Educating Nehru about black money

...And other funny tales about graft

A little corruption is good for one’s integrity, a French journalist once told me during Francois Mitterand’s 1988 re-election campaign. It sort of innoculates one against bigger corruption, he said. “This may be true of the French,” I told him, “In India, every little act of corruption, far from innoculating the corrupt, seems only to spur him to ever bigger acts of villainy.” Anyway, the makeshift adage trotted out by the French journalist did not seem to be true even for French politicians and businesses. Corruption scandals were tumbling out from every office bureau in the country. Two or three Paris municipal fathers were in prison. I think a former Mayor, too. Some Ministers had been arraigned on serious corruption charges. So were several provincial political leaders. All sorts of charges were flying around.

At a café near the Le Monde office in Paris, I was regaled with jokes about graft in France. “You know why the steering wheels of French cars are so small?” someone asked. “No,” I said. “Well, that’s because our Ministers have to drive with handcuffs on!”

A loud burst of laughter issued from even those who must have been hearing it for the umpteenth time. Elsewhere, someone said, “You know how much money such-and-such Minister in Paris is said to have made? No? I’ll tell you: enough so he can stand on the pile of banknotes he has amassed to see through the window of his bank in Zurich.”

France was not the only country in Europe so overrun with talk of corruption and illegal foreign accounts of politicos and tycoons. Italy, in some ways, felt worse and the people there were a lot more despondent. Spain and Portugal did not seem in such dire straits but conversation there was not altogether free of mention of corruption either. All talk in Greece and Yugoslavia soon veered to corrupt politicians feathering their nests.

People in Austria and Belgium admitted, even if reluctantly and grudgingly, that there was some corruption in public life, though not to the extent elsewhere. Only the Germans felt their country was, by and large, free from such corruption. The Finns, the Swedes, the Norwegians and the Danish I met at house parties, cafés or at business establishments did not seem to think any significant corruption existed in their countries. Later, I learnt that New Zealand, Canada and Singapore too were in that category.



Every other country suffers from graft to a limited or large extent. That is what Indira Gandhi used to tell us whenever the press, the people or the Parliamentarians howled about it.

I bring up all this because Indians often tend to take these countries as benchmarks when lamenting corruption at home. If we compared ourselves with countries in Africa and Latin America, we would have reason enough to feel rather satisfied with ourselves. But then we do not see ourselves in the same category.

So, corruption is not peculiar to India. Every other country suffers from graft to a limited or large extent. That is what Indira Gandhi used to tell us whenever the press, the people or the Parliamentarians howled about increasing corruption in public life. “There is corruption everywhere,” she would tell the nation. That might not have satisfied the people at large but there was something in the remark that made some people ponder.

Yet, corruption tormented the people so much even then that a spark in Gujarat in 1974 soon led to such a conflagration that she had to eventually put the entire country under Emergency rule when, even on losing a court case, she refused to step down from office. Her refusal was seen throughout the country as an arrogant defiance of public opinion. If she bounced back to power within two years of the failure of the Janata Party coalition, it was only because those who had overthrown her were found to be utterly incapable of running a government. The people obviously chose order, stability, leadership and governance, and soon forgot all the talk of political corruption which had ousted her from office in the first place.

If corruption was high under Mrs Gandhi, it was not invented by her. Allegations of corruption had become rampant long before Independence. Complaints against Ministers and Congress officebearers began reaching Mahatma Gandhi as early as 1937 when the first Congress Ministries were formed in several States after the election of 1936-37. By 1948, ie, within a year of Independence, Gandhi was writing to Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel and Jawaharlal Nehru that corruption had grown so much in some places that people were beginning to murmur that British rule, in this respect, had been better. Soon, the buzz about corruption exploded in major scams such as VK Krishna Menon’s Jeep scandal and the KD Malaviya-Sirajudin oil scandal.

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