10 years back no one would
have bothered about it. We have always lived with the knowledge that politicians are
corrupt, that businessmen bend rules to make it etc. And this general awareness about their impropriety never kicked up a public storm or dented their popularity. In fact, there was
admiration for their ability to con and prosper expressed in private quarters.
Many said why complain about the means as long as the end is good. No one grudged
them their ill-gotten wealth.
Then what has changed us so
much in last four to five years? Why are political parties fighting elections
with corruption as their central issue? Why are the channels going bonkers over
what would have been dismissed as petty corruption issues a few years ago?
Our tolerance about corruption
has shrunk in last few years. We have started asking questions about what we
had always taken for granted.
Couple of months ago, when
BJP’s land bill had just started being discussed in media, one day I saw an
elderly man being interviewed on a TV channel. He spoke with the simplicity of
a village elder. He blamed the government for forsaking the welfare of the
poor. He threatened to start a movement to raise aware around the land bill. It
reminded me of the chaos the elderly man had created only four years back.
It’s been some time I saw the
interview and nothing of the sort we had witnessed earlier followed. Maybe Anna
Hazare held a meeting or two, following that TV interview, but they never
created the nation-wide stir his anti-corruption movement had four years ago.
It’s to that movement four
years ago, which never reached any conclusion but brought corruption to the
center stage of politics, that Congress owes getting an issue which it can
firmly wrap its fist around since the formation of the new government. It’s to
that movement four years ago that BJP owes its coming to power at the center on
the strength of the popular despair it created against Congress’s corrupt rule.
It’s to that movement four
years ago that Delhi owes its unpredictable chief minister Arvind Kejriwal. And
many more transformative changes that have taken place in India since that
anti-corruption movement spearheaded by the bespectacled elderly man on the TV
channel – have their origin in that movement four years ago.
Whether you think that in an
atmosphere where tiniest of misdemeanors by public figures can be orchestrated
into an over-blown national hysteria, there is always the possibility of the
political establishment misleading us into believing that all scams are same.
Or you believe, when it comes to corruption, size or type shouldn’t matter. The
politics of propriety as an issue has never had it so good. All earlier
movements with a social impact dealt with a bouquet of issues; corruption was
just one of them.
So maybe Sushma and Vasundhara
will still get away with whatever they have done or not. But corruption as a political
issue is not going fall out of favour with the political establishment any time
soon. When an opposition dislodges dislodges a ruling party on the basis of
corruption charges and after staying in power for some time gets bored of
taking about corruption, it’s time for the former ruling party to attack the government
on corruption.
