Corruption is not a partisan issue

In this long season of scandals and scams, repeatedly one has come across the mentality of the two principal political parties, the Indian National Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party, to declare that their party men are less corrupt than the other's. Each party seems to be concerned only with the acts of corruption perpetrated by the other. The message is very clear that corruption per se is not bad, unless it is members of the other party who are indulging in it or, to put it more precisely, have been caught doing that. That is why Sonia Gandhi and her minions in the Congress keep attacking the BJP for its Karnataka chief minister B.S. Yeddyurappa's transgressions of law in land denotification and allotment to his own kin. The lady also claims for her party a better record in dealing with its own and its allies' ministers when they stray from the right path. Similarly, the BJP blasts the Congress for its acts of commission and omission which have given rise to a series of scams in the recent past but sees no wrong in its corruption-infested government in Karnataka. It says that the Congress' record can not be called better than the BJP's merely because it has belatedly moved against a few of a large number of corrupt persons in its and its allies' ranks.

What these two political parties seem to have forgotten is that the nation has come to be completely sick of corruption, it is not concerned whether it is of the Congress origin or BJP. If the two are even a little serious about battling corruption and bringing it under control, they must first learn to view it as such and not through glasses coloured by their respective political prejudices. The people of India have watched their game of blaming each other long enough, now they expect them to act in a decisive way to clean up public life. If they fail to do this quickly enough, the people are quite capable of dumping them both in the garbage bin, in there th etwo parties can continue with their fight and claims that the muck on one's face is a lighter shade of black than on the other's and vice versa.