By Valson Thampu

Modi’s intentions may be good; but they won’t do. Why? Because he is part of the system and he has to work within the system. It is the system that is unclean. You can’t clean dirt with dirt. You can only re-locate dirt and, may be, hide some of it behind bureaus and some, beneath bedsteads.

A news channel is agog with ‘exposing’ an ‘investigative story’. The news is that this joint secretary level babu helped what it calls “the king of loot,” Vijay Mallya, to secure humungous amounts of money from public sector banks.

It is news only for the news channel, not for the common man. Who among us does not know that corruption –especially big-ticket items- cannot happen without active collusion between bandits and bureaucrats? Ask a high school child, she will tell you that corruption thrives only under the umbrella of political patronage. Ask a farmer, who is at the point of committing suicide, he will tell you that democracy has come to be, alas, “a government of the callous, by the cruel, for the corrupt”. Suicide is a final, unambiguous statement.

It is not solely by helping thieves to burgle tax payers’ money via the banking route that the Establishment facilitates robbery. The common man is continually robbed through a variety of modes and ways. The corporates get a lion’s share of our money. It is amazing, for example, that demonetization has been justified on the basis of it having re-capitalized public sector banks. Not a word is said about how these banks became bankrupt.

The government needs to come out with a white paper on the volume of taxpayers’ money that, in the banking mortuary, stays rigor mortised as “Non-Performing Assets” or NPAs and what it proposes to do to recover this booty. Alternately, it needs to make a public confession of its impotence vis-à-vis these gigantic sharks.

The present government is at a huge advantage. Only a small share of this glaring instance of public venality will fall to its lot. It can expose its adversaries. We would expect that, given Modi’s heroic intention of creating a Congress-mukt Bharat (India free of Congress), he will go all out with a full-scale exposure of termites.

There is every reason, however, to fear that this too will go the way the promise to bring back Rs. 90 lakh crores (900 billion) overseas black money has gone, into the black hole of tactical amnesia. The immunity of the corrupt in the system of governance lies in the stranglehold that the corporates exercise over the State. No Prime Minister can afford to defy our corporate kings or incur their displeasure. All heroics and rhetoric stop at this Lakshman rekha (a strict convention or a rule, never to be broken).

The Finance Minister has dealt a token blow to corruption in political funding. The measure proposed, though welcome, is not even a fleabite, given the size and spread of this cancer. The question uppermost in the minds of all concerned citizens is, “What does this government propose to do to sever the umbilical cord of corruption between the corporates and the conmen of the political system and structures of governance?”

What we need is a systemic solution. Targeting individuals who are corrupt –and this tribe is significant in numbers- is good feed for journalism, but will not mitigate the disaster.

A small step in this direction would have been the inception of an empowered Lokayutka. Why is the BJP dragging its feet? What does that indicate?

To think objectively on this issue, it is helpful to look at an episode in the life of Jesus. He comes across a rich tax collector called Zacchaeus. (All tax collectors of that time, like our babus and the rest of the wheeler-dealers now, were rich; given the nature of their work and political patronage by Rome). Till that day Zacchaeus had only one goal: to grab and hoar as much as possible. He was a Mallya. Encountering Jesus, he undergoes a radical change. He proclaims, “Half my wealth I give to the poor…”

Zacchaeus suddenly realizes what we are even today scared to acknowledge. Corruption is, fundamentally, robbery of the poor. The corrupt snatch bread from the poor and the hungry. (That’s why the curse of it endures for generations.) So, even as death due to starvation and farmer’s suicide are reported, the loot stashed in overseas havens continues to swell. In the last count (I am going by Ram Jethmalani here), it stood at 90 lakh crore rupees.

Consider what this means. The total budget outlay in the 2017-2018 budget is 25 lakh crore (250 billion) rupees. What our respected and resourceful bandits have gained for themselves out of our pockets, with zealous political patronage, is nearly four times our current budget. It is nearly six times larger than the total currency in circulation in India.

If this money were to be brought back to India (believe me, we will not get to see it), the demonetization surgical strike on all of us was simply unnecessary. The presumptive gains of this strike are peanuts in comparison. The demonetization surgical strike on corruption serves to unfurl a smoke-screen of heroism in the shadowboxing against corruption, which helps, largely, to divert attention from core issues.

What Modi needs to investigate, if he dares to, are the tens and thousands of manifest instances of disproportionate assets in the case of those who were/are in positions of power.

Only look at their lifestyle. It tells the lurid tale right away. We are pretending that these bloated bodies point to some genetic problems. No, they are bloated with loot. If 58 percent of the national wealth is in the hands of 1 percent of the population, it cannot be magic of the sweat of their brows.

Going by the confession of Zacchaeus, at least half of this is looted from the poor. The poor are the generators of wealth. But they toil in a system that exploits their labor and consigns them to deprivation and degradation.

Our experience, since 1947, proves that corruption cannot be “targeted.” The corrupt may be attacked selectively, depending on the political temperature that prevails. Even if there were a magic bullet for shooting corruption, it would not work; for it is the corrupt who have to shoot. They may shoot; but when they do the poor, not the thieves, will be hit. The corrupt will become smarter, that’s all. We don’t have to look far to see the truth of it.

We need a change of heart at the national level. The corrupt must be socially boycotted. It should be deemed a patriotic duty to despise those who pick the pockets of the poor.

In my last year in office as the Principal of St. Stephen’s, a corporate player with a dubious track-record in the game of cricket in India wanted to showcase himself at an event in the college. He put his agents on the job. A generous amount of money was offered by way of sponsoring the event. The condition was that he would present certificates to the winning participants in a certain event. He wanted to be seen on the stage of St. Stephen’s. I refused entry to that popular plunderer into the campus. I would have insulted the founders of the college and misled the present students by winking at the visibility of this item of venality.

It is dishonest on the part of the media to beat its breast on occasional instances of corruption. What it needs to do is to mount an uncompromising campaign against corruption. But, how will the media do that, now that it is bought up, almost entirely, by those whose interests lie in other directions?

“Clean India” has to be a people’s movement. It should command our resolute participation as the youth of Tamil Nadu did vis-à-vis Jallikattu. We are the victims. Who else, except the victims, would want to change the system under which they groan?

(Valson Thampu is former principal St Stephen’s College, Delhi)