The Culture of Four Positives

Asked recently what was the reason India was still a developing country after nearly 72 years of independence and obvious progress in some fields, an elderly gentleman, who had been a member of an all-India service for all but the first two of the Indian republic's first forty years, replied that our DNA was defective. Well, the fault does not lie in our DNA but in the culture we have developed and have adopted over the last couple of centuries. Barring for some honourable exceptions, it is a culture of dishonesty, self-delusion, indiscipline, irresponsibility, and under-performance. If India is to really do justice to the talent of a billion plus Indians and the opportunities they are having, the present negative culture will have to be replaced by the culture of four positives - Honesty, Excellence, Law-abidingness, and Responsibility. What follows is an explanation, in some detail, of each of these four positives.

#1  Honesty

Honesty here is an all-encompassing term for honesty of purpose, truthfulness, transparency, fairness, sense of justice, intellectual integrity, courage of conviction, pecuniary honesty, accuracy, walking the talk, delivery as per promise, and, above all, being honest to oneself. Why honesty is much more than an ethical and moral nicety and being of immense practical value is absolutely essential for nation-building can be seen in the following.

Research, including scientific, is basically a pursuit of truth and thrives in an atmosphere of honesty where results even if negating the very hypothesis originally sought to be proved are valued. That is how science progresses, inventions and innovations are made possible.

Trust is built on honesty and competence. For the same level of competence, higher honesty gives rise to higher trust; and in a high trust society, transaction costs are less, which results in faster economic progress.

If we are at point A and are honest about it, only then we can correctly chart out our journey to point B, the destination. Any self-delusion about the starting point or the destination will make the journey unsuccessful. Hence, the importance of honest measurements!

#2  Excellence

Excellence, which literally is excelling yourself in some desirable activity of mind or body, goes much beyond competence. In fact, our take on the excellence vs. competence debate is - While competence helps you keep your customers, excellence delights them. For the more mathematically inclined, competence is necessary for excellence but not sufficient. However, for our purpose, we will also commend excellence as a blanket term for punctuality (yes, that's how this all has to begin), high quality, willingness and capacity to keep on learning, continuous improvement, doing it right the first time (it goes by the counter-intuitive acronym DRIFT), challenging others and accepting challenges ourselves in pushing the envelope, using best practices as a launching pad for inventing next practices, and making success a habit and building upon it. Excellence is its own reward, it gives us a sense of real achievement, also that of pride which provides intrinsic motivation for striving for bigger successes, even for reaching out for the stars.

We all have spent many years in academic institutions as students and many of us, if we were fortunate, would have had some teachers who not only were very well-equipped academically but they also helped us discover and nourished our spirit of enquiry, our sense of wonderment, and launched us on a long journey of seeking knowledge. They were excellent teachers!

#3  Law-abidingness

In a law-abiding society, one in which the rule of law prevails Lord Denning's immortal words "Be you ever so high, the law is above you" ring true. There, the perceived inconvenience or harshness of laws is not an acceptable plea for not obeying them; so long as they are there, they have to be obeyed. There is, however, a due process through which unnecessary or outdated laws can be amended or abrogated altogether.

The notion that the law puts fetters on us is clearly wrong. In fact, following the law in its letter and spirit liberates us. Most of the creative work in arts and sciences has been done in nations where people, by and large, abide by the law. Many of our young people who were considered mediocre in India start flourishing when they emigrate to the West or even Singapore, which are generally law-abiding societies.

#4  Responsibility

Responsibility is going above and beyond the call of duty to do something for others on one's own initiative, not needing any supervision. A sense of virtual ownership gives rise to it. Since feeling responsible is voluntary, RESPONSIBILITY IS ONLY THEIRS WHO BELIEVE IT IS THEIRS. No one else can make you feel responsible, of course, they can hold you accountable for your acts of commission and omission.

Someone assuming responsibility of their friends will always help them in taking the right path, the one feeling responsible for the environment will help keep the surroundings clean, minimise air pollution, prevent and stop abuse and wastage of water, and propagate the philosophy of reduce, reuse, and recycle. An individual or a small group can assume the responsibility of the entire society or even nation.

For real personal growth, it is essential to assume responsibility of our own life, that is truly believing that all our successes and failures have their seeds in our own actions.

In mourning on Yeshwant Sonawane's gruesome killing

This 61st anniversary of the Indian republic I am ashamed to call myself an Indian because in today's India confirmed criminals and scamsters not only go scot-free, they can also continue to be ministers at the Centre or in the States, but honest officers like the Maharashtra Additional Collector Yeshwant Sonawane are burnt alive for daring to catch mafia red-handed. I refuse to believe that it was only that vermin Popat Shinde and his goons who murdered Sonawane in broad daylight, equally or perhaps more guilty of the egregious crime were their protectors among the state's most corrupt politicians and bureaucracy.

The minimum that the chief minister Prithviraj Chavan can do is to prosecute the ten criminilas responsible for the murder, who have been arrested, and have them tried in a fast-track court; before the people could forget this case all the murderers should be handed adequate sentences. Chavan should also get to the root of the problem and expose and punish all whose patronage had given the confidence to Popat Shinde and others that they could cause the ultimate harm to a senior officer of the government and be none the worse for it.

What shall we not do for a real alternative!

The Congress party's Kapil Sibal trashed and ridiculed the report by the Comptroller and Auditor-General on the telecom 2G spectrum scam, in the process giving almost a clean chit to his infamous predecessor A. Raja. Another Congressman H.R. Bharadwaj took next to no time in giving permission as the Karnataka governor to prosecute the chief minister B.S. Yeddyurappa for corruption; his alacrity standing in sharp contrast to Manmohan Singh having sat for two years on Subramaniam Swamy's request for permission to prosecute A. Raja. Then we have the principal opposition Bharatiya Jananta Party deciding on unfurling the tricolour at Srinagar's Lal Chowk on the next Republic Day after a gap of nineteen years. It obviously thinks that it must put up its ultra-nationalistic foot forward to counter charges of terrorist activities against some Hindu fanatists, particularly after the confession of Aseemanand. That its ill-advised move would again destabilise the Kashmir Valley which had four months of peace and tranquility after having been on the boil for three months from June last year, is of no concern to the BJP leadership.

How we wish we had a real alternative to the Congress and BJP! What we need is a political party committed to combating corruption and establishing the rule of law in our country.

Lesson from Tunisia

Last week Tunisia’s dictator for twenty three years Zine el Abidine ben Ali was forced to flee the country and seek shelter in the Saudi Arabia. This was after a month of public protest and demonstrations against his misrule and some worst forms of corruption by him and his close relatives. The shock waves of his ignominious dethronement and escapade have been felt in the other Arab capitals including Cairo. Presidents of several Arab countries officially elected for life are feeling discomfited at the fate of ben Ali and quite naturally so.

In India too the central government would be experiencing some discomfort due to the Tunisian development. If a tightly controlled society can show that kind of determined opposition to the extremely corrupt ways of their government, Indian society with its freedom of speech can do a little better – that is the fear which should now be haunting the leaders of our government. If only fifty thousand people, which is only one third of one per cent of Delhi’s population, surround the Parliament complex for days and weeks demanding that the Central government demonstrably moved effectively against the corrupt politicians and bureaucrats or resigned forthwith, the things can change for the better.

Walk your talk, BJP!

The Bharatiya Janata Party has not been missing any opportunity to condemn the United Progressive Alliance 1.0 and 2.0 governments, headed by its arch adversary the Indian National Congress, for being the most corrupt central governments from the time of the independence on the 15th August 1947. In the Guwahati rally the BJP has declared that it would fight the next general election on an anti-corruption plank. If it perseveres in its attack on the top leadership of the Congress party for being a silent spectator, if not a willing accomplice, when the public exchequer was being raided and robbed of Rs.2.25 lac crore or US$50 billion in just two scams, 2G spectrum and Commonwealth games, the Congress will have to ensure that the central government remained on its best and most honest behaviour for the remaining three years and four months of the five year term. In that the BJP will definitely be doing a service to the people of India.

But the BJP's call for probity in public life has a tone of hollowness around it. Mahatma Gandhi's life, as he had said, was his message. The BJP's life, on the contrary, is very different from its message. To be able to climb to the moral high ground and remain there, the BJP will have to come clean at least on its government in Karnataka which is headed by B.S. Yeddyurappa, whose actions in denotifying state land and allotting it to his own kin have been called immoral, yet not illegal, by the party chief Nitin Gadkari himself, and which includes the infamous Reddy brothers as ministers whose illegal mining activity has earned opprobrium from the Supreme Court appointed Central Empowered Committee.

If the BJP decides to jettison Yeddyurappa and the Reddy brothers, as it must, its government in the state will fall and its national coffers will also suffer because the largesse from the Reddys will be lost for ever. But that will be a small price to pay for establishing its credibility in the eyes of the Indian masses, which act, in the ultimate analysis, is going to be the difference between the winner and the also ran.

Kalmadi's tribe will be thanking Sepp Blatter

The FIFA president Sepp Blatter has recently said that India should be in a position to hold the 2026 football world cup. Coming from him it is a surprisingly big endorsement for the Indian football which occupies a shameful 145th rank on the basis of the national team's performance in whatever low quality international tournament it gets to play in.

Organising the football world cup, in which in all 64 matches are played over a month by 32 teams, is only a tad less involved an exercise than the summer Olympics. It will require at least a dozen world class stadia seating 40,000 to 150,000 in seven-eight cities for matches and 40 to 50 grounds for teams' practice. About 800 players and 5,000 officials, 10,000 press and television people and a couple of hundreds of thousands of spectators from different countries will be trouping down to India for the huge spectacle. Roads, metro rails and other urban infrastructure on modern lines will have to be provided in all seven-eight cities unlike the 2010 Commonwealth Games which were hosted by just one, Delhi. Another major difference from the CWG would be in the number of spectators from abroad; while it was zilch for CWG, for the world cup it would be at least 200,000. Over all, on organising the 2026 football world cup the country would be spending at least US$50 billion or Rs.2.25 lac crore, i.e. about Rs.50,000 crore more than the revenue loss in the telecom 2G spectrum scam, at 2010 prices.

So, rest assured that the government of India would jump with utmost alacrity at Sepp Blatter's suggestion and prepare itself to make the bid for the 2026 world cup when the time comes for that. After all, the successors of Kalmadi, Sheila Dikshit, M.S. Gill and Jaipal Reddy should also get a chance to get their names written in golden letters in history books.

Kapil Sibal can only confuse his own party

In trashing the CAG report on the telecom 2G spectrum scam particularly its estimate of the revenue loss to the exchequer of the order of Rs.1.76 lac crore or US$39 billion on account of iniquitous and arbitrary allotment of the telecom spectrum and issue of the UAS licences by the then Union telecom minister A. Raja, the present telecom minister Kapil Sibal has only complicated the matters. There is an inconvenient fact that he seems to have overlooked that here he is not dealing with the opposition for whom the usually combative lawyer minister has nothing but the utmost contempt but with the Comptroller and Auditor-General of India, a Constitutional authority charged with auditing the accounts of various wings of the government and point out where proper accounting norms have not been followed and where money has been unwisely spent or unwisely not earned. By laying into the report and dismissing the presumptive figure as the figment of some fertile imagination, Sibal has only tried to bring into disrepute an institution which predates India’s independence by no less than 87 years and serves as a Constitutional safeguard against the government’s recklessness in money matters. Obviously, he is the spear head of his side which has now gone into an attacking mode after all its defences failed against the opposition’s single-minded onslaught demanding a Joint Parliamentary Committee to go into all aspects of the 2G spectrum scam. But in taking on the CAG he and, through him, his party are only belittling and damaging an institution so essential for the good health of our democracy. They are trying to do to CAG what Indira Gandhi did to so many other institutions on which a democratic India rested.

Further, by ridiculing the CAG report Sibal has sort of given a clean chit to his predecessor, the infamous A. Raja. The BJP is right then in asking for what reason Raja was turned out of the Union cabinet if he had not committed any serious irregularity. His own party had so far been claiming the moral high ground and intolerance for corruption by holding out the example of Raja whom they eased out because of his wrong doings; Sibal’s recent support to Raja has left the rank and file of the Congress party confused. Senior BJP leader and chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, Murli Manohar Joshi, whom the Congress had been placating in the hope that he would give an opportunity to the prime minister to appear before the PAC and explain his role in the allotment of 2G spectrum and thus avoid appointing a JPC, has turned the tables on Sibal by his statement that Sibal should first read the CAG report fully before passing judgment on it.

Finally, does Sibal not understand that the credibility of the UPA government has taken such a bad tumble that the people of India are not going to believe one word of the long explanations he might offer? And unless the government shows its resolve by getting those who have looted lacs of crores of rupees of public money behind the bars and recovering from them everything that they had stolen, it will have to live with this credibility gap howsoever humiliating or insulting it may be.

K.G. Balakrishnan is not the only one

In the three years K.G. Balakrishnan headed the Supreme Court, the assets of his sons-in-law and brother, all practising law in his and their native state Kerala, went up manifold. First he tried to explain their windfall gains by saying that just in one hearing lawyers can charge anything up to Rs.80 lac realising almost immediately thereafter that perhaps he exaggerated the things a little too much and that his relatives were not so hot shots as lawyers. Then he changed his tune and said that it was for his relatives to explain their assets disproportionate, if so, to their incomes and he had nothing to say on that. He also, as if, dared his critics, who include the most celebrated living retired Supreme Court judge, Justice V.K. Krishna Iyer, to point out even one act of his as the head of the Supreme Court or that of the National Human Rights Commission that was not fair.

Balakrishnan’s protestations notwithstanding, the source of his relatives’ sudden riches are obvious to all save him but he has a point; the trail has got to be shown as connected to his actions as the head of the Supreme Court before accusing him of malfeasance and asking for his resignation as the chairman of the National Human Rights Commission. In my opinion it is not going to be rocket science and should be quite straight forward provided this weak central government is able to muster the required political will. And if it delays action on this for whatever incompetence or lack of courage it may be suffering from, the others like karunanidhi and Mayawati will get a chance to jump into the fray calling it yet another case of Dalit-baiting after hounding the poor A. Raja out of the Union cabinet on trumped up charges of causing a loss of Rs.1.76 lac crore to the exchequer.

But to be fair to Balakrishnan, he is not the only one among the illustrious persons who got to head the Supreme Court at one time or the other and who did not add to the prestige of that august office. His immediate predecessor, Y.K. Sabbarwal, had his two sons practicing their business of constructing malls and other commercial buildings from his official residence and it was just a matter of chance that when the father was ordering sealing of shops and other commercial establishments located in non-conforming areas of Delhi, the sons were constructing, what could be termed as, costly alternatives for them. If not all found dishonest by the senior advocate and former Union law minister, Shanti Bhushan, at least sabbarwal should be made to give company to Balakrishnan in facing investigation and trial for giving undue and most unethical and immoral advantage to their progeny and other relatives.

What is Digvijay Singh’s game?

The Congress general secretary Digvijay Singh is in a celebratory mode now a days. The normally super-inefficient and customer-unfriendly BSNL has obliged him by digging out the record of a phone call made from his BSNL mobile phone on the fateful day of November 26, 2008 to a landline number registered in the name of the Anti-Terrorism Squad of the Mumbai police. The BSNL is supposed to save the phone call record for only one year and then destroy it, how could it provide information about a phone call made more than two years ago, only the BSNL can explain. Singh claims that his stand that he had a talk with the then ATS chief Hemant Karkare only a couple of hours before he was killed in a hail of AK-47 bullets fired by the Pakistani terrorists storming parts of south Mumbai, has been vindicated. According to Singh, Karkare had told him that he was in great mental stress because of threats to his life from some Hindu extremists whose alleged involvement in the Malegaon blast case he had been investigating.

So far Digvijay Singh had been saying that Hemant Karkare called him hours before the attack on Mumbai by Pakistani terrorists but the BSNL record have completely nailed his lie; it was Singh who called Karkare and not the other way round. What does Singh have to say on this? He has not cared to explain his absolutely wrong statement about who called whom. How can we then believe that Karkare did confide in him about the perceived threat to his life from some Hindu extremists? It is strange that just because Karkare’s family once lived in Madhya Pradesh, he should have come to treat an ex-chief minister of the state as his sole confidante because not even Karkare’s widow Kavita seems to have been privy to the information with Singh. Singh has also not responded to Kavita Karkare’s statement that it was normal for the ATS chief to be threatened by suspected terrorists under ATS investigation, she had said that when Karkare had been investigating acts of terrorism allegedly by some Muslim extremists they had warned him of dire and deadly consequences. Singh, to his utter shame, has chosen to ignore this extremely significant statement of Mrs. Karkare.

Digvijay Singh is the master of innuendo and duplicity, even then it will not be out of place to ask him to spell out once and for all what he is really after, what his game is.

And who is fit to give the award?

It was reported some time back that at the 98th Indian Science Congress at Chennai the prime minister would give the Jawaharlal Nehru Award to Ratan Tata for his contribution to society by getting the Tata Motors to develop the world's cheapest car, Nano. But he did not receive the award nor his name was there in the published list of awardees. Perhaps his name was dropped from the list at the last minute because of Tata's fall from grace after a tape of his telephonic conversation with the Tata group's lobbyist Niira Radia, in which he seemed to be conspiring with her to have A. Raja reinstalled as the telecom minister in the UPA 2.0 government in May 2009, was recently leaked to the press. If this actually was the case, the government's decision, howsoever late in the day it might have been, was unexceptional. A person tainted with an ugly controversy could not be the recipient of this prestigious award.

So far, so good, but how about the person giving the Jawaharlal Nehru Award, was the prime minister Manmohan Singh fit to give it? After all, it was on his watch that Raja defrauded the exchequer of an estimated Rs.1.76 lac crore or US$39 billion. Through his letter of the 3rd January 2008 to Raja, Singh had accepted Raja's explanation of his bizarre actions. As if this was not enough, he also defended him publicly. Singh was forced to let him go only after the Supreme Court expressed surprise that Raja had still been continuing as a Union minister and this was in November 2010, more than three years after gross irregularities committed by Raja first came to light.

The government, however, has a serious problem on its hands - if the prime minister Manmohan Singh, because of his less than exemplary conduct, now lacks stature required for giving the Jawaharlal Nehru Award, who should be asked to do the honour. The chairperson of the the ruling United Progressive Aliance, Sonia Gandhi, or the president Pratibha Patil could hardly provide an acceptable alternative.

Welcome, 2011!

On the first day of the Year 2011, I will like to wish all my countrymen and women a happy, peaceful and, therefore, prosperous, and, above all, scam-free New Year. Let us hope that this year we will not have to spend our time, effort and energy in exposing and combating the acts of malfeasance by our elected governments, and that we will get the chance to devote ourselves whole-heartedly to the all-round development of our country.

Friendship for all

Lord Mahavir, the twenty fourth and last Teerthankara or Path-finder of the Jains, had said in Prakrit, "Khammami savva jeevanam, savvee jeeva khamantu me; mitti me savva bhooesu, vairam mejham na kenai", i.e. "I forgive all living beings, let all living beings forgive me; I have friendship for all living on the earth and enmity for none."

For me these fifteen words in Prakrit carry in them the essence of religion. In fact, I may go a little further and say that just four of them - Mitti me savva bhooesu (I have friendship for all living on the earth) - make the essence of the essence of religion for me. But I must reconcile my intrinsic and instinctive hostility for the corrupt to the sacred idea of friendship for all. Not an easy task but let me try.

I do want that the corrupt, who deny the others of their due and weaken the nation by their unfair and unjust acts, should be caught, tried and adequately punished for their crime. But only in this their real welfare and rehabilitation lie and not in stashing away their ill-gotten riches in the banks in Switzerland or other tax havens. Since I care for their welfare, I am their true friend.

So, all ye corrupt of this land, listen to this true friend of yours! Surrender to the nation all that you have looted and happily accept whatever punishment is meted out to you after a due process of the law!

Make Haryana chief minister pay for persecuting honest official

Sanjiv Chaturvedi, an honest forest service official, was victimised by the Haryana government for his ‘crimes’ of bringing to light a huge scam in which senior functionaries had been involved and of effectively implementing the Supreme Court’s orders to save a wildlife sanctuary from being wiped out. Despite his case receiving sympathetic attention from no less than the prime minister’s office, Union ministry of environment and forests, cabinet secretariat and the Central Administrative Tribunal, for years he has remained at the receiving end of the punishing might of the state government. In the last five years, all in the chief ministership of B.S. Huda, he was transferred repeatedly, denied promotion, suspended and even charge sheeted for an offence he never committed. In a fact finding report, two senior officials of the Union ministry of environment and forests have placed the blame for harassing and tormenting Chaturvedi at the doors of the state forest minister Kiran Chaudhary and some top officials in the finance and forest departments and in the chief minister’s own office.

The most shocking aspect of this most sordid incident is that the prime minister’s office miserably failed to come to any real help to the persecuted official, whose only crime was that he chose to perform his duty conscientiously. It can now make amends by instructing the state government to put under suspension all officials who had harassed Chaturvedi and try them under the Prevention of Corruption Act and also for entering into criminal conspiracy to destroy a wildlife sanctuary and for preventing a government official from carrying out his duty. The prime minister should get the Haryana chief minister to remove forthwith Chaudhary from his cabinet, he should also warn Huda that a repeat of an incident of this type would mean his own dismissal as the chief minister. And of course, all cooked up disciplinary proceedings against Sanjiv Chaturvedi ought to be withdrawn immediately, he be promoted with retrospective effect and also rewarded by the prime minister himself for upholding the best traditions, now mostly forgotten, of civil services even in the face of crudest and vilest opposition from his seniors.

Wasn't Indira Gandhi the prime minister during the Emergency?

The official history of the Congress party has blamed Sanjay Gandhi for the excesses committed in family planning and slum clearance campaigns during the Emergency. It is less than clever ploy to distance Indira Gandhi, post facto, from those unpopular steps which were largely responsible for the party's defeat in the 1977 general election. What Sanjay and his over-enthusiastic supporters in the Youth Congress were doing in those fateful nineteen months had Indira Gandhi's unmistakable approval and she should be held accountable for all of that. After all, she had not ceased to be the prime minister with the rise of Sanjay.

What all Sanjay did during the Emergency, he did it openly and if the prime minister, Indira Gandhi, ever had the impression that he was overstepping the limits she could and should have stopped him. That she chose not do that only goes to establish that his actions, howsoever mistaken they may appear in retrospect, had her seal of sanction. Obviously, the hagiographers of the Congress party could not attribute any sins of the Emergency to its author, Indira Gandhi, because Mrs. Gandhi 2.0 sources her legitimacy as the party’s undisputed leader in the original Mrs. Gandhi and Rajiv, nor could they omit the mention of that period from the official history, so, they decided to hang on the now long dead Sanjay everything that had gone wrong. Now that his wife and son are in the principal opposition party, the BJP, making Sanjay the scapegoat for the crimes and excesses perpetrated 34-35 years ago is also politically expedient.

Let Manmohan Singh appear before the Public Accounts Committee

For reasons best known to himself, the chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, Murali Manohar Joshi, seems to be open to considering the prime minister Manmohan Singh's offer to appear before the PAC and answer all questions on his role, if any, in the Rs.1.76 lac crore telecom 2G spectrum scam. The PAC is deliberating upon the report on the scam recently submitted to Parliament by the Comptroller and Auditor-General. Joshi's approach is at variance with the stand so far adopted by the combined opposition that the PAC can only go into the accounting aspects of the scam and that it is the Joint Parliamentary Committee which is the right body to scrutinise deeply all aspects, including the responsibility and culpability of various political authorities, of this unprecedented scam.

Suppose, in order to hit back at his old adversary within the BJP, L.K. Advani, or as a screaming protest against his isolation in the party, Joshi overrides the opposition of all other members of the PAC and tells the prime minister to appear before the committee, not all is going to be lost. The other members of the committee should start preparing for that eventuality right now and when it is the time for Manmohan Singh to face them they should pose to him all their probing questions which in normal course they would have asked him had the UPA government agreed to appoint a JPC. He will have to give comprehensive answers and in the process will be forced to reveal the part he played or was made to play in permitting the scam to become a reality. If, on the other hand, he decides to be less than forthright he will be exposing himself to public ridicule, much bigger than he has had to suffer so far.

And of course, the prime minister's tete-a-tete with the PAC can not stop the opposition from continuing to demand a JPC.

System of criminal justice in total disarray

A special Sessions Court in Chhattisgarh has sentenced the well-known paediatrician and public health expert and equally well-known sympathiser of the cause of Naxalism, Dr. Binayak Sen, to life imprisonment for sedition. His crime - carrying three letters written by jailed Naxalites, helping a couple of Naxalites to rent houses and open bank accounts, and some such other things, but definitely not inciting violence or armed rebellion against the state which according to the Supreme Court of India fall under the definition of sedition. Of course, there would be an appeal to the High Court against the judgment and then finally there is the Supreme Court. But the very fact that Sen has got life imprisonment for a crime which can not be termed as sedition should be contrasted with a case in Maharashtra, a few years ago, in which a person, who was accused of hiring professional killers to murder his intra-Congress party rival, the District Congress Committee president, was let go by the Central Bureau of Investigation for want of prosecutable evidence. This happened in spite of some persons having given evidence that they had heard some others saying that they had committed the murder after having been hired by the DCC president's rival. Perhaps it is a matter of some coincidence that the accused's sister was the governor of Rajasthan when the CBI decided to look at him so kindly. She then went on to become the president of India, ironically as the nominee of the same Congress party.

We also have the ludicrous case of some petty government official recently sentenced by the Supreme Court to one year's rigorous imprisonment for accepting a bribe of fifty rupees in the year 1993. In a country where those responsible for scams for tens of thousands of crore rupees, be it in the Commonwealth Games or in the Adarsh Cooperative Building Society, are not even dislodged from their Union ministerial perches, what to talk of suffering any punishment like jail terms, frowning at a bribe of fifty rupees is laughable. If the Supreme Court is so particular about upholding the letter and spirit of law, how has it been allowing the CBI to change its stance on charges of holding assets disproportionate to known sources of income against politicians to suit the convenience of the ruling United Progressive Alliance at the Centre?

Make corruption unfashionable

When I had joined the State Bank of India as a Probationary Officer way back in 1972, one of every two employees used to smoke. Smoking was then supposed to be a sign of advancement and was considered very fashionable. But when I left thirty years later, retiring voluntarily, only one out of four of five smoked. In 2002, smoking was no longer fashionable even among the younger staff of the bank. This big change was made possible by greater awareness about the ill effects of smoking on the smoker's health.

Something like this has got to be done for corruption. People have to be educated about its pernicious effects on the economy and, more importantly, on the moral fabric that binds the nation together. Corruption is far more addictive than tobacco smoking; getting people to kick this habit, therefore, is going to be an uphill task. But if India's non-corrupt take this up as a challenge, they can do it, just as the Obama supporters could do it in November 2008.

Population control is an imperative

At the time of independence in 1947, India’s population was 33 crore or 330 million but in these 63 years it has crossed the figure of 120 crore or 1.2 billion. This almost quadrupling of the population has taken place despite the country having declared family planning as a national policy way back in 1951, the first country in the world to have done so. India’s effort to reduce the average size of the family received a deadly blow in 1977 when due to a backlash of the excesses during the 19 months of the Emergency, such as forced sterilization, Indira Gandhi’s government was badly defeated in the general election. Even now, more than three decades after the Emergency was lifted, population control or planning remains a taboo subject for the government. In fact, after the world’s leading investment bank Goldman Sach spoke about India’s demographic dividend ushering in an era of economic prosperity for the country around 2025, the country’s officialdom suddenly discovered the silver lining to its resounding failure to curb the rate of population growth. The rate has come down somewhat but it has been a secular trend and no government agency, even at its wildest, can claim any credit for it.

But at 1.1 per cent per annum, the rate of growth of India’s population is still too high. Every effort, short of forcing family planning methods on people, should be made to reduce this rate to 0.1 or 0.2 per cent per annum latest by 2020. In the hinterland and even in the city slums, the majority of productive couples do not know that simple means are available to space out their children and also to limit their number. Through intensive publicity on electronic media this message must be put across to them. There is also a need to educate the parents on marrying off daughters when they are at least eighteen and have attained physical maturity. Self-appointed leaders of some communities consider family planning an interference in the affairs of God and forbid it accordingly. The government could engage a few educated members or role models from the fields of sports and films from among these communities to counter this propaganda by convincing the people that by limiting the size of their families they will be able to improve their living standards and educate their children.

There is another angle to this issue. Now we have in India the right to employment, the right to education, and the right to food security and very soon the right to clean water and good health would follow and quite rightly so. In other words a child born in the country becomes in some ways the responsibility of the government. If this is universally agreed upon, should the government then, keeping in view the country’s limited resources, not have a right to advise the people to adopt suitable methods of family planning so that they may not have more than two children? The country has not reached the Malthusian state, and thank heavens for that, but we are very near the maximum carrying capacity of this land.

Politicians as freeloaders

Ever heard of any ethics law in India? Here the president of the main opposition party BJP can get away with a statement that his party's chief minister in Karnataka could have acted immorally in allotting denotified land to his own kin but it was not illegal, where the prime minister has a cabinet colleague who in his previous stint as the chief minister of the state of Maharashtra was found by the Supreme Court to have illegally favoured some usurious money landers related to a legislator of his own party to poor farmers who had borrowed from them, as a punishment the court imposed a fine of Rs. ten lac on the state, not on the former chief minister. And compare this to what has just happened in the the state of New York. There, the governor, a directly elected chief executive of the state, has been fined $62,125 by the Public Integrity Commission for accepting, in contravention of the state ethics law, five free tickets to a popular baseball game in 2009 from the New York Yankees, which had commercial dealings with the state.

What is remarkable is not only that the Public Integrity Commission chose to punish such a senior public official for a transgression considered laughable in India, where ministers, legislators and bureaucrats think it is their birth right to ask for and get all sorts of freebies from those having business with the government, but also that it took it only one year to decide the case in. In our great democracy, if at all, such a case would take about fifteen years and then another five years because of an appeal to the High Court followed by one to the apex court.

When will the Indians learn that the United States has been the world's greatest power for about three fourth of a century not just because of its scientific, technological, economic and military prowess but also because it is, by and large, a law abiding nation where howsoever high you might be, the law would still be above you?

Is the Congress party serious about fighting corruption?

The Congress party's recent plenary session at Delhi's Burari was dominated by two battle cries, one against the Bharatiya Janata Party and the other against corruption. Obviously, fighting the BJP is a matter of life and death for the Congress and its determination to take the fight to the BJP's camp was genuine. But the same can not be said about the Congress taking on corruption, after all, of late many of its members have been caught with their hands in the till.

However, if the Congress is really serious on this, it can make a start by introducing an effective bill on Lokpal or ombudsman in the next session of Parliament (Here I am presuming that the Opposition will not boycott it on its demand for a Joint Parliamentary Committee to go into the Commonwealth games and 2G telecom spectrum scams) acceptable not only to the political parties but also to the civil society, initiate the process for creating law to provide for seizure of public servants' assets disproportionate to their known sources of income, and move to amend the People's Representation Act to debar from fighting elections those against whom a law court has preferred charges. Unless the party takes these three steps very soon its newly found animus against corruption will look like a put on act only to keep up with the Jones.