In a little over two months, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will bid goodbye. Most of India is likely to say good riddance. How did the technocrat who oversaw the fastest period of growth in India’s economic history, and who also had an enviable reputation for integrity, end up in such a place? If only….. (The following article was published in 2012.) There’s a revealing conversation that the Prime Minister’s former Press Advisor, Harish Khare, shares with his readers in an article in The Hindu. In Khare’s words, “Just as I was leaving, he (the PM) beckoned me to sit down again and said: ‘One more thing, Harish. If you ever hear anything about any member of my family engaging in any kind of hanky-panky, please come and tell it straight to me, however unpleasant or painful it may be.’ “ This conversation happened in 2009, and in retrospect, it is easy to see what is wrong with the Prime Minister’s instruction. In 2009, Manmohan Singh was already aware of the serious shenanigans going on in the telecom, coal and other ministries. Still, he did not see it necessary to ask Khare to inform him if he heard anything about the “hanky-panky” that his ministers may be up to. He only asked him to tell him if he heard any complaint against his own family members, whom he very well knew were not into that kind of stuff. He thought that would be enough to protect his Teflon image. Which brings us to a fundamental issue. What should an honest man do in dishonest company? It is an everyday, practical question for thousands of honourable men and women who keep the wheels of government turning in the midst of widespread thuggery. They have three choices, really. They can become corrupt themselves; they can expose corruption wherever they can and be a thorn in the side of the system; or they can take the path of least resistance: never be personally corrupt, but do not rock the boat either. Needless to say, the vast majority of the honest men and women in government take the last option. They are not looking to be heroes; they want to just get on with their lives and go to bed with a clean conscience. I can understand them; one can demand decency out of everyone, but can you demand heroism from everyone? Manmohan was a bureaucrat working, surviving and thriving in a corrupt system for two decades before he became a politician himself, and it is no surprise that he has carried the tepid anti-hero morality of the honest bureaucrat to his position as prime minister. But is that enough? Is it enough for the leader of the largest democracy in the world to say that he and his family are personally honest? Would it have been enough for Mohandas Gandhi to say he didn’t ask anyone to kill policemen in Chauri-Chaura? Would it have been enough if Vajpayee were to say that neither he nor his family were in Gujarat during the communal carnage? Or if Rajiv Gandhi were to say that none in his family led mobs during the anti-Sikh riots? We get an insight into how Manmohan Singh himself looks at the issue of integrity amidst corruption in an interview with Karan Thapar in 1999, five years before he became Prime Minister: “In politics, I have learnt that one has to compromise. But there’s a limit to compromising. If you compromise at the cost of your conscience – I think you should draw the line there… I do hope that I will have the moral courage to not cross that line. And that line is set by my own conscience.” We now know that the prime minister’s hope was in vain. It seems when it came to the crunch, he failed to check whether his own conscience did indeed draw that line ethically and correctly. Today, in 2012, corrupt governance is no longer a side issue; it is the central issue. It is eating away at the legitimacy of the democratic system and free markets; it is wrecking government finances; it is making the young cynical again; and it is choking growth. Instead of admitting the problem, the instinct of this government and the Prime Minister’s Office seems to be to attack the messengers and accuse them of being anti-national. Hubris is the only word to describe it, and disaster will be the result. There’s another way to go. That is for Manmohan Singh to step up, tell the public the truth about corruption in high places, and commit wholeheartedly to cleaning up the system in the remaining two years of his term. Since words will no longer do, he will need to put his own party and his coalition partners on notice that if they want him to continue as the prime minister, he will have to choose his own Cabinet and turn out those ministers against whom serious corruption charges have been laid. He will also need to ensure that CBI has both the freedom and the competence to investigate and bring corrupt ministers to trial. This could, of course, shock the system and the party could ask him to resign. But are two more years of ramshackle governance and increasing public anger any better? Shock is what the system needs today, just as it needed it in 1991. If Singh needs inspiration to take this step, he should listen to the following words of a prominent political leader of our times: “In the last 50 years, the politicians have been taking our people for a ride. And there’s a great danger if the gap between what the politicians say, promise and what they do grows the way it has been.” - Manmohan Singh, in an interview in 1999. He also quoted the following verse in an interview in the same year: “Insan woh nahi hai Jo hawa ke sath badale Insan woh hai Jo hawa ka rukh badal de” Postscript 2014: In the end, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh didn’t dare change the direction of the wind. And is now about to be gone with it.
Posted on: Sat, 15 Mar 2014 02:39:41 +0000
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