AK's pointless attack on this or that politician must end. They are ALL corrupt. That is an ESSENTIAL requirement of politics in India.

He needs to understand the CAUSES of this corruption (socialism).

Let me cite from BFN:

Big versus Small

I want to change the entire Indian governance system and make it the world’s greatest, ever. That is my goal. But surely that’s a ridiculous goal to have for a mere individual! I must surely have the common sense to realize that this idea of changing the whole system is silly. People have therefore asked me: ‘Shouldn’t we all do the right thing in our lives, do our little bit well, do our duty; and the rest will take care of itself? Why should we think so big when we have so many small things to attend to in our daily lives?’

 

Well, this is it! I’m stopping my banter now, as our journey of discovery has now begun in earnest. I am now going to become all worked up and red-faced while I try to demonstrate to you why, at times, big things must take precedence over the small ones.

 

But just before I do that, let me tell you a little bit about myself, for that will also tell you why I am so disenchanted. My formative beliefs were made through readings in philosophy during school days in the early 1970s. That led me to rationalism and the scientific attitude as the primary means of inquiring into the truth. I was very young at that time, but I concluded that the behaviour of Indira Gandhi and Sanjay Gandhi during the early 1970s wasn’t what we should expect from our leaders. I wasn’t into things like socialism and capitalism, but I knew their behaviour wasn’t right. On observing the state of the nation preceding the Emergency in 1975, I made a painting[i] to depict my sense of concern with continuing poverty in India despite the Garibi Hatao slogan. I was not convinced about the merits of the family planning programme either which led to incursions into people’s personal lives by Sanjay Gandhi.

 

In 1976, after passing out from school, I decided to serve India through the civil service, to which I was recruited in 1982. Unhappy with hordes of officials around me who were corrupt in many ways and also misappropriated money meant for the poor, I developed systems of administration to minimize their opportunities of corruption and diligently investigated the records of projects to confirm that things were being done in the correct manner. I ‘trapped’ individual corrupt officers wherever possible. I caught (and got jailed) one officer in Dhubri district and a ‘revenue’ assistant in Barpeta district for taking bribes. Similarly I pursued cases of corruption against Inspectors of Schools while I was Secretary in the Education Department of Assam.

 

But in all these cases, and in many others too numerous to mention that I came across in my later roles such as Assam’s State Enquiry Officer, corrupt officials – even those caught taking bribes red-handed – were quickly reinstated by their corrupt senior officers at the behest of corrupt political bosses or released by corrupt courts. I later also spent a lot of my energy in trying to prevent corrupt Ministers from misusing public funds. But in each case they triumphed by replacing me with a more malleable officer, or by otherwise by-passing me.

 

In the meantime, I also discovered that the poverty alleviation and education policies in place in India were not delivering their intended results at all. I found subsequently, upon reflection, and after considering extensive academic literature as part of my studies in Australia and USA, that our policies were bad policies to begin with. They could never have succeeded. My reflections were not biased by working in, say, badly governed states alone. I have worked in three states: Haryana, Assam and Meghalaya and travelled extensively to other states, and the same things happen everywhere. And at the National Academy of Administration, where I have taught for a while, one gets an overview of administration from all parts of the country. Nothing I had concluded was repudiated by experiences in any part of India. I was confident that my conclusions were valid and well-founded. They applied to the entire country.

 

Anyway, after 15 years of doing ‘small’ things on a daily basis, I finally had enough of it. My analysis showed that the problem was clearly systemic. I had to stop wasting my time with individual corrupt officers and Ministers who are found below every stone in India. The corruption was being fuelled by ideology which had led to significant misallocation of resources and systemic misgovernance. This fuel had to be choked off, else the fires of corruption would rage endlessly across the country for ever, no matter how many of them I tried to put out. I hope you’ll agree that there is no point in fighting a fire while someone is pouring petrol all over it from behind. The smart thing is to shut the petrol off, first. A doctor doesn’t waste time on fixing each boil or rash separately, but focuses on analysing just one of them through the microscope to find the cause of all of them. Then he treats the underlying factors and banishes the disease. Killing one mosquito at a time won’t fix the problem of malaria. The swamp has to be drained.

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[i] That painting is reproduced on the internet at [http://www.sanjeev.sabhlokcity.com/indira-1975-small.jpg].

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