Author: Kanchan Gupta
Publication: The Pioneer
Date: August 20, 2011
URL: http://www.dailypioneer.com/362199/India-needs-reforms-not-a-super-babu.html
We were at Checkpoint Charlie. There it was,
in real life no more than an unimpressive white prefabricated cabin with a
grey slanting roof straddling the famous crossing in the Berlin Wall that
had come to symbolise the Cold War. This is where spies were swapped on smoky,
rain-washed evenings; a gap in the Iron Curtain immortalised by writers of
brooding yet brilliant fiction like John le Carre. Just in case those crossing
Checkpoint Charlie from West Berlin into East Berlin were unaware of their
passage from 'freedom' into 'servitude', a large board had been put up for
their benefit: "You are leaving the American sector." These six
words were repeated in Russian and French. In brief, you had been warned.
It was a bright summer day when the bus in
which I was travelling crossed into East Berlin after a brief halt at Checkpoint
Charlie. A rather well-built East German woman with a stern, unsmiling face,
muscles straining at the fabric of her severely cut dark brown Army jacket,
had boarded the bus, flipped through our passports, and sold each one of us
a ticket, a rectangular piece of cardboard printed with undecipherable details.
Her job done, the bus began to inch its way through the narrow opening; within
seconds we had made our passage from West into East. A short distance later,
the bus stopped again. An official boarded the bus, flipped through our passports,
checked our tickets, made elaborate notes in a leather-bound logbook, and
disembarked, without so much as saying guten morgen or danke - he was clearly
not paid for that. A kilometre or so away, the bus was flagged down at a barricade.
A third official, jowly and scowling, boarded the bus, flipped through our
passports, checked our tickets, and made further elaborate notes in his logbook,
also leather-bound.
That, however, was not the end of the passport-ticket
story. When we disembarked from the bus, we were made to pass through a turnstile
which would turn only after we handed over our passports and tickets to a
woman who bore remarkable similarity to Herta Bothe of Bergen-Belsen fame
and she pressed a switch behind the counter where she stood, her face passive
and her gaze steely. The passport was returned, the ticket was retained as
it was 'state property'. I later learned that the multiple checks were to
ensure that the previous official had done his or her job and meticulously
followed all rules. Each one of them would file a report to his or her boss,
who would then file a report to higher officials, who would then compare and
match the reports and file yet another report recording their satisfaction
or pointing out lapses. Those reports would then be put in a file and the
file would be filed in a high-security Stasi building somewhere for future
reference. As for the tickets, they would be recycled till the cardboard crumbled;
the remains would then be sent to a recycling plant to produce fresh tickets.
A very elaborate system, and foolproof too, just that it did not prevent the
edifice from collapsing after the first brick in the Berlin Wall was dislodged
in the winter of 1989, leading to the fall of the sprawling Soviet Empire.
Memories of that summer day's experience at
Checkpoint Charlie and beyond came flooding back last Friday as I heard Ms
Kiran Bedi addressing the crowd at Ramlila Maidan, or Midan-e-Ramlila if we
must borrow metaphors since Anna Hazare's do-or-die crusade against corruption
which has captured the popular imagination is being compared with Egypt's
Midan-e-Tahrir, or Tahrir Square, 'revolution' by easily excitable though
appallingly ill-informed 'revolutionaries' waving the National Tricolour and
chanting "Azadi", demanding that the Jan Lok Pal Bill, which they
of course haven't even read, be adopted and implemented without a comma or
full stop being changed.
There was Ms Bedi on the dais, waving at the
crowds and swaying to their sloganeering. "You don't need to know what
is there in the Jan Lok Pal Bill we have drafted," she assured the cheering
masses, "All you need to know is that we (and she emphasised the 'we'
with a great degree of emphasis) will get you 101. Do you know what is 101?
Let me tell you what is 101. If someone asks you for a bribe, no matter where
you are, whether in a city or in a village, you will have to just dial 101
and immediately Jan Lok Pal inspectors will rush to the place with cameras
and recorders." Here she took a pause as the masses went into a frenzy
of cheering, assured that a solution to the gargantuan problem of corruption
was just three digits away. "And… listen to me… and, if 101
doesn't do its job, you can dial 102. Other Jan Lok Pal inspectors will rush
to your help and take the first lot of inspectors to task," Ms Bedi was
in full flow now, "You will ask me, what if 102 doesn't work? Don't worry,
you can then dial 103…"
I didn't bother to listen any further, but
possibly she went on to explain how 104 would monitor 103, and 105 would keep
a watch on 104, and so on. In other words, what we are being promised is a
Soviet-style parallel bureaucracy with Soviet-style inspectors to enforce
a Soviet-style law in a Gestapo state which will rule not on the strength
of respect for the law but fear of an omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent
Big Brother. What is being demanded are not measures to remove the primary
reason for corruption, a bloated Government with a humongous bureaucracy,
but a law that will make Government even bigger - a return to the days of
Inspector Raj which we had to cope with for the privilege of living in a joyless
socialist India wrapped with endless red tape.
Everybody knows that the route to a corruption-free
India lies through radical reforms that will ensure minimum government, maximum
governance. But that's a tedious process which will also mark the end of entitlements.
So, what we are being asked to adopt instead is a second version of the hugely
wasteful NREGA which has bred further corruption and thievery at all levels
of our administration. The new job-generating scheme shall be called JLPEGA
- it will create sufficient employment to keep retired babus, busybodies and
self-appointed monitors of rectitude in clover at the taxpayers' expense.
Sadly, our political class, denuded of credibility, has so compromised itself
that it lacks the guts to take on those who claim to represent all of India
but have nothing to show, apart from a well-choreographed made-for-television
protest, to substantiate that claim.
Strait is the gate and narrow the path to
redemption. If legislation and the creation of bureaucratic institutions could
alone redeem us as a nation, we wouldn't find ourselves in such a sorry mess.
Populism has brought us to where we are today; populism of the kind being
witnessed at Midan-e-Ramlila (and before that at Tihar Square) will only leave
us stuck deeper in the mire of hopelessness. Anna Hazare is right up to a
point. India does need a second freedom movement, but not to recreate the
Inspector Raj of our socialist past. We need a second freedom movement to
secure economic freedom and freedom from a system that intrudes into every
aspect of our lives. That's how democracies have dealt with the menace of
corruption elsewhere in the world.
