18 Aug 2006: ISS Today: Engendering Critical Understandings of Corruption

18 Aug 2006: Engendering Critical Understandings of Corruption

 

Being Indian is about accepting corruption and finding creative ways to sustain it, Pavan Varma argues in his latest book by the same title. These and other insights into corruption are littered in this book that provides a peak into the Indian psyche. But Varma eschews the systems debate, detracting from global anti-corruption efforts to understand and tackle its worst excesses in society.

 

Commentary

 

The ordinary mind struggles to comprehend the barrage of corruption statistics that Indian Foreign Service official Pavan Varma spews out in his latest book, Being Indian. But, for Varma, they are a short leap to a few major generalisations about the Indian character and its creative acceptance of corruption in society. However, flawed these assertions may be, they are important to put into perspective a range of issues that will assist in elucidating on the theoretical underpinnings of corruption. Equally essential are the comparative insights to the African context that may be gleaned from his understandings.

 

The most salient corruption debate that is posed by Varma deals with the system versus character debate. In essence, how much of corruption in India is as a result of, and promoted by a “bloated bureaucracy, archaic rules and regulations”? Varma seems to accept this as partial explanation for the proliferation of corruption. However, the lack of substantiation and exploration is a gaping oversight in the book. Indeed, readers would benefit from understanding the nature and impact of two hundred years of colonialism on the country. Understanding the fostering of corruption through co-option of elites and a strangle-hold on the economy - which may have left little recourse for subjects against the system, forcing them to ‘non-legal’ methods of doing business - may indicate the genesis of a mode of being that has become characteristic.

 

It may also provide a deeper perspective on ostensible character traits that Varma attempts to unpack into the desire for the “allure of power” and the “recognition of status”, which he declares as all-important to the contemporary Indian. Ideological constructions of power that are perpetuated by systems like colonialism leave stark cleavages in an already fractured society, India having being divided geographically into 700 villages at one time. This transmutation of earlier devised power has differential imprints and means that members of society are now assisted by corruption to get the recognition they crave. The battle of a relatively new democracy to entrench new systems that will remedy the colonial heritage, building bottom-up, sound, transparent institutions and laws, is recognised no doubt as a considerable feat.

 

Similarly, new democracies in Africa face the colonial legacy, and ‘big men’ with aspirations for power through corrupt means become derivatives of the past. The new advert for Joko tea on South African TV satirises the phenomenon of assertion of power rather well. Clad in an expensive suit and tie and demanding immediate attention - nay servility - from airport staff his demand “Do you know who I am?”, is a trait of corruption that anyone in Africa may easily recognise. With regard to Varma’s thesis on power and recognition, it was interesting to hear on a recent visit to Mauritius – incidentally with a predominantly Indian diaspora - from anti-corruption workers that the tackling of corruption was severely impeded by the intricate tangle of power relations in the society. Who you are and, more to the point, what you can get away with in Mauritian society seems to be determined by kinship ties, political affiliation, caste, religion and race, each accorded their own position in the societal food chain. The relationships and interconnectedness of small societies, like the tiny island in question which has no more than two million inhabitants, have their own dynamics that may differ from the character thesis posed by Varma. Furthermore, the affliction of colonialism cannot be discounted in this context.

 

Varma’s allusion to the “ethical deficit” inherent in Indians is of course glaringly and fundamentally about character, and not systems. In a reductionist fashion, he presents a strong argument in favour of the hypothesis that corruption is ubiquitous. Indeed, he relates that $1bn is paid in bribes yearly by 2.5bn small-scale businesses in operation, 50 percent of the electricity in Dehli is stolen by educated middle class citizens and more than half of the top 1500 companies in India do not pay taxes. So corruption is not just the domain of the public service. In fact, “anything and everything is for sale,” he declares. And, what makes India unique globally is the level of acceptance and creative ways to sustain corruption. One may not be able to argue against some of these statements, but the issue of uniqueness is highly questionable. Indeed, any African may relate similar experiences with corruption. The demand for non-regulation by multi-national corporations in the plunder of natural resources in Africa may indicate a new face to this “ethical deficit” in a post-colonial paradigm.

 

Trusha Reddy, Corruption and Governance Programme, ISS Cape Town Office