Part-1
Ahmad Cameron,
I left India on Dec. 23, 1998. I did not leave it for seeking greener pastures. Rather on facing increasing level of corrupt practices while executing a National IT project in an honest manner of over Rs 10 crores in Mumbai, I realized I could be framed up by someone planting money in my scooter by which I used to go to the office. I wrote to my Secretary in Delhi by a confidential note about the fears I had. But by then I also decided it was not worth to remain in the country of my birth any more where I felt threatened living every day as a committed, honest and up right officer in the financial capital of the country. It was not a sweet decision at all, leaving behind my old parents and siblings besides all friends and relatives with whom I had grown. I had worked for over 15 years in different organizations and seen almost 80% of India by virtue of it. Initially for two years I worked in USA before settling down in Canada. So after spending 10 years here I felt let me look back and see how far my country of birth has moved during these years. I wanted to see how its balance sheet looks.
I took a pause to also recall how during the Independence movement my parents, uncles and aunts contributed without seeking any payback as freedom fighters when those privileges were being given for asking after 1947. I am proud to say India did progress a lot in almost all the sectors starting from Agriculture at one end to the IT, Communications, Nuclear and Space technology at the other due to the dedication, honesty and sincerity of first group of nation builders. India laid the foundation in the evolution of excellent and global level scientists, academics, artists and entrepreneurs such as Hargobind Khurana, Venki Ramakrishnan in science, Amratya Sen in Economics, Khosla & Sabeer Bhatia in IT, Dr Reddy in Healthcare, Mittals in Steel, Satyajit Ray, Gulzar, Rehman, Husain, Arundhati etc in fine arts to name a few. Hence on the face of it our balance sheet does not look bad at all! However, according to one of the recent compilations, the total amount of money involved in various scams over the last 12 years alone is estimated to be over Rs 80 Lakh Crore (Rs 80 trillion) or US$1.80 trillion!
On looking slightly deeper, I find all the major pillars which can make my India the largest proud democracy in the world have developed serious cracks. A simple scratch of the primary institutions such as the Defense, Judiciary, Police, Legislature, Bureaucracy, Financial Institutions, Corporate Houses, Education, Medical, Fifth State, Entertainment, Sports, and Commitment to the Weaker Sections etc will make it evident they are crumbling down at quite an accelerated pace.
Defense Sector
Defense of a country is close to every citizen’s heart, especially when India has faced five wars of various magnitudes in a little over six decades. I am taking this sector at the outset as I have remained a Senior Scientist in the Ministry of Defense. We started with stalwarts such as Gen Carriapa, Admiral Katari, Marshal Mukherjee and by 1971 Field Marshal Manekshaw wrote a chapter in golden letters of our combat history. The ideals set forth by those who fought during the freedom struggle could be seen amongst this lot. Officers commissioned in early 50s started retiring by mid 1980s. It is here we all could see the change of guards at the ground level. By 1988-89 this primary pillar started showing first symptoms of corrosion with Bofors on the dock making a dent in our combat preparedness. Between March 1998 to April 17, 1999 when Vajpayee’s NDA coalition lost confidence vote for the second time, all political parties were tired, exhausted and were heavily short on funds to fight yet another general election within 40 months. Under such a scenario and during the caretaker government of Vajpayee, Kargil war takes place and within months after that war, coffin scam broke out i.e., coffins were bought at a unit price of $2,500 from US when the same coffins were procured by its own Army for $1200.00 each! Involvement of senior defense personnel besides the politicians resulted in hitting even the moral and ethical grounds of our fighting force as it was about the soldiers who had laid their lives for the protection of our mother land. In this scam CBI filed the charge sheet against four, including a Retd Maj General rank officer.
Interestingly on Dec 13, 2001 the matter related to coffins and Barak Missile scams were to be debated in the Indian Parliament. To me it has always remained intriguing that on the same day while the session was in progress the most heinous and daring attack on the Indian Parliament takes place which exposes many security lapses under none other than the then Deputy PM and Home Minister L K Advani, also called “Chotey Sardar”, to be reminded of Sardar Patel, the Iron Man of freedom struggle period. And in the melee the practice of organized payoffs growing in the Defense supplies getting exposed on the floor of the parliament as well as the likelihood of the 3rd NDA government falling as it happened in 1999, got evaded.
Things have come to such a pass that only recently Tehelka wrote Ex-Chief of the Army Staff Gen Deepak Kapoor “opened his office to wheeler dealers”. In less than past 5 years we have Dry Rations, Frozen Meat, Sukhna Land, etc scams coming out like worms from a can. Morality has reached such low levels that even residential units for the war widows have been usurped as evident from the Adarsh Housing scam. “Every General Officer commanding in-charge (GOC, army) between 2004 and 2009 got a flat in the building,” was told to Bombay High court during a hearing by none other than the Defense Ministry’s lawyer.
Recently Lt Gen P K Rath, former Deputy Chief of Army Staff-designate, was found guilty by an Army court martial in the Sukna land scam, becoming the highest ranking serving officer to be convicted for corruption. An Army Court of Inquiry had found Rath guilty of wrongdoing along with Lt Gen Avadesh Prakash, the then Military Secretary to the Army Chief, Lt Gen Ramesh Halguly, the then 11 Corps Commander and Maj Gen P K Sen.
When unprecedented transfer of an upright and honest Lt Gen Panag was carried out and he appealed to the Defense Minister Antony, the later preferred to back the Army Chief Kapoor’s prerogative of moving Gen Panag! No wonder when Generals start laying hands on the wives of the juniors as brought out in the Israel visit episode of a Defense Ministry delegation in 2010, it can be seen to what extent and how deep the cracks have developed in this institution of ours which is responsible for securing our borders from enemy’s intrusion and responsible to set the role models before the juniors who lay down their lives for our nation at times of war.
The Civil Servants Lot
On the eve of independence, the initial set of ICS, IPS, IFS, IFoS etc officers inherited work ethics which has been responsible for the planned manner of our nation building. Bhakra Dam; HEC, Ranchi, HAL, SAIL, Chitranjan Locomotive Works, Avadi, Factory, Nagarjuna Project, IITs, IIMs, BARC, ISRO etc have been the contributions made by the 1st two generations of civil servants’ vision, dedication and sincerity led by the political bosses.
In early 1990s while serving as a senior faculty member at the National Academy of Administration in Mussoorie, I was told by the then Director how an IAS officer who was the District Magistrate of a border district of Assam, at the peak of Indo-China conflict, was sacked by Late Lal Bahadur Shastri as the Minister-in-Charge, due to dereliction of duty. I could not resist myself to ask if any other IAS officer was removed from the service later. The Director politely moved to another topic and I was softly heckled by my civil servant colleague & friend, not to ask such embarrassing questions in future. Since then a lot of water has flown down the Ganges. I recall during the 1989 Independence Day address from the ramparts of Red Fort, none other than Late Rajiv Gandhi mentioned, “When our Government sanctions Rs 100 for any developmental work then only Rs 15 reach the desired end”! No wonder then we find our current Union Home Secretary’s remarks on Dec 20, 2010 appalling viz., “Police recruitment in almost every state is mired in ‘corruption’ and aspirants do not get jobs as constables and sub-inspectors unless ‘money’ is paid”!
In view of such a rot getting cultured, the staged encounters have become an organized industry in a similar manner as is the postings and transfers in Provincial Govt. Gone are the days when Shaheed Bhagat Singh, Chandreshekhar Azad, Hemant Karkare or Sanjeev Bhat, Satish Verma or Rahul Sharma would be taken as role models by our youth. Today Vanzara along with his gang of police officers supported by Chief Minister Modi and his team of Gujarat Ministers such as Shah, have all become the top idols for our future generation! No wonder if the late Justice Anand Narain Mulla of Allahbad High Court passed a judgment which is quoted globally by probably all law schools vis-à-vis the role of police in organized crimes in a nation. He had said: “There is not a single lawless group in the whole of the country whose record of crime comes anywhere near the record of that single organized unit which is known as the Indian Police Force.”
Now the bureaucratic scandals are not limited to few Lakhs of rupees. Any scandal coming to the attention of media is not less than several Crores, may it be from Govt quarters or corporate sector. The bureaucracy and police have come to such corrupt level that the Director General of Haryana Police was jailed for molesting of a teenager girl; another IPS officer got journalist Shivani Bhatnagar eliminated; Neera Yadav a 1971 batch IAS officer earned the dubious distinction of being the country’s first IAS officer to be removed from the chief secretary’s post (not the IAS, kindly note!) by the Supreme Court on charges of corruption in 2005. She was also tagged as one of the “most corrupt officers” in a poll held by UP IAS association in 1997! Just last month the Joshi IAS couple in Madhya Pradesh was found to have stashed over Rs 400.00 Crores of assets! Now the phrase in the corridors of bureaucracy is “it has been joshied”, referring to the sofas, kitchen utensils, mattresses, cushions, empty oil canisters etc in which the couple had hid over hundred of Crores of hard currency!
It is not only the IAS and IPS officers who have brought such a state in the ministerial corridors of power but the Indian Revenue Service (IRS), Indian Forest Service (IFoS), Provincial Civil Services (PCS), Bank Executives, Chartered Accountants, Doctors, Lawyers etc are not far behind. Srivastava of NALCO is the latest in this brazen show of one-up-man-ship apparent in the corruption culture prevailing all over the country. Coming from an average upper middle class family, a classmate of mine, who made it to the IRS in late 1970s, was heckled by two of us on the eve of his joining the service that he would be making around Rs 20-30 lakhs (that was the maximum we could think of at that moment!) in bribes during his service and then will take pre-mature retirement to enter politics. My friend and I felt vindicated when he shot back, “Some times you both are able to see things crystal clear”! After completing his 20 years of service, he did take voluntary retirement but with the caveat of having several Crores worth of properties and business in the downtown of one of the metros of India!
To be concluded..
(The author has served as a senior faculty member at the National Academy of Administration in Mussoorie. He has also worked as a Senior Scientist in the Ministry of Defense. He can be contacted at Email: [email protected])