Cleaning up Indian politics is a Herculean task, but is doable!

The 2G spectrum scam, Commonwealth Games scam, Adarsh Co-operative Building Society scam, Karnataka land scam, Tamilnadu land scam … ; Indian politicians in cahoots with bureaucrats, corporate houses and sundry others in business, legitimate or illegitimate, have been materialising scam after scam with monotonous regularity. Those in control of the government at the Centre have immensely large resources at their command in comparison to the others ruling in the states, that’s why the scale of scams at the Centre has gone well beyond one lac crore rupees as against the maximum of, say, twenty thousand crore rupees in the states. Otherwise there is no choosing between politicians of various hues and colours, a monstrous majority of politicians, ninety nine per cent according to Baba Ramdev, are corrupt, they have only one mission in life, to make as much money and grab as much land as possible, wantonly and shamelessly misusing their public offices and the trust the people had reposed in them. But the situation may not be allowed to continue like this for ever; the media, the Supreme Court and High Courts and even the ever tolerant Indian public are increasingly finding their voice against the open loot and their combined opposition could raise the price of corruption to an unacceptably high level at least for some of the corrupt.

The question which comes to mind is – how do the controllers, uniformly called high command, of the political parties look at this? It is not a secret that they need massive amounts of money to run the party machine and fight elections and then offerings have to be made to everyone’s personal greed and sense of insecurity. Even then at least some of the top managers in the two principal political parties would be concerned about the “lowliest of the lowly” image of the politicians and would be looking for a way out of the mess. This should be treated as an opportunity by the ethical and law-abiding people, who so far dared not go anywhere near politics and politicians, to join politics in ever growing numbers.

Politics undoubtedly is the most potent means to transform the society and put the nation onto a virtuous cycle of growth and all-round development. If it stinks today, it is because of the dirty politicians having greed as their pole star. It is, therefore, incumbent on the right type of people to enter the pool of politics and push the scum to the periphery. The scum will resist, fight, even try to kill by poisoning the pool but will ultimately yield to a determined adversary having with it the forces of law, ethics and morality.