IN the old days, corruption scandals would follow a familiar pattern. A minister would take a bribe from a businessman to either use his discretion and bend the law or to release some scarce resource. A rival businessman would leak the story to the media and a public uproar would follow. To some extent, that pattern still endures. The allegation against telecom minister A. Raja is that he accepted bribes (according to some accounts, as much as Rs. 300 crore per deal) to award licenses to businessmen who were willing to line the minister's pockets. But what worries me is that a new pattern of corruption is emerging. Two of the biggest scandals to have rocked India in recent weeks – the Commonwealth Games loot and the Adarsh Building Society scam – differ from the familiar pattern. Their DNA is different from the traditional scandal and they suggest that the virus of corruption is mutating into a different, more dangerous shape. Here are the distinctive features of the new scams and, therefore, of the new kind of corruption. 1) Nothing is sacred any longer. People will make money out of anything with a complete absence of shame. The Commonwealth Games were supposed to be a showpiece for the new India. But the people put in charge of organizing them decided that they represented a great opportunity to get rich by accepting kickbacks from contractors and over-charging for the purchase of the simplest items. The Adarsh Society was allocated prime land in south Bombay on the grounds that the building would benefit the families of Kargil martyrs. Around the time the allotment was sanctioned, memories of the sacrifices made by the martyrs were still fresh in our minds and nobody would want to oppose anything that benefitted the families of those who gave their lives for India. But the use of Kargil as the justification for the allotment was nothing but a cynical ruse. The land was never intended for the use of the families of the martyrs. The people who planned the building knew that they could get prime land allotted to them if they used the names of the Kargil heroes. So, nothing is sacred, not the Commonwealth Games and India's prestige, not the sacrifices of our martyrs and our desire to help their families. The hallmark of the new corruption is that people will defile anything in their greed for big bucks. 2) Once upon a time it was the politicians who had a monopoly on corruption. The distinctive feature of both recent scams is that politicians have played co-starring roles while huge sums of money have been made by people in other fields. In the case of the Commonwealth Games, the money was made by sports administrators and by local government officials who received kickbacks from contractors. The worrying thing about the Adarsh Society scam is that the beneficiaries include the defense brass. Generals and Admirals felt no shame is misusing the names of Kargil martyrs to get flats worth crores allotted to themselves. This is a worrying development because it suggests that corruption has now permeated to every section of our society. 3) There was a time when corrupt officers would come up against honest people. Of course, this did not mean that the honest people would necessarily triumph in the end. But at least there was a clear distinction between the bad guys and the good guys. Sadly, that distinction seems to be vanishing. In the case of the Commonwealth Games, there were no good guys who did their best to stop the crooks. There were no whistle-blowers. Everybody seemed content to let the looting go on. The most shocking thing about the Adarsh Society scam is that the corrupt promoters were able to buy off everybody they dealt with by offering them flats in the building. Regional commanders, defense chiefs, local collectors, revenue ministers, government officials, etc. – anybody who had any role in clearing the project got something out of it. Many of these people represented the cream of Indian society – senior military officers, IAS civil servants and the like – and yet, the scamsters seem to have encountered a minimum of resistance. Almost everybody was only too willing to be bought. So, where are the good guys? Has our society reached the stage where the good guys have all given up on being good and decided that because the system is beyond repair, they might as well join the bad guys and get something for themselves? 4) The root of most corruption in India used to be business. In the old days, it was businessmen who had the money to buy up politicians and manipulate the system. The interesting thing about the CWG and Adarsh Society scams is that businessmen hardly enter into them. In the case of the CWG corruption, officials decided that they could rip off the Indian state and steal money from the government. Because India's prestige was at stake, the central government kept providing more and more money to stage the Games. This gave the officials the equivalent of a blank cheque. They knew they could steal from the taxpayer and still never run out of money for their ever-increasing budgets. In the case of the Adarsh Society scam, the crooks (officers, bureaucrats and some politicians) made their money by tricking the government into parting with the scarcest resource in any Indian city: real estate. Once they got their hands on the real estate, they were able to acquire flats worth Rs. 8 crore or more for a mere Rs. 60 lakh. When businessmen were the villains, there were at least some limited checks and balances. Other businessmen would resent the favors done to their rivals and would complain about the scams. These stories would be leaked to the media and some exposes would result. But when corruption is an internal affair in which soldiers, bureaucrats and sports officials steal from the taxpayer then there are few checks and balances. Because everyone gains from the rape of the system, they all keep their mouth shut. My concern is that the new type of corruption is almost impossible to combat because it is self-perpetuating and restricted within a small group of powerful officials and generals who have no hesitation in stealing from the taxpayer. It is the sort of corruption that marks the complete collapse of a nation's character, when everybody at all levels decides that morality is a waste of time and so it is best to get rich quickly. All societies have bad apples. But how can one be hopeful about a society where all those we put our faith in, from sports officials to chiefs of defense staff, have no hesitation in stealing from us? As far as they are concerned, the state exchequer is their personal piggy bank. And you and I, the taxpayers of India, are the ultimate victims. Vir Sanghvi is Editorial Director of Hindustan Times __
