Corruption absolved

Corruption absolved

In a sense, Sukh Ram had been absolved long before the Delhi High Court quashed a lower court order framing charges of criminal conspiracy and corrupt practices against him in the 1996 telecom scam case on Tuesday. The former Union minister of state for communications had been exonerated by the people's court in Himachal Pradesh when they elected him MLA; his fledgling party was then wooed by the BJP to shore up the numbers to form thegovernment in the state. This despite the corruption cases registered against him in the court of law. It was in spite of the fact that with currency notes spilling out in wanton abandon from nooks and crannies of his home in full media view, Sukh Ram's is a name that has passed into the contemporary folk lore of corruption.

It is not just the people of Himachal Pradesh who have demonstrated that corruption is not `the' issue with them. Time and again, this has been reiterated by the electorate in many states. Witness Tamil Nadu's Puratchi Thalaivi's remarkable survivability despite the slew of corruption cases against her. Now, after having been convicted in two cases, there is still very little evidence to suggest that these convictions will work against either Jayalalitha, should she contest, or her party, in any decisive manner. It has been suggested, on the contrary, that the issue may even boomerang, earning sympathy and votes for the tainted leader, if the DMK were to press it too far. By all accounts, Laloo Prasad Yadav's vote bank in Bihar has also withstood the fodder scam and all its reverberations. With Yadav adroitly using the charges against him to paint himself as a martyr, he has probably even profited from it. Corruption, it is evident, is no more an issue that could overly dent a political fortune. To a largeextent, this is because the system comes to the rescue of the individual. The entire system is perceived to be so infected by this malaise that many see it as a travesty to single out an individual for punishment, no matter how deserving he or she may be of it. If corruption is everywhere, if the giving and receiving of bribes to get work done or to get it expedited has become an inescapable quotidian experience, goes the argument, why make a Jayalalitha the scapegoat? Then there are those like the Left parties who propagate and purvey a hierarchy of vices. In this book, corruption occupies a lowly rung of the ladder, much lower than communalism. So it is that while the BJP is an untouchable, a scam-tainted Laloo or Jayalalitha is not, and an ally in fact, in the secular crusade.

The problem is that using our tolerance as cover, corruption continues to grow. It feeds and fattens upon the pervasive acceptance of it, and the widespread cynicism. It is this that is reflected also in the many half-hearted and outrightly cosmetic attempts to combat it -- be it the grandstanding of political parties or the CVC's blacklist on the Net. The bottomline is that until the voter is able to retrieve her indignation, until the electorate demands a break from the past, and decrees that the moment to do it is now, the corrupt will continue to walk free, irrespective of the verdict by the court of law.