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Business Commentary/Dilip Thakore

Excessive adulation a reason for corrupt middle-class politicians

This is truly an era in which the fondest hopes of the educated middle-class, which had soared sky-high when PLU (People Like Us) were elected to the highest positions of government in the subcontinent, have been dashed to pieces. Not once or twice; but over and over again.

The hottest news from the subcontinent is that Benazir Bhutto who against all odds and through the exhibition of great qualities of courage and determination had twice risen to the position of prime minister of Pakistan, has been discovered to have stashed away an estimated $ 80 million in over a dozen bank accounts in Switzerland. Moreover there is a strong likelihood that together with her husband Asif Zardari (Mr 10 per cent), she is the beneficial owner of a luxury mansion and real estate valued at an estimated $ 10 million (Rs 360 million) in Britain. Significantly, Bhutto has not denied the ownership of the Swiss bank accounts which are not illegal per se under Pakistan law.

But the question does arise -- and must be asked -- as to how an individual such as Bhutto whose only source of income is what she derives from full-time politics, could possibly have accumulated such impressive wealth. In her thus far unconvincing defence, she has stated that she was born into a wealthy family. But even her father, the late and unlamented Zulfiqar Bhutto, was little more than a full-time politician. And the honest involvement in politics -- however successful -- surely cannot build such impressive fortunes.

Benazir is not the only well-educated and well-groomed PLU politician in the subcontinent who has succumbed to the temptations of power and turned it to personal profit. There is strong (though not conclusive) evidence available to indicate that our own late prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi and/or his family, derived considerable pecuniary benefit form the Rs 640 million Bofors payoff scandal. And in neighbouring Bangladesh, the urbane and sophisticated General Ershad also found it impossible to resist the temptation to derive personal profit from public office.

While it is some consolation that unlike the unchecked loot by the selfish and self-serving dictators who have devastated the once high-potential nations of the African continent, the misdeeds of the once highly-regarded leaders of the Indian subcontinent have been outed, a larger question arises and needs to be answered. Why have subcontinental leaders with comfortable upper middle-class backgrounds, sound education and good manners and grooming, proved susceptible to tawdry monetary corruption?

After all, Rajiv had been educated at Doon School and Cambridge, and Benazir at Oxford and Harvard, the world's most prestigious educational institutions. One can expect rural politicians such as Laloo Prasad Yadav and Deve Gowda with their suspect education and inexperience of the good life being unable to resist the temptations of office. But how does one explain the lack of higher standards of probity and conduct from leaders people like Rajiv Gandhi, Narasimha Rao and Benazir Bhutto?

The seeds of the answer to this conundrum are to be found in the exaggerated respect and adulation accorded to incumbent politicians, wide discretionary powers vested in the executive arm of government, and in weak supervisory institutions which are characteristic of the subcontinent.

As the celebrated pamphleteer and political scientist Arun Shourie once perceptively observed, the public tolerates so many courtiers and sycophants of incumbent politicians, that a leader has to merely nod (or refrain from categorically refusing) for commission accounts with all legal formalities completed to be activated for them. And once such slush fund accounts are set up, politicians become vulnerable to blackmail and threats of exposure which prevents them from ever getting off the corruption merry-go-round.

The ease with which even educated, well-intentioned politicians are hoisted aboard the corruption merry-go-round is intimately connected with state participation in, and domination of, national business which is another characteristic of the Indian subcontinent. Therefore, the current wave of economic liberalisation and deregulation which is sweeping the nations of South Asia is to be welcomed not only for economic growth reasons, but also because it will inevitably reduce opportunities for political and administrative corruption.

This liberalisation tide needs to be taken at the flood with the simultaneous fortification of the other institutions of governance which have been deliberately weakened by self-serving politicians and bureaucrats during the past five decades. Though the judiciary (and the media) have begun to discharge their duties in protecting the Constitution with increasing vigour, the administration of the law is in a shambles as is the police service. The rejuvenation of the law and order machinery of the central and state governments in particular requires the sustained and unrelenting pressure of public opinion.

The writing on the proverbial wall is clear. The nations of the subcontinent urgently need to reappraise their adulatory attitude towards politicians and to sharply reduce their wide discretionary powers while simultaneously granting autonomy and fortifying punitive law, order and justice dispensation systems. Failure to advance on all these fronts simultaneously is likely to result in even well-educated and well-intentioned People Like Us become susceptible to the spreading cancer of corruption.

Dilip Thakore