Hi folks,
Yes, it’s official now. We are in the middle of the season of scams. The sums involved this time make your eyeballs gouge out, literally, and put even the biggest of past scams to shame. Right from the land we live in to the air that we breathe, there seems to graft everywhere. In this post, I don’t wish to zoom into specific cases, for the fear of sounding like a mundane news bulletin, but rather focus on how we have responded to scams that have been unearthed in recent times.
Our polity has a new found addiction, the ‘moral high ground’. Find anyone of your party members in a compromised position? No problem. The accused individual will step down upon the request from the party high command and that absolves the individual and the party of all guilt! The loss to the exchequer and the taxpayer is conveniently overlooked and negative sentiments generated by the scam and their consequent effects are not even debated. This kind of circus goes on only in India and goes to show the moral bankruptcy of our political class.
The reaction from the great Indian Middle Class [IMC] has been along expected lines. The latest scams notwithstanding, the IMC has always looked upon the political class with despair and contempt. We couldn’t care less as long as we got our daily dose of Saas Bahu serials and cricket matches. We didn’t see any mass scale upheaval that naturally would have occurred in any other country. But this doesn’t surprise me as IMC knows very well that there is much more to come and will certainly be bigger in magnitude than the scams that have been unearthed.
The only consolation in this whole tamasha has been the fourth estate, the media. This section of our society has toiled hard to ensure that corruption is exposed and that the culprits are brought to justice. The electronic media, in particular, has gone into a tizzy covering the various scams. Official government reports on various scams appear first on television channels before they are even tabled in parliament. The media’s role has been so crucial that it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that the government would not even bother acting on these scams if it were not for the relentless coverage and as such credit must be given to the media for precipitating change. [Of late, we have been hearing that some journos from the mainstream media were actually in touch with a dubious lobbyist. But we should be careful here not to paint the entire media with a single brush.]
Graft is a cancer that will certainly destroy us from within if we do not address it immediately with as much willpower as we can muster. As of now, I can safely say that we have not even initiated this difficult task.
P.S. While we are at it, why don’t we also turn the heat on petty corruption?
