Let us extirpate “CORRUPTION”

The title of this post must be a dead giveaway – I am not going to say how to handle this corruption or that, or even something beyond. I am interested in figuring out how some items catch fire in the imagination of people and others do not.

OK, I understand that local relevance carries a premium. Yet, some things that do not cause even a ripple in the local media can be easily justified as deserving a mention among the chattering classes in India, particularly given the attention globalization receives in the same media. Why, then, the media ignores globalized dimensions of corruption? They are unable to define corruption.

First, local corruption – the list is long and I will give only the marquee names that roped into the dragnet the big political cheese: Spectrum, Coal, Granite, Adarsh, BCCI, IPL, any number of defense procurement … I will claim that these scams and scandals thrived on the “rentier” business of allocating scarce public property for private gains by the putative public-servants, the politicians, for that euphemism - consideration. Of course, there was the other side to this transaction – mostly corporates (pharma companies, for example), but some individuals (including lobbyists) too – but they never grabbed the headlines, perhaps because media outlets were effectively underwritten by them.

Go overseas and let us look at the situation. The names are no less marquee, and equally arrogant as their Indian counterparts. One difference though – more corporates and fewer politicians comprising the list. To start with the lesser evils in the west, I cannot miss Silvio Berlusconi. If you think of Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney as politicians, I club them with business people. That suits me better and is no less defensible.

Then, let me state the dominant others, at various levels: News Corp, Rupert Murdoch, death penalty, Bernard Madoff, WorldCom, Google, Siemens, Creation Science, religion and the clergy, climate skepticism (fueled [word used advisedly] by the hydrocarbon lobby), Apple, Enron, Raj Rajaratnam, Rajat Gupta, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, rating agencies (Standard & Poor, Moody’s), any and every oil company of the west (Exxon Mobil, BP, Shell…), the accounting firm Arthur Anderson, World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz (offering a lot of nice financial cushions to his girlfriend’s seat at the bank), Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell taking the UN for a ride, the US Supreme Court’s decision on Citizens United (on campaign contributions and asserting that corporations enjoy freedom of speech guarantee as much as individuals do; if this is not corruption, what is?), IMF road rolling over Greece and then doing a mea culpa …

You can put a dollar value to each of them and I would not be surprised if many of them dwarfed the numbers thrown up by Indian corruption numbers. For example, tax avoided by Apple is in billions of dollars per year (or is it Euros?). The cost of Bush’s war in Iraq – don’t ask.

A rider to the above: I do not accept the defense of many of these companies that they are following the law; the reason being it is they who wrote the law. Lobbying is not corruption. Why? The law says so. Who wrote the law? The lobbyists. See, how simple it is.

The above is a short list, a very short list. And, even given an unassailable logic and the fastest supercomputer, it will be impossible to decide which of the above is corruption and which is not. Then, how do I go about extirpating corruption?

This is where intelligence plays its crucial part. Management gurus claim that what is not measurable cannot exist. Likewise what is not definable cannot exist. Presto, no CORRUPTION!

Raghuram Ekambaram