The embarrassment that the Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, finds himself in, over coal block allotments or the 2G scam, was entirely avoidable. No, I don’t mean it in the sense that the Government should have auctioned the blocks to the highest bidder or some such ‘India Against Corruption’ naiveté.

Practitioners of realpolitik, of whom the Prime Minister undoubtedly is one, understand that there is something called ‘coalition dharma’ that means an accommodation of the financial interests of even those political parties that are not part of the ruling coalition!

No, he did not go wrong in pursuing per se , a policy of ‘wink-at-it-and-hope-no-one-notices’ when ministers under his watch, were handing out Government largesse to their friends and relatives in complete disregard of the established principles of administrative law. Where he went wrong was in believing that their misdeeds were adequately clothed in leaves, which ultimately turned out to be made entirely of figs.

So, what could the Government have done? Well, here goes a step-by-step approach of how to indulge in corruption and get away with it. Let us say that you want to allot spectrum to someone you wish to favour (for a consideration, of course).

Yet, you do not want the Comptroller and Auditor General baying for the Government’s blood or some busybody of an NGO rushing to the court with a Public Interest Litigation.

The first thing to do is to paint the mobile telephony business in a bad light. Say that it is sinful to be running a mobile telephony business; it poses a great health hazard and that money spent on it could be used to put some more food on the table for the family. Get the All India Institute of Medical Sciences to endorse with approval studies which show how cell tower radiation causes cancer in human beings and makes sparrows die of heart attacks.

The real clincher would be when you can get some references in Mahatma Gandhi’s autobiography, My Experiments with Truth as actually representing an oblique criticism of mobile telephony; then, your case is as good as made.

Spinning evidence

Gandhiji, if you recall, advocated a Ram Rajya of self-contained villages growing their own food, weaving their own cloth and making pretty much everything that one could possibly not do without.

Just imagine, if you can spin this around as evidence of Gandhiji’s opposition to cell phones (in a village, you should most certainly be able to walk if you want to talk, or at worst engage the services of the town crier), then you can pretty much get away with blue murder in administrative decision-making on spectrum allocation and no questions would be asked. The Government failed to prepare the people for this.

Ditto with coal blocks allocation. Here too, what the Government failed to do was to paint coal-based thermal power generation as the black villain of public welfare. You could dust up some National Sample Survey data to show that the percentage of population with respiratory disorders is higher in the vicinity of a power plant than those living in the rain forests of Amazon and claim coal-fired power plants as the villain.

Black villians

I recognise that this in itself would not be enough. The peskier ones among the public would then want to know why the Government is not doing anything to ban it altogether. If cell phones cause heart attacks among sparrows, why is the business being allowed at all? Now, as a minister you don’t want people going down that road at all. If there is no mobile telephony, there is no need for spectrum and no sweet-heart deals with cronies in its allotment, either.

You should not only paint mobile telephony or coal-fired boilers as black villains; you must also say that, awful though these businesses are, the alternatives cause even greater public injury.

It is useful to let the world know that, as an administrator, you hate doing what you have to do. But nevertheless, do you must, as the alternatives are even worse.

Cell phones are bad but banning it will only give rise to a thriving carrier pigeon market for short messaging services with untold harm to pigeons’ well-being besides earning the wrath of those people from the Sierra Club.

Similarly, coal-fired boilers employed in power generation put soot in the lungs of the public living in its vicinity.

But banning it would only make people to burn more wood and denude the country of green cover. So, the solution is not to ban mobile telephony but carefully regulate it in larger public interest.

Prepare the public

The public, for its part, is expected to feel sufficiently chastened. It is due solely to the munificence of the Government that they are being permitted to engage in such harmful activities.

The least they can do to demonstrate their appreciation of such indulgence is by not inquiring too deeply into the decision-making process and certainly not scream, ‘1.8 lakh-crore scam!’ at the first opportunity.

Of course, you have to prepare the public into believing all this. But, then, as Noam Chomsky has demonstrated, quite convincingly I should say, that it can be done, given time and imagination.

The pay-off

But with coal blocks and 2G spectrum out of the way, have we scraped the bottom of the barrel in the exercise of administrative discretion for private gain? Far from it.

The Directive principles of State Policy of the Indian Constitution is full of so many pious homilies that there is practically no business activity from steel-making to children’s plastic toys that cannot be held out as running counter to those principles.

Through a process of manipulating public perception, you can make the public feel sufficiently grateful that the State is allowing them to indulge in such shameful activities in the first place, that they shouldn’t inconvenience it further by submitting the latter’s actions to closer public scrutiny. It is all hard work. But the pay off is this.

Once you achieve this, you can simply put your hand in the cookie jar and walk away with all that is there, and no questions would be asked.

Sounds far fetched? Not really. Ask Mr Vijay Mallya or Mr Hari Khoday what administrative excesses they have had to put up with, in the hands of those in power in the States, just for the privilege of being allowed to carry on with a ‘sinful’ business of vending alcohol — and yet each and every State ruler comes out smelling like roses.

Now, what wouldn’t Mr Manmohan Singh give to enjoy such a privilege?

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