Corruption is a hotly debated topic in India. As far as I can remember, it has always been so.  The following is my reflection on the state of corruption in India. It is not enough to simply point out the problem; I am also sharing my advice for my countrymen and what I myself am doing to root out this malady. I believe it is possible to completely eradicate corruption from India.

Anna Hazare and Arvind Kejriwal have brought intense spotlight on this issue. I have known Kejriwal from my time at Tata Steel, in Jamshedpur. He was a 1989 batch Graduate Trainee from IIT, Kharagpur, and I had joined the same program a year earlier from IIT, Kanpur. He and I had participated in a cultural event put up by the trainees. Kejriwal was part of a skit and I remember the dialogue he delivered. I have fond memories of him from those days, and I feel sorry for him for what he is going through. It is like he is playing a game of cricket following all the rules of the game, while his opponents are on the same field following the rules of field hockey.

I was intrigued, so I set myself on a soul searching mission and made a startling discovery: I have engaged in corrupt behavior and have corrupt tendencies.  It is important for me to recognize my own corrupt tendencies and instances of my corrupt behavior from the past. I denounce corruption; therefore it would be hypocritical of me to not acknowledge my own. It has helped me on my personal journey to becoming free of corruption by doing so. I once attended a meeting of Food Addicts Anonymous, which is modeled on the renowned Alcoholic Anonymous program. Each attendee stands up and states something like this: "I am John and I am an alcoholic." It has been proven that the act of labeling oneself an alcoholic sets one on the path of recovering from alcoholism, as most alcoholics remain in denial about their problem and so do not try to solve it.  Something similar has to be done to eradicate corruption from our society. I find that most Indians who rail against corruption fail to acknowledge their own corrupt behavior. In fact, I am struck by the innocence with which Indians do not acknowledge their own corruption. Once, I was traveling on the Rajdhani Express to New Delhi from Katihar. In the middle of the night, I overheard negotiations taking place between a passenger and the conductor. The passenger wanted to travel in First Class without having purchased a ticket beforehand. Finally, the two settled on a bribe. In the morning, I woke up to a passionate debate among my fellow passengers about corruption, and the loudest voice was of the person who had bribed the conductor a few hours earlier.

For all of us who wish to see corruption rooted out of India, we need to begin by taking care of our own corruption. Every dialogue on corruption should start with, "I am so and so, I am corrupt and here is what I did last week to control it." Or, "I am so and so and I have been corruption free for the last month." Right now, I find that we are experts at spotting others’ drinking without seeing the bottle in our own hands. Corruption in India will not go away or diminish as long as we continue this culture of self-deception. It simply cannot be so pervasive if most of us are not engaging in it. When I encourage people to do some soul searching and watch their corrupt behavior, I find that they view their own corruption as either too small to be significant or as pragmatic. They fail to realize that even those who are universally considered corrupt, they too, consider their follies as insignificant or mere pragmatism. Acts driven by individual “pragmatism” pile up and India is getting crushed under staggering corruption.     

I recently looked at the latest numbers at Transparency.org and found that no country could score 100 our of 100.  Every society has corruption. I have two motherlands: India is my motherland by birth, and the US is my adopted one. In the US, we encounter little corruption in our day-to-day life. But a donation of $50,000 to a congressman can get a clause inserted into a bill that can in turn help the donor earn millions. In the US, corruption is therefore legalized and enshrined in the law. The result is a massive amount of it at the highest levels of government, even though an ordinary citizen does not have to bribe a Department of Motor Vehicles clerk to get a driver's license.

Corruption in India, meanwhile, is an equal opportunity phenomenon. It is so pervasive that we do not even notice it in our daily lives. We only notice corruption when the amount involved is really big. In small matters, we do not recognize corruption in our conduct or that of others.

I have been intrigued by the very high level of corruption in public life in India and all former European colonies in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. All countries which were ruled by outsiders have high levels of corruption.

I found a clue for the reason why by watching my father and his colleagues. My father was a clerk at a Civil Court in Bihar. We lived in government quarters, and our neighbors were all clerks. Everyone had a salary. Then, there was a daily income. This came from the "personal fees"  that clerks would charge for each transaction passing through their hands. It was a fixed and very structured system. There was, and still is, a position for the peon whose job is to shout out the names of the plaintiffs and defenders when it was their turn to appear before the judge. If the peon’s hands are not greased, he would either forget to shout out the name or would do it in such a low voice that people would miss their court dates.

I am sharing a paragraph from the novel Namak Ka Daroga ("Inspector of Salt"), by the famous Indian author Munshi Premchand. The story is set against the backdrop of the prohibition the British regime had placed against Indians making salt from the sea water. The scarcity had led to the smuggling of salt from neighboring Nepal. In response, the British hired Indian men as inspectors to prevent salt from being smuggled into the area. In this passage in the book, which I have translated from Hindi, a father gives advice to his son, who is about to become a salt inspector:

"Don't pay attention to the position--that is like the tomb of a holy man. You should keep an eye on the offerings on the tomb. You should look for a job that has outside income. Monthly salary is like the full moon that gradually reduces in size before vanishing. Outside income is like the flowing stream that always quenches the thirst. Man gives the salary and nobody can become rich on that. It is God that gives the outside income, and one can accumulate wealth with that alone. You are a man of wisdom, how much more should I persuade you?"

While this comes from a work of fiction, most of us can relate to it, having received similar advice from our elders.

The salaries of my father and his colleagues were so low that, without bribes, their families were likely to starve. I watched as my father worked seven days a week in a white-collar job for a salary that was not enough to meet our family’s basic needs.

Later, I discovered that the tradition of low salaries for civil service workers has been in place since the time of the British Raj in India. That is when I realized that the British used corruption as a tool to break the spirit of the people they employed, as it has been my experience that corrupt people are more malleable than those who are not. The British kept people working in white collar jobs at such low salaries that the workers had no choice but to take bribes to supplement their income, while their employers encouraged the practice by looking the other way. This strategy created a vast pool of workers with low self-esteem who were easy to control and keep fearful. Again, Munshi Premchand has captured this practice beautifully in his novel Gaban (“Embezzlement”). There is also a film based on this novel featuring Sunil Datta and Sadhana.

India subsequently achieved a strange version of "peaceful" freedom which left all forms of governance from the time of the Raj intact. This included the culture of low paid workers and the accepted practice of taking bribes.

The result is that today, my motherland is a huge education center for corruption. Since the time we were born, we have been given the kind of advice that I have quoted from Munshi Premchand's novel. Corruption has gotten into our DNA, and just as modern science has found that the life experiences of one generation alter the DNA of the next generation, ours has been hammered with the corruption gene for several hundred years. In contrast, there have been only weak attempts at eliminating the gene. If we truly are serious doing so, several generations should be prepared to work on themselves.

There is a lot of talk of “cleaning up” politics and civil administration. That approach will not work, because one set of corrupt politicians will be replaced with another set of equally, if not more, corrupt set of politicians. Therefore, another reason I feel sorry for Kejriwal is that he is running on a platform of fighting corruption only to join a system that is top-to-bottom corrupt. It will be a tall order to find honest candidates for all the seats on his party’s ticket. If his party manages to win the majority of seats in the national parliament and form governments in every state, he will have to transport civil servants from some other planet to run his corruption-free administration, so rare are honest ones now.

Trying to turn a successful politician in India into an honest man is impossible because it is too late for him. He has become successful in politics by engaging in corruption in the first place. Perhaps he can be removed from his position and thrown into jail, but then he will be immediately replaced with someone of the same mettle. Thus the top-down clean up of Indian society will not work.

If you have reached this far in my blog, you will find the solution I share that will work. The solution is very hard - and simultaneously very simple. Each one of us needs to take a pledge to become honest and influence the people in one's sphere of influence: our sons, daughters, friends, and colleagues. Parents need to take a pledge to not give their wards the kind of lesson that the father in Munshi Premchand’s novel gave.  People like Kejriwal, Hazare, and Baba Ramdev have much larger spheres of influence. Instead of trying to cure politicians who are now just terminally ill patients of corruption, they should take pledges from their followers to discard corrupt behavior. From my own experience, I can say that it took me a long time to understand the subtlety of corruption and honesty.  People like Kejriwal, Hazare, and Baba Ramdev should help their followers learn how to not be corrupt.

Until we all can individually come clean of our corrupt tendencies and behavior, India will remain mired in corruption. Until I can get rid of my own corruption, my complaining about somebody else's corruption is an act of corruption in itself.