India and Corruption

Allow me to digress a bit from the usual stuff on the blog to some serious stuff.

Social networking websites have been flooded with discussions about the latest fad in India – Eradicate corruption. Millions of Indians are extending their support to Anti-corruption stalwarts like Anna Hazare, Arvind Kejriwal and Baba Ramdev. While we may or may or realize, the actual cause of corruption are not ministers or government officials. It is people like you and me – the common man. 

How many times have we thought before bribing a traffic constable for avoiding traffic fines? Does anyone bother to think about corruption when we evade custom duty at airports? Aren’t most of us guilty of bribing government officials for getting our work done? Be it a property deal or getting a passport or a driving license or even getting admission in a school, we are frontrunners when it comes to encouraging corruption. What right do we have to accuse our ministers or government officials of corruption when we ourselves are guilty of committing the same crime? 

The core cause of India’s corruption is that the common man does not find anything wrong with heinous economic crimes like bribery. It has become an integral part of our culture. The common man is so obsessed with himself that he has no time and energy for anything else. All these current movements in support of eradicating corruption are superficial and temporary. Ask the common man to stop bribing the traffic constable or evading property taxes or avoiding sales tax or creating false rent receipts to save income tax – he will faint.

This anti-corruption movement reminds me of the anti-reservation movement that we had some years back when our HRD minister Arjun Singh increased the percentage of caste based reservations in the educational system. The movement was an emotion-driven war of idealism with no long term plan. And we all saw what happened to it – it died down within a short duration of time.

I am not romanticizing our corrupt politicians; they definitely need to be taught a lesson for indulging in corruption and destroying the roots of our country but along with that, it is more important that you and me put efforts to eradicate this cancer that has been plaguing us for decades.

Jai Hind !!!