I believe we have to fight corruption not merely with laws, but with education, persuasion, instilling the fear of God and the like. But will the fight succeed? I don’t know, but Noonan says it will. He claims that “the nature of bribes is contrary to the nature of human power in its full development.” And he ventures a prediction — “just as slavery was once a way of life and now, has become obsolete and incomprehensible, so the practice of bribery in the form of the exchange of payment for official action will become obsolete.”

True, slavery has become obsolete and incomprehensible. But let us recall how slavery got abolished — the anti slavery amendment in the US Constitution (the thirteenth amendment) provided that slavery should not exist within the United States; and empowered Congress to enforce it by appropriate legislation. It was passed in the very last session of the US Congress after the November 1864 elections, which reduced the Democrat majority in the House from 64 to 35, and the new Republican members who were opposed to the Constitutional Amendment could not take office until March 1865 when the new Congress was to be convened. In his presidential message to the old Congress, Lincoln asked the House to pass the amendment. But it required two more votes to make up the two-thirds majority to enable it to be sent to the state legislatures. President Lincoln then said: “these votes must be procured.” He said — ‘I am President of the United States, clothed with immense power. The abolition of slavery by constitutional provision settles the fate, for all coming time, not only of the millions now in bondage, but unborn millions to come ... a measure of such importance that those two votes must be procured. I leave it to you to determine how it shall be done; but remember that I am President of the United States clothed with great power, and I expect you to procure those votes’. His party understood the significance of his remark. The votes were duly “procured”; the constitutional amendment was passed, and slavery got abolished!

If Lincoln had lived, if the newly elected House had investigated the circumstances of the passage of the thirteenth amendment, it is possible that a price would have been exacted to the detriment of Lincoln’s reputation. But this did not occur, simply because Lincoln was assassinated in March: which overshadowed everything, and sealed the emancipation of the slaves in a way Lincoln’s use of patronage could never have achieved.

I recalled this little bit of legislative history when I saw those noisy scenes on television on July 23, of currency notes being waved about in the House. Shekhar Gupta of the Express said at the time— please take the number of MPs and see how many cross-voted or abstained contrary to the party whip? Would you then say that all members of parliament are corrupt? Is there some hope then for the future of parliamentary democracy? I certainly think so.

Many of us have commented on “sting operations” — but it is time now to tear off the mask of hypocrisy with which public personalities have spoken, of their surprise and dismay at sordid disclosures. It always reminds me of that old R.K. Laxman cartoon where a minister, is shown raising his hands in feigned surprise at a large wad of notes offered to him — and the Common Man tells his friend, “He is merely acting! I think he suspects a hidden video camera somewhere around.”

Let us come down to brass tacks. We all know that the Supreme Court’s majority judgment in Narasimha Rao’s case leaves it to Parliament to adopt punitive action for bribe-taking MPs who accept bargains or cash for votes. And we know that Parliament simply does not have the will to take such action. Let us then move the court in an appropriate case to revisit its impunity decision of 1998. Let’s not wring our hands in despair and do nothing.

The answer as to what a few can do against heavy odds was given fifty years ago by the editor of the Nouvelle Revue Françoise, a Parisian literary journal, who joined the Resistance in 1942, and when asked what one Frenchman could do against the might of the Third Reich, his answer was: “you can squeeze a bee in your hand until it suffocates — it would suffocate after stinging you — that’s precious little, you will say, but if it did not sting you, bees would have become extinct a long time ago”. Let us have more bees to sting the body politic.

The writer is an eminent jurist