Forget ethics, just pay!

Scandal and sensation is part of everyday life anywhere in the world. Like an epidemic, it has occasional flare-ups and then subsides into a subliminal mutter, all set and waiting to erupt once again into a storm that hits headlines in print, on television and over the Internet. Over the past few weeks, an epicentre has been India, a land-building scam vying for public attention with one focusing on the telecommunications industry and many others just waiting for their share of the media spotlight. It is all about high level politics, contacts, licenses, permits and, obviously, a great deal of money. With that quantum of power comes a lot of privilege, many perquisites and even more permissiveness, at least in the local ethos. And all along, though everyone knows, nothing can be proved or used in a court of law. Not so much because it is not useful and useable evidence, but because the process of untangling it all would be too time-consuming, too messy and just too complicated to deal with on a fast-track basis.

Transparency International's latest ranking of 178 nations by their perceived level of corruption indicated that India had fallen three places, with most Indians being labelled "utterly corrupt". Congress President Sonia Gandhi recently said that the fast pace of economic growth in India was happening at the cost of a "moral universe" that was "shrinking". The biggest noise was perhaps made at the Commonwealth Games, which concluded not too long ago in Delhi, and was coloured a darker hue by the taint of corruption in places that should, ideally, have been clean and whitewashed, with no hint of anything that was not above board and honest. And, as the latest nail in the ethical coffin, Ratan Tata, a very respected industrialist with a huge and immensely successful conglomerate to his name, told the story of how he was asked for a bribe by a government official when he was thinking about starting a new domestic airline.

In everyday life too there is a great deal of wheeling and dealing, some of it astonishingly underhanded. There is corruption everywhere, from the parking lot attendant taking a little something to find you a good space ahead of the waiting line of cars to a minor minion at the local municipality office who wants to be "induced" to expedite signatures so that you can buy your new home. We have all faced it and are usually so inured to it that we do not find it strange, let alone dishonest, any more. I am as much part of this cycle of a little bad-tinged good as anyone. When I was just 14 years old, I got a driving license that stated that I was 18, just by handing over a surprisingly small amount of money to the official at the local authority office. When I was rather older, living alone in a city that was not mine, Delhi, I was asked blatantly for some money to escape dealing with a court appearance when I took a right turn against the sign, never mind that the sign was nicely hidden in a tangle of leafy branches of an overhanging tree, thus giving me no indication that what I was doing was not allowed. Since then, life has not been all honest either — most recently, we gave a traffic policeman a little pourboire to let us off the offence of jumping an unexpected red light at a crossroads. All in the urgency of getting somewhere to get something done without the wait and accompanying hassle.

The current news focuses on much larger instances of wavering morals. There is no traffic policeman to bribe or government minion to coax into granting favours. Huge amounts of money are involved and people in positions of greater power are part of the scenario. From the Commonwealth Games, where the issue of accountability was clouded by accounts that were fudged on a massive scale, to the Adarsh housing society, where premium apartments were built ostensibly for war windows but bought at extraordinarily low rates to less needy souls, to under-quoting and over-charging bidders for a new-generation telecommunications service, the dirt is flooding into the public domain and the figureheads who were supposed to maintain a code of conduct and the dignity of their post are falling off their self-attained pedestals, fast. And as each scandal is unearthed, rodents who were part of the tangled web woven around it desert the fast-sinking ship, ratting, as it were, on their superiors whose orders they were merely following. Who takes the blame? Who accepts the responsibility? Who pays the price of these shortcuts to a better life for themselves? Who knows!

But life is not all murky in these parts. We do have honest officials, politicians who are not corrupt and a great number of ordinary citizens who will not resort to the easy route to wherever they are going. It all takes a little longer to get there, that is all. If you have the time, honesty is still, after all, the best policy.

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Ramya Sarma is a Mumbai-based writer-editor.