With neither the ruling Congress party nor the principal opposition BJP doing anything substantial to weed out this endemic malaise, it is the Aam Aadmi Party — the latest entrant in the political arena — that is expected to be the watchdog in the nation’s fight against graft
- By Laurence Cockcroft
- Published: 20:00 May 7, 2014
- Image Credit: Ramachandra Babu/©Gulf News
In the bear pit of India’s election, voters seem particularly focused on two issues: Economic growth and corruption. However, while growth manifests itself in many different ways, some of them hard for the average voter to comprehend, corruption is a tangible and daily reality. Corruption has played an important part in Indian electoral politics in the past. As early as 1977 and 1989, voters selected the winning parties in national elections in part because they pledged to fight corruption. But public concern about corruption in the run-up to this year’s election has reached a new high.
The current wave of concern found its first outlet in the 2012 campaign for an anti-corruption body with investigative powers (a Lokpal), which was led by Anna Hazare, a civil rights activist in the Gandhian tradition. His hunger strike in support of the Lokpal led to its adoption by parliament in December 2013, albeit in a diluted form. Meanwhile, over the past year, some key players in India’s political and business elite — the sort of people who normally benefit from a widespread culture of impunity — have been found guilty on corruption-related charges and imprisoned, including A. Raja (former minister of telecommunications), B.S. Yeddyurappa (former chief minister of Karnataka) and Jaganmohan Reddy (YSR Congress chief in Andra Pradesh state).
Even the chairman of the all-powerful Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), Narayanaswami Srinivasan, has been implicated in match-fixing scandals. Last month, the Supreme Court required Srinivasan to resign his position. At the same time, under the Right to Information Act of 2005, thousands of applicants have been requesting information on corruption-related issues and pointing fingers at many officials, especially at the state level. (In some cases, those information requests have led to the assassination of those making the applications). At the local level, very successful “right to know” and anti-corruption campaigns — such as the Public Affairs Centre and Janaargha (sponsors of the website “I Paid a Bribe,” which has had two million hits since it was launched four years ago) in Bengaluru — have raised awareness of citizens’ rights to a new level.
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