What is corruption?

Few weeks ago I was watching the BCC world service news in the evening, between cooking the dinner and laying the table. The usual evening news is a few headlines on insurgencies in Iraq, tripe statements by the usual suspects of world leaders on the global war against terrorism, death / famine / civil wars and diseases in Africa all read by women who seem to be vaguely amused by what they were reading out. Then after the commercial break one usually gets some snippets of out of context statements / studies / reports that one has no idea of what to do with but you never have to ponder too long about it as the business news takes over with energetic men and / or hungry looking women throwing mergers, takeovers, numbers and indices at you. This is usually my cue to get on with the table laying and calling the herd to feeding counter. But on that day the out of context news was about a survey done by some group called “corruption watch” (I think that was the name, but I could be wrong) and according them India was one of the most corrupt and Switzerland was the least corrupt nation.

This set me thinking; I live in one of the most corrupt country and have visited several times to the least corrupt country and without being informed of this fact till now I had always preferred the corrupt one.  As an upright and discerning person (Well, we all like to think of ourselves as being one even if no one else around us agrees to this fact) how could I actually prefer the corrupt world to the clean one, and that too when it is clean in more than one way.

I got thinking of examples of what an impartial observer would call corruption and what we on the inside would call normal, like for example - If I sometime suffer from a very painful allergy which doctors could never pinpoint the cause as what set it off is not clear. But since sometime I have not had it so I do not actively think about it anymore, but suddenly on a Saturday afternoon it has me in its grip, I do not have the drugs nor the prescription to get the drug and it is not one of those over the counter drug – then this is what I would do in Switzerland.  As it is not possible to call the doctor on Saturday and I could never bring myself to go to the pharmacy and try to persuade the pharmacist to sell me the drug even if he would remember that I used to buy it with a prescription till few months ago. My social nurturing would prevent me from even thinking down that line. But in India, I would call my doctor he then would call the pharmacist and ask him to hand over the drug to my friend / maid / family member who will be coming along shortly with the verbal assurance that it is all fine. In Switzerland I would suffer for 36 hours before I call the doctor but in India the line between humanitarian action and corruption is so blurred that the doctor, pharmacist and I would not even think what we all doing is corruption of the law.

Or take the incident of having sudden and mortal sickness attacking a loved one in a distant city. In India you would appeal to the person in the airline or train booking office to let you jump the reservations to get a ticket to make it in time to be at the side of this loved one. The person behind the counter will bump somebody off and give you the place and in gratitude you would thank them in more ways than verbal but find yourself in the non-corrupt country and you will be doing on-line booking using your credit card and would not even think of bringing up the reason for your desperate reason for travelling and just hope for the best. No, I am not defending the oppression that malicious corruption brings to our society but I am wondering about the defining parameters of corruption and what is just normal human tendency to empathize and bend the law? Law and justice are blind and so are supposed to be just.

I think the concept of corruption is very linked with religious backgrounds and religions that were conceived in arid and harsh climes tend to be a bit unforgiving in their judgment of human frailty and emotions. They had to be as nature was not very forgiving too when these religions were being dreamed up, codified and spread. But in the tropics we dreamed up chaotic gods in keeping with the exuberant nature we live in. What would be the market appeal of a god who has no sense of humour and did not indulge in demonstrations of multiple personalities occasionally even if they were psychotic sometimes? How can one be precise when the gods in our complex mythologies happily deceive, play tricks, break promises and make back room deals?  And some 50 pages later the god would justify his / her action to a curious and shocked mortal by pointing out the difference between the perceived truth of the moment and the absolute truth in a non-linear world they live.

Governments and parliaments come up with legislations, implementation mechanisms, monitoring bodies and punitive measure for the folks who do not get it. All this painstaking and costly affairs are done in the name of creating a just and ordered society that can progress infinitely towards prosperity and peace. And the individuals in these societies are expected to shelve the development of their personal sense of discernment and discretion to the law making and enforcing agency but at the end of the day the deep frustration that builds up leads us to look for loopholes or act when no one is watching to strike back indiscriminately with petty or very damaging actions. Has the law and its civilising nature really helped in the end to produce a good citizen? Or it has it made all of us kids in the kindergarten who need to be monitored as we cannot be trusted to exercise our innate sense of the good and bad?

Yes, I live in a country where the monthly allocated food for the pre-school children in village crèches disappear between the files of the officers who are supposed to administer their distribution but I also live in a country where people can and do actively exercise their humanitarian nature to give or help even if they break laws to do it. To get your passport renewed is not an exercise of filling the right form and getting it to the right desk but getting an introduction to the right network but the upside of this is that every Indian is a veteran net worker. The “world wide web” is just a virtual form of how this country has always functioned with cross linked hyper connections of groups, communities and individuals or in short - who knows whom and where. The amazing thing is that if there was not the greed factor it would be one of the most efficient ways for a society to function with active individual participation.

The Indian system would be the greatest system of socio-economic management if only we would also develop within each individual the consciousness to be sincere. Unlike the developed nations we have not become totally dependent on outside agencies and bodies to monitor every part of our daily life. We could frog leap into a self-monitoring form of governance and bypass the raggedy democratic governance system that is being offloaded globally at discount prices these days even if has not worked for the countries marketing it or is a daily political disaster for the ones that are coerced in to it with military might.