Act 2005. This helped to bring out in the public many of the processes underlying decisions affecting people at large or in individual cases and it has been rightly observed, transparency or sunshine is the best antidote to prevent malpractices. So increasingly, individual citizens as well as non governmental organisations have been utilising the powers conferred under Right to Information Act to bring out the facts and help in checking corruption. A classic example is the weeklong attention in october2011 that was focused on the Note prepared on 25th March 2011 by the Ministry of Finance, [seen by the Finance Minister] about how the then Finance Minister [who is the current home minister could have avoided the 2G scam, if he had insisted on auction instead of ‘first cum first served’ principle which gave so much opportunity for perpetrating the scam. The 2G drama is still evolving but this became an excellent example of how participatory vigilance by way of using the Right to Information Act can help unravel corrupt action or colourable action leading to corruption in government system.
The second factor that has helped the citizen to practice effectively participatory vigilance is development of technology. The camera telephone is a powerful tool which can make every citizen a citizen journalist. The act of corruption can really be caught on the camera and uploaded in the media like Youtube, so that not only the country and the whole world can know how acts of corruption have taken place. This important tool is also a method for empowering citizen, especially the whistleblower.
This brings us to the other side of participatory vigilance where citizens who are not part of the system, take upon themselves the responsibility of exposing corruption or the media takes extra initiative to expose corruption. How can the whistleblowers be protected? The Whistleblower’s Act is being under consideration for at least a decade and has not yet seen the light of the day, though it has been introduced in the Parliament last August. The key issue is not only the protection of legal rights of the whistleblowers, but also their physical protection. In this context, I think we will have to find out the best practices in other countries and adopt them. There is no point in inviting people to participate in checking corruption and not provide them sufficient safeguards. The tragic case of Satyendra Dubey and Manjunath Shanmugam show that this is an urgent requirement.
The next aspect of participatory vigilance is the role of those who are within the department itself will act as whistleblowers and those who are within the department and have the role of Chief Vigilance Officers. So far as the CVOs are concerned, they always has faced the problem but their posting in the vigilance department may be on a deputation basis and when they go back to their original position, then the senior officers against whom they might have initiated action when they were in vigilance department may take revenge on them. This is a major issue so far as the participatory vigilance is concerned.
I will go to the extent of saying that if we want to give a new meaning to participatory vigilance, we will have to virtually request every honest public servant to act as a fifth columnist in favour of integrity and checking corruption so far as the department is concerned. Those who are within the system know how corruption is practiced and they are the best people to expose corruption. But in that process, they face risk in their career as happened in the case of those who happened to be recruited to the vigilance department .The danger is greater if they are exposed as they have been vigilance officers who detected the corruption case of a senior officer. I have come across cases where in public sector banks the officers who exposed senior people had their career threatened and promotions delayed if not denied. The whistleblowers when it comes will take care of this aspect but we should probably empower the agencies like the CVC to effectively ensure that the promotion aspects of those who are in vigilance are not adversely affected because of the nature of their work. Similar protection will have to be given to those who expose corruption within the department. This is because, in the long run, it is the honest people within the organisation who know how the organisation functions who will be able to check corruption. The problem with others is that they get only a limited view from outside, but an insiders view is really more effective, there is a lot of truth in the saying ‘set a thief to catch a thief’. Because when it comes to thinking the originality comes from the criminal minds. As Oscar Wilde said, ‘the thief is an artist, the policeman is only a critic’.
We can stand back at this moment and look at the larger issue of how corruption in our country can be reduced to a minimum if not totally eliminated, by applying the participatory principle. After all, the level of corruption depends upon three factors. [1] The values and integrity cherished by the individuals. [2], the values of the society and [3], the system. So far as the values cherished by the individuals are concerned, they are shaped by the parents, peers, religion and as Dr. Abdul Kalam is fond of saying, the primary school teacher. Because these people play an important role in influencing an individual’ hierarchy of values .The importance of integrity has to be drilled in this area.
So far as our education system is concerned, thanks to misinterpretation of the concept of secularism, the entire issue of moral or ethical education is neglected in the government schools. It is the schools based on religious inspiration like the Dayananda Anglo Vedic School or Ramakrishna Mission or Christian missionaries like Society of Jesus which teaches values as a part of education. This is an important area where there has to participation from education sector, teachers and parents and students to spread the importance of integrity and checking corruption through out the country. This naturally will be a very long process taking years.
The second one is the set of social values. Social values represent what people do in practice. It has been rightly said that the ethics is what you do when nobody is looking at you. If hypocrisy is common, everybody pays lip service to the values of integrity, but in practice, they relax, we will have the system which we have today.
In fact, my main criticism of the concept of Lokpal which is so hotly debated is that after all the people who are going to man the organisation have to come from the same society. What is the guarantee that they are going to be honest? That brings me to the third important aspect of shaping of values, which is system.
The Bell curve, or the standard distribution curve operates so far as the behaviour of people is concerned, As Lord Krishna pointed out in the Bhagvat Gita, people have different gunas or values. Rajo guna, tamo guna and satva guna. Not even for a moment, a person can act against his own guna. Nahi kashit kshanamapi jathutishtaya karmakrithu, that is what Lord Krishna says. If this is so, to ensure that people behave properly, they will have to design systems that will ensure that the right people occupy the right position. The corrupt system, which we face today in our country,where every sector seems to have been affected , is like a person having a multiple organ failure, In the case of an individual, doctors and specialists can treat the different diseases and then find a cure. So far as governance is concerned, the doctors have to be seen in the form of agencies visualised by the Constitution and the system of governance.
Fortunately, there are ‘doctors’ for treating the issue of governance in our system. The first is the judiciary, the second is the Election Commission, the third is the Comptroller and Auditor General of India and the fourth is the Central Vigilance Commission. But we must ensure that these doctors are also manned by right people. For ensuring that right people occupy this post, we must adopt what I will call the 2T principle. Transparency, so far as the eligibility conditions of the persons are concerned and the second one is the transparency process by which selection is made must have the TINA factor, that means, there is no alternative but to select the right person. Such situation exists today so far as the CVC is concerned, thanks to the two key judgements of Justice Verma in the Vineet Narain case and Justice Kapadia in the PJ Thomas case. As a result today, only a person who has excellent track record of unimpeachable integrity and politically neutral can be selected and having been selected, he will be not tempted for a post retirement sinecure wangling because only one term is provided, there is a lifetime ban on any post retirement office of profit or a constitutional post.
If such a 2T condition can be created for filling every post, at least to begin with, with the four doctors I have mentioned, then we would have taken the first step of bringing changes that will be permanent and which will ensure that participative vigilance become an operational reality. Because, as it is being increasingly realised, it is not one organisation alone that is concerned in shaping of practices and values. The education system affects all of us. The legal systems plays an important role so far as the punishment for violation is concerned and as regards ensuring equity, it is the alertness of the citizen that can check leakage of revenue and misdirection of government resources.
In short, therefore, we are at a critical and important turning point in the life of our nation. The all round crisis we face on the issue of corruption in practically every sector of governance should make us reflect deeply on the concept of participatory vigilance, which is the theme of this years Vigilance Awareness Week and make it a reality.
In achieving this, during this Week, we must exchange our ideas and practise the principle articulated by the immortal call of the Taitreya Upanishad:
Sahana vavathu sahanam bhunarthu sahaviryam karavavahai
Tejasvina mahetha masthu maavidh visha vahai
Om shanthi shanthi shanthi!
Let us come together. Let us enjoy together. Let our intellectual strengths come together. Let us avoid the twin dangers of misunderstanding and hatred. That way lies progress.
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