India: Independence and Corruption

Aug 19, 2011 Editorial

India achieved its independence from Britain on August 15th 1947. Sixty-four years down the road, not many remember what a seminal event that was: not just for Indians but for scores of countries in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean, chafing under the yoke of colonial rule. After almost two hundred years, the British had departed peacefully after an agitation led by the “naked fakir” Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, dubbed a “Mahatma” or “great soul”.
There are those that assert the reasons for the British withdrawal were quite more mundane than the moral ones posed by the satyagraha or “peace force” deployed during the non-violent protests organised by Gandhi. It is said that after its mortal struggle with Germany during WWII, Britain just did not have the power to maintain an Empire. But as one of the first in the modern era that spoke “truth to power”, Gandhi and the India he represented were exemplars of struggle at a higher moral plane.
But time moves on and as India struggled with the messy business of establishing its credentials in the comity of nations and of making independence real for its hundreds of millions, it would seem that it became increasingly difficult to maintain the moral integrity that had presaged its birth. After all, the birth itself had witnessed its physical partitioning into Pakistan and India, accompanied by a million brutal murders. Its first PM Nehru attempted to maintain its moral standing by playing a leading role in charting a “non-aligned” role in world affairs, but this was eventually extinguished.
But it was in its internal development that the gap between the moral promise and the reality has been most striking. For the longest while, India was the poster child of poverty – along with sub-Saharan Africa. But that poverty was not random – it was strikingly correlated with caste: the lowest castes and the outcastes were overwhelmingly the poorest. While there were efforts to rectify the anomaly over the years, the slow development delivered by the economic model adopted by the government stymied those efforts – and its moral standing.
With the dawn of the new millennium, India chose a new economic developmental thrust and very soon, positive results were forthcoming. There were great expectations that with the albatross of poverty removed from the neck of India, it would have recovered its moral bearings. But as the gains of the robust growth rates became manifest, it became obvious that not only had the caste-linked poverty remained entrenched, but the cancer of corruption had metastasized and spread into all levels of society – especially the government.
This cancer was not the garden variety petty bribery and official connivance that characterises most administrations, but corruption at a scale that could only be described as looting of the treasury. Scams in the last few years alone involved billions of dollars siphoned off in the allocation of the 2G spectrum and the construction of stadia for the Commonwealth Games. Corruption in modern India had become the norm – a standing indictment on the promise of moral governance by Gandhi.
While Gandhi’s Congress had lapsed egregiously, the opposition BJP that harkened back to the need for morality in politics unfortunately also became stained. Out of this morass, hope has been raised from an unlikely, but yet traditional source: an individual that unabashedly adopted the simplicity, demeanour and tactics of the Gandhian satyagraha. Anna Hazare is a 73-year- old social activist with a history of fasting in public to protest corruption.
Back in April his fast received so much public support that the government was forced to include him in the drafting of an Ombudsman Bill to go investigate public officials. When the government balked at giving teeth to the legislation, Hazare threatened to fast once again; was denied permission and jailed. The public outcry was such that the government had to reverse itself and Hazare begins his fast today. It seems that in India the moral imperative is still alive.
There is hope then that India might recover its moral compass, and perchance its leadership, in a jaded world.

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