Jerry Joseph said he was an immigrant from Haiti and orphaned from an early age when he landed up in the small town of Odessa in Texas to seek admission at the local high school. He made quick progress in his studies. Above all, he was an absolute boy wonder at basketball.
In no time at all he made it to the school team and helped the school get within sniffing distance of the championship title. He became a regular at the local Baptist Church and sought to be baptised as a Christian.
All in all, a perfect immigrant fairytale of the kind that has made America justly famous: No matter how miserable your present lot is, you just have to somehow sneak your way into the United States of America and the rest is easy.
Well, there was only one thing that was wrong with this narrative. He wasn't Jerry Joseph at all but one Guerdwich Montimere, formerly a resident of the State of Florida. He was also not 16 years of age at the time he sought school admission but actually 22. He was no orphan but actually had a mother still living in Florida then.
While he was no doubt a talented basketball player he was by no means a prodigy. He actually represented a school in Florida. It all came out finally, as such things invariably do. The police arraigned him before the local County Court for a variety of misdemeanours such as falsification of Government records, identity theft and, for good measure, that inevitable American school life crime of having sex with an under-aged girl. We may of course wait for Hollywood to tell why he did what he did when they choose to do a film on his life. It need not concern us at this stage.
But what must, is the ease with which an illegal immigrant from Haiti with the help of a false testimony of a former teammate (a local who said Jerry was his half-brother and hence his ward) established that he had a right to education in the State of Texas and the alacrity with which the public authorities accepted it.
TALE OF TWO SYSTEMS
Are American public servants naïve or even stupid? A lower division clerk in India could have taught a thing or two as to how the municipal authorities of Odessa, Texas could have saved themselves the embarrassment. That would be missing the point. The Indian and the American system of administration are culturally vastly different.
The Indian system is the by-product of a culture where one has to prove oneself as worthy of whatever entitlement that the State has chosen to bestow on its citizens.
In contrast, the American system operates on the principle of universal entitlement unless there is compelling evidence for its denial to a citizen.
Now, how would this play out in India? You take your son/daughter to the local Government school and demand that he/she be admitted as the Right to Education Act says you are entitled to. You run up against a hurdle that requires that you prove to the school authorities that you are not an illegal Bangladeshi or Sri Lankan immigrant.
They wouldn't quite say so in that many words for that would be too crass. Now, the only way you prove otherwise is to show that you possess a ration card. As anyone who has lived in India knows, most people could be stumped by that.
DEVIL IN THE DETAIL
This is where Anna Hazare and his team of activists may have been guilty of strategic oversight. Their undue emphasis on corruption in high places has tended to shift the focus away from the principle of a citizen's innate right to the entitlement to such of those goods and services that are provided by the State.
True, they have talked of ‘citizen's charter'. But the debate on that is disproportionate to the one on Lok Pal. The absence of detail could prove costly. For instance, many public sector bank branches have put up notices listing how much time within which a customer is entitled to a withdrawal of cash or the issuance of a demand draft.
Now, in the absence of a system to register when a customer enters the bank premises or when he leaves, it is difficult to see how the promise under the citizens' charter has been fulfilled. A citizen's charter on ration cards is operationally a million times more difficult.
Again, should the system assume that the absence of a complaint means that the chartered assurance have been complied with? Shouldn't there be an external mechanism for verifying this as through the establishment of a mini ombudsman, for instance? These are the some of the aspects of detail that are completely missing.
Corruption in high places thrives because functionaries at successive lower levels have been co-opted or rendered impotent by threats of punishment (transfers that carry with it, serious financial losses or familial consequences or both, for the transferee).
The co-option of the willing is secured not by giving a share of the profits from a corrupt act indulged in by those in high places. It is secured by allowing those petty acts of corruption so that every one acquires a stake in the corrupt system.
Remove the incentives that exist for petty corruption through a meaningful universal entitlement programme for accessing public goods and services; you remove the incentive for such lower functionaries to remain silent in the face of corruption indulged in by those in high places. That is the lesson that the Team Hazare appears to have ignored and one that the Jerry Joseph episode has served to highlight.