In Admiration for Anna and Some Submissions in The Hindu (August 26) , the author narrates instances of her interaction with a cross section of the people out there: “Sohan Lal from Tilak Nagar is in stone trade and does not give receipts to his buyers. Aditya Gaur from Porta Builders in Dwarka agrees that there is a lot of black money in the business”. Her auto driver admits to fleecing his customers.
Another newspaper highlights Monica Bedi, the consort of underworld don Abu Salem, sporting a Gandhi cap and shouting slogans against corruption. The film fraternity too sees no moral dilemma or contradiction in supporting Anna. No doubt, the whole campaign has been orchestrated to an unprecedented crescendo by an unabashed middle-class and celebrities who have been both beneficiaries and victims of corruption. The hypocrisy is hard to miss.We have the Domestic Violence Act, the Anti-Dowry Act, the Prohibition of Child Labour Act and numerous others on the statute books to regulate human behaviour. Has there been any significant improvement? Not much. When important pieces of legislation such as the Right to Information have been passed and the Constitution amended many times, why is it that this Bill could not be passed for 62 years? Were there no sensible people in the 15 Lok Sabhas so far?
Perhaps, the Anna phenomenon is a text book case of “The Power Of Context” as described by Malcom Gladwell in
Cleansing of polity
During the days of Socrates in Greece, Diogenes, an anti-corruption crusader, went searching for a honest man with a candle light in broad daylight. Human nature has not changed much since then. However periodical cleansing of polity has taken place in the form of revolutions, all of them bloody and against dictatorial regimes where the corrupt under the previous regimes are either annihilated or incarcerated.
But, in a democracy, at the aam admi level, experience tells us that perceptions of the youth in terms of equality of opportunity, in terms of free availability of goods and services, determine the level of corruption.
Finally, law or no law, if everyone is against corruption as they all seem to say, why should there be any corruption at all?
(The author is a former Member, Ordnance Factories Board.)