Life comes with a price tag

As his name implies, Bishop Chrysostom of the Mar Thoma Syrian Church is ‘‘golden tongued’’. There is a whole thick book of his anecdotes that make the reader think and laugh. My favourite is about his visit to a jail where the prisoners were reluctant to open up to the bishop, who was attired in his colourful cassock. Suddenly the bishop enlivened the atmosphere when he told the prisoners, ‘‘Don’t worry, we are all in the same boat. The only difference is that you have been caught while I have not been.’’ The wall of silence collapsed and, thereafter, Chrysostom had a long interaction with the jail inmates. I was reminded of this story when the former governor of Jharkhand, Prabhat Kumar, was forced to resign from the governorship for allegedly hosting parties, the bills of which were picked up by a questionable character who is now in police custody. He reportedly hosted these parties when he was the Cabinet Secretary, the highest post a civil servant can aspire to in this country.

Like the prisoners in the story, the only difference between Kumar and many others is that he has been caught while others have not. If the exacting standards that have been applied to the former governor is applied to many others who throw parties on flimsy grounds, many a reputation will fall like nine pins.

Just a week ago, film star Amitabh Bachchan and the company he keeps these days went to Etawah in UP in several chartered planes for a ‘blood donation camp’. At this camp, the reports said, 110 persons donated blood ‘‘which would be useful for our jawans in case there is a war’’ as Mulayam Singh Yadav piously stated on that occasion. There is no clue as to how many lakhs of rupees were spent on the camp and who paid the bills while a small group I know spent as little as a few hundred rupees to organise a similar camp in Delhi where 170 people donated blood to the Red Cross. The Etawah camp may, of course, be viewed as part of surrogate election campaigning and hence condonable. But politicians and bureaucrats are not alone in this business of partying. In my previous job, I had a journalist colleague who celebrated his birthday, some say his wedding anniversary, every year in grand style. Union Cabinet ministers, chief ministers and senior bureaucrats used to flock to the do in large numbers. If he had not retired a few years ago, his parties would have been the stuff of society columns that metropolitan newspapers carry these days. Needless to say, parties of this kind are invariably symptomatic of the extent of corruption in the country.

To cite one specific case, there is a small office of the Registrar of Cooperative Societies on Delhi’s Parliament Street, adjacent to the police station. The employees may be in humbler circumstances but does anyone have a clue as to the amount of money they rake in on the side? Ask any of the thousands of cooperative housing societies that have come up in the Capital whether their files are cleared without paying huge bribes. The answer would definitely be in the negative, and I have personal experience of this. It was said of Lord Clive of the infamous Battle of Plassey, ‘‘We may safely affirm that no Englishman who started with nothing has ever, in any line of life, created such a fortune at the early age of 34.’’ It would not be inappropriate to say the same about many an employee of the Registrar’s office, although it would be improper to single them out when corruption is so rampant and widespread. What is overlooked is that it is usually the consumer, in this case the flat-owner, who has to pay these Johnnies through the nose.

It was just the other day that two residents of downtown Lajpat Nagar died of heart attack when the bulldozers of the Delhi Municipal Corporation began demolishing those portions of their buildings which were illegal. That reminded me of one early morning when a jeep full of Delhi policemen visited one of my neighbours. It was out of concern for my neighbour’s welfare that I rushed to his house. But it came as a shock when he said there was nothing to worry about as the police had come only to collect some money from him for constructing an additional (illegal) floor. No illegal building ever comes up overnight and it is possible only because some authority at the local level took a bribe when it was being constructed.

Small wonder that corruption has more or less been institutionalised. Companies and institutions no longer pay a ‘bribe’ or ‘speed money’. Instead, they employ consultants who are paid consultancy fees, which is an euphemism for a bribe. No wonder government officials these days insist on the appointment of consultants if one has to deal with them.

As a nation, we woke up to the danger of corruption only when the Dubai-based mastermind of the terrorist attack on the American Center in Kolkata managed to get an Indian passport. It cost him only Rs 500, paid to the right person in the Superintendent of Police’s office in Nawada. The hijackers of the Indian Airlines aircraft from Kathmandu in 1999 were also found to be in possession of passports issued by the Mumbai passport office. Whereas dreaded terrorists have their way, my son failed to get a domicile certificate from the officer concerned in Tis Hazari, despite producing all the certificates, including a certificate of introduction from an IAS officer. Instead, if he had gone through the tout and paid his fee, he would have got the certificate and been saved the bother of visiting his office several times. That is what the more sensible do these days, although according to the penal code, giving a bribe is as much an offence as accepting one.

Now we all know that Enron thrived on corrupt practices and fudged accounts. In the US and in Britain, the spotlight is presently on those who accepted favours from the power major and they include President George W. Bush and Prince Charles. The manner in which Enron’s Dabhol project was pushed through and the way in which it obtained counter-guarantees from the Central government is scandalous. Enron is on record for stating the company had spent Rs 60 crore on ‘‘educating Indians’’. Surely, some bigwigs in the government pocketed this sum as a result of which the Indian state is losing more than Rs 1 crore a day on this ill-fated project.

About 245 years ago, a certain Mir Jafar entered into a deal with Lord Clive for his private benefits. He betrayed the nawab and this marked the beginning of the British rule in this country. Around this time the Dutch equivalent of the East India Company, VOC, which had preceded the British into the Indian waters, was brimming with corrupt practices. Small wonder it did not last long and, on its demise, its logo came to be read as Vergaan onder Corruptie (Perished by Corruption). Let this not happen to our country and society. One Prabhat Kumar does not make an anti-corruption crusade.

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