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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