Three idiots and a scam that won’t die

Pritish Nandy

Always watch out for 'The Big Obsessive Scam' the media goes after. It often covers up a great deal more than it reveals. It also draws away our immediate attention from issues where we were about to get close to a dangerous truth or two. Poirot famously described it as a red herring, a cunning device to draw people’s attention away from real issues to focus on a non sequitur MacGuffin.


Also read - Sreesanth a modern day Valmiki

Like the MacGuffin, which Hitchcock made cult, The Big Obsessive Scam vanishes or becomes irrelevant once its purpose is over. This is what the spot fixing scam could be: Too much outrage chasing what matters so little to most of us. The evidence in hand is flimsy, so flimsy that it’s unlikely to get past the smallest court but the noise around it is so much one would think World War III has broken out.

The day news channels were chasing Gurunath Meiyappan all the way from Kodaikanal to Madurai to Mumbai to the Crime Branch at midnight, millions were happily sitting in front of their TVs watching Mumbai Indians battling Rajasthan Royals at the Eden Gardens, proving yet again that there are two Indias with their own sets of concerns and priorities. I confess I was among those watching the game, rooting for Rahul Dravid whose team lost with a ball to spare.

But this column is not about two Indias. What bothers me is the carpet bombing scam coverage that ensured there were no goodbyes for the man who with evangelical zeal exposed the sleazy underbelly of Indian politics over the past 5 years, and did his best to set it right. Worse, there was no debate over who his successor ought to be. So the Government sneaked in its own nominee, clearly to undo some of the outstanding work Vinod Rai, India’s bravest Comptroller and Auditor General did in his own low key style.

That may not be so easy though. Rai made the 153-year-old office of CAG a powerful weapon in his fight against corruption by the mightiest in the land. Till Rai came, CAG saw its job as writing long winding reports, more often than not hugely delayed, on the inefficiencies in government systems. None of those reports had the kind of impact that Rai’s reports created, especially those on 2G (revealing $38.9 billion gifted away by the Government to its cronies),  coal mining licences (involving another $34 billion loss of revenue) and the infamous Commonwealth Games that brought us so much shame. Courts intervened, including the highest court in the land; ministers landed up in jail or got shamed and sacked; investigations landed up at the Prime Minister’s door.  

Amidst all this outrage over spot fixing, Rai quietly demitted office last week. He was even more quietly replaced by someone less likely to expose the Government’s lapses.  Several other crucial issues that were being debated in the public space, like China’s incursions in Ladakh, the Vadera land deals, Muslim youth arrested and held for years on trumped up terrorist charges and now being released and, above all, the Supreme Court demanding the freeing of the CBI from the Government’s unholy clutches are now on the backburner. Even the Ranbaxy issue, where intrepid whistle blower Dinesh Thakur exposed the grave misdemeanours of one of India’s leading pharma companies and the dangers implicit in those for millions of us who buy its products, have been largely ignored. All we are left discussing are 3 idiots, a C-grade TV star, a lecherous umpire and a boastful son-in-law of the BCCI chairman, all of whom may well be crooks and fixers but must not be allowed to hijack the nation’s attention and agenda.

A father-in-law is the last person to know what his son-in-law is up to. Allowing him to stay in his holiday home in Kodaikanal is not the same as endorsing his petty vices or (as yet unsubstantiated) attempts to fix IPL matches. I may be a lone voice saying this. But I really think we are all playing into the hands of those who have much more to hide than these dolts. Srinivasan’s enemies (and heaven knows, he has far too many of them) are having a field day. But ask yourself, do you really care whether he heads the BCCI or Sharad Pawar. Or Rajiv Shukla. Frankly, my dear I don’t give a damn.

Upper caste scams v Lower caste scams

How Some Gather Silver In The Fog

There are two types of scam, upper caste and lower caste. The latter kind is more visible.

AAKAR PATEL

When a Balwa orchestrates a scam, you don’t know how much money was made. Even the Comptroller & Auditor General’s (CAG) accountants are confused about how to value the loss to the exchequer. The payoff is legally offered in the form of a Rs 200 crore loan to the Karunanidhi family. Is it a bribe? Tough to say. The Balwas are from the Gujarati mercantile caste, mostly Muslim, called Cheliyas. They are superb businessmen and the equal of Hindu merchant castes in running hotels and managing retail.

When a Vadra commits a scam, one isn’t even sure whether it was actually a scam, though the numbers are clear on the balancesheet. People are not advanced money without security to get into the construction business. What was the payoff for? Nobody really knows. Vadras, or Vadheras, are Khatris, the great Punjabi trading caste which dominates business in Delhi.

When an Adani (a Jain Baniya) is arrested in a scam, the motive is not to be found. The unbelievable allegation is that he evaded Rs 80 lakh worth of customs duty for a company worth Rs 26,000 crore. When an Ambani (a Modh Vaniya) does a scam, even the victim is not to be found. Was the state duped of billions of dollars in natural resources? Apparently not.

When a Jindal (Baniya) does a scam, he isn’t accused of impropriety, though his own party has allotted to him, without auction, thousands of crores in mineral deposits. When a Goel (Aggarwal Baniya) asks for Rs 100 crore as blackmail, he can coolly deflect it though the evidence is on tape. Even his employees, caught red-handed, keep their jobs.

If scams by SC/STs or OBCs tend to stand out, it’s because the transactions are pretty simple, the exchange open.

When a Dalit Mayawati does a scam, she hands over land to developers near the Taj Mahal and is caught. When a tribal Koda does a scam, he hands over land to miners and is caught. He loses his chief ministership and goes to jail. When a peasant Lingayat does a scam, he gives over land to his sons and is caught. He loses his chief ministership and goes to jail. When a peasant Reddy does a scam, he hands over land and his son goes to jail. When a peasant Yadav does a scam, he dips into money for cattle fodder and is caught. He loses chief ministership and goes to jail.

There is absolutely nothing wrong in Ashis Nandy’s observation about caste and corruption. It is accurate and obvious, unless one is blind to what is around. Nandy said, “...the fact is that most of the corrupt come from the OBC, the Scheduled Castes and now increasingly Scheduled Tribes, and as long as it was the case, the Indian Republic would survive”. He gave this example. “The state of least corruption is West Bengal. In the last 100 years, nobody from the backward classes and the SC and ST groups have come anywhere near power in West Bengal. It is an absolutely clean state.”

What he meant is obvious enough, but subtlely is not our strong suit. We are all corrupt, and this is the true meaning of Nandy’s remarks, but some castes are seen as more corrupt. Why is this so? The fact is that SC/ST and OBC scams tend to stand out as scams to us because of the nature of the transaction.

Upper-caste scams are different from lower-caste scams. The former tend to be complex, less likely to provoke anger, and therefore, more easily forgotten. Scams involving the lower castes tend to be straightforward. No fancy paperwork and an uncomplicated payoff. Cash is to be delivered in India, not Switzerland.

There is a reason for this. Those who are familiar with the process of democracy in India will tell you that over 50 per cent of the money a politician spends on elections is given to the voter. Salman Rushdie accurately defined Indian democracy as “one man, one bribe”. My speculation is that SC/ST corruption is actually more democratic, though it is seen by the middle-class with more revulsion.

What angers middle-class Indians—they will be surprised to know this—is not corruption. It is actually bribery, which is the exchange of money for favour. The correct word for this is rishwatkhori, not bhrashtachar. What is corrupted (made ‘bhrasht’) by this act of bribery is the office. It is the office, and the edifice of the state, that is corrupted. But this isn’t something that we are particularly upset by. If we were, the corruption by the upper caste’s scams would anger us more than the bribery of the lower caste scams.

But it doesn’t. What offends us is the making of money. And what really upsets us is that “those people”, and not we, are the ones making it.