By Aakar Patel
Corruption and bribery are two words that are interchangeable. Or are they? Bribery, in the way that we use it today, is of 16th-century origin and is defined as the “act of magistrates taking money for corrupted services”.
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Note that corruption is part of that definition, and it is a much older word, of Latin origin. Its meaning has little to do with the exchange of money for favours. It is defined as the “act of becoming putrid, dissolution, decay”.
Bribery is an individual act; corruption is, in addition to bribery, the decaying and rotting of institutions. This is the distinction, and it is a major one.
The Economist Intelligence Unit, part of The Economist magazine, produces a crony-capitalism index every few years. It measures how large a part of the economy has been surrendered to making individuals rich by manipulating policy, what is called rent-seeking.
In 2016, crony capitalism formed 3% of India’s GDP. In 2023, the last year in which this was measured, it had doubled. This may or may not be bribery but it is certainly corruption, because the power and legitimacy of the state is being eroded and misused to enrich chosen individuals.
The state can decay and rot in other ways. It is important to understand that for something to rot, it has to exist fully in the first place. Indian democracy is a project that has taken a long time to build. Books have been written about what a monumental exercise adult franchise was, how the first electoral rolls were drawn up, and how much effort was made to include individuals, including those who were only to be found on footpaths at night. Innovations like election symbols were introduced to encourage those who could not read to participate.
Credibility was built over time. Parliament tried to halt defections by elected members. The power to arbitrarily dismiss state governments was taken away from the Centre in 1994. Around the same period, we finally said goodbye to one of the most persistent problems of electoral democracy in India: booth capturing and ballot stuffing. This happened with the introduction of the voting machine.
A short time before that, older readers will remember, the Election Commission became, for the first time, a body that asserted itself against the government. This happened first under a maverick individual named Seshan, but it continued when the government tried to shackle him by adding two other commissioners to make it a panel of three.
Progress can be noted in the institution of democracy becoming more efficient, more credible and more trustworthy. Corruption is allowing this institution to rot and decay for individual benefit.
The progress has been undone on the matters of defections and dismissals. Today, entire parties are bought out, from the west of India to the east. No matter whom one chooses to vote for, often the result is that the same people continue to control everything.
The damage done to the institution of the Election Commission is likely permanent, as is the harm it has inflicted on the electoral rolls. A future government, even if well-meaning, will have no way to undo what is unfolding before us and what has already been done.
Either the entire SIR process must be vitiated — in which case it would also raise questions about elections that have taken place after the alleged assault on the voter rolls — or all the crores of individuals who have been erased must be added after they personally and individually validate themselves to the satisfaction of the state. Under what rules can this happen? Will those new rules mean that we have two tiers of voters, one who cleared SIR and the rest who came through another path? This is a problem that is not going away.
Remember that it all began without a proximate trigger. Nobody had proven, or even claimed, that India’s voter rolls were damaged beyond repair and needed to be fixed with this blunt and violent instrument requiring voters to prove their authenticity through ancestry. This is a gratuitous exercise in which a hammer has been taken to our voter lists, just as casually as it was taken to our currency a decade ago.
There is a saying in America that goes, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” This earthy line tells us that if something is functioning, it does not need to be meddled with. But that does not accommodate the idea of malice. If it ain’t broke, break it, is the version we are living under.
Though it was imperfect, and we have looked at some of the ways in which it was, Indian democracy was our crown jewel when we engaged with the world. It was messy and chaotic, but it was real, honest and true. We could confidently tell ourselves we were a democratic state. One person, one vote and so on. Can we now?
The decades of institution-building that took place before the BJP won a majority in 2014 were a giant crumple zone. The assault on institutions — courts, universities, the election system, pluralism, political culture and the media — took a whole decade because the institutions, some weak and others flawed, existed and worked.
They have been rotted, decayed and made putrid for the sake of making them so. This is the essence of corruption.
