The authors observed that the academic evidence supported the popular perception that corruption was widespread and endemic.
Can the State government be empowered with the ultimate prerogative of prosecuting the guilty proponents cited in the SIT land grab cases before the Commission of Inquiry?
According to Dr Vipin Sharma in his 2011 Seminar article entitled “Corruption and Scam”: “Corruption in India has taken a widely virulent and deliberate form with scams popping up almost every day. India’s politicians are leading the protagonists with realty being the main theme. Only some small fish are made scapegoats while the ringleaders deliberately and openly indulge in manipulation and corruption.”
In the opinion of Dr Sharma, according to TI (Transparency International), judicial corruption in India is attributable to factors such as “delays in the disposal of cases, shortage of judges, and complex procedures, all of which are exacerbated by a preponderance of new laws”.
Relatedly, Wikipedia elaborates that: “Transparency International e.V. (TI) is a German registered association founded in 1993 by former employees of the World Bank. Based in Berlin, it is nonprofit and non-governmental purpose is to take action to combat global corruption with civil societal anti-corruption measures and to prevent criminal activities arising from corruption.”
In their collaborative research article by Sandip Sukhtankar and Milan Vaishnav that was presented at the INDIA POLICY FORUM, 2014“15 and was entitled “Corruption in India: Bridging Research Evidence and Policy Options”:
n Interestingly, however, they found that the costs of day-to-day corruption were just as large, if not larger, than those of the “scams” that dominated the headlines.
n Further, the findings revealed that there was very little evidence to support the idea that greater transparency, information, and community-based efforts had a significant impact on reducing corruption on their own.
The reason behind this grim evaluation in hoping to weed out corruption has been better enunciated by Devesh Kapur in the same collaborative research paper by Sandip Sukhtankar and Milan Vaishnav.
According to Devesh Kapur: “A sharp definition is essential not just for analytical clarity but also for tractability given the vast terrain the issue entails.”
Devesh Kapur at the INDIA POLICY FORUM, 2014“15 has succinctly illustrated the scenario, which all us Goans are all too familiar with: “So let us take a hypothetical country with a hypothetical prime minister who is completely honest but decides to look the other way when her or his ministers are engaged in patently corrupt activities in order to hold on to power. Is that an act of commission or an act of omission? If we care about welfare, should we worry more about someone who takes 50 crores in illegal money or someone who has the power to stop such activities and allow certain policies that cost 500 crores to the public exchequer? If the ambition in public organizations to stay in power can sometimes cause a lot more damage than someone taking cash, then it begs the question of what exactly is “private gain” and what types of “private gain” should we focus on?”
But not everything has to be based on active corruption within the fringes of enjoining governmental blessing, Karthik Muralidharan, while commenting on Devesh Kapur’s paper at the India Policy Forum, 2014“15, elaborated another plausible scenario:
Karthik Muralidharan in his Critique of the paper by Devesh highlighted that coming to the economics of this scenario, one really important paper that was missing in terms of helping organize the thoughts was the Bandiera et al. (2009) AER paper on active and passive waste in government. The main insight of this paper postulates that while most of the attention goes to big headline-grabbing scams, which estimates that about 80% of the waste in government was because of what they call “passive waste,” which is not the kind of corruption that would be directly going into somebody’s pockets but the waste that happens because of systemic inefficiencies and of the waste that happens because there was no residual claimant in government to internalize the returns to improving the effectiveness of governance and functioning.
Karthik Muralidharan has neatly delineated that: “This is the difference between a corrupt state and a nonresponsive state, and so it is related to active and passive waste and they are correlated, but you can see why there is a different policy implication.”
Now, in drawing attention to a lighthearted metaphor in terms of the Halloween tradition of “Trick or Treat,” the historical accounts according to Roger, Tricking (2003) in his article titled “Halloween: From Pagan Ritual to Party Night” published in the Oxford University Press expounds that:
“The history of trick-or-treating traces back to Scotland and Ireland, where the tradition of guising, going house to house at Halloween and putting on a small performance to be rewarded with food or treats, goes back at least as far as the 16th century.”
The phrase is a subtle suggestion that if a treat (like candy) is given, then the child will not perform a “trick” (mischief) on the owner of the house.
With some prudent imagination, it could be legitimately expected in the mind of a common man of general prudence that if the ‘List of Cases’ before the Commission of Inquiry were made comprehensively accessible in the public domain via Notification dated: 2nd Feb, 2023, wherein the names and residential addresses of every person under inquiry could be accessed by the members of the public and now all of a sudden, upon completion of hearings before the Commission of Inquiry, the findings of the final report have been kept confidential.
Yet, no such transparency could be ascribed to the Report, probably under the guise of “trick or treat,” so that the errant members of the legislative assembly whose names have been cited in the Confidential Document could be afforded an opportunity to forfeit their strategic strongholds in their respective constituencies in exchange for immunity from the ruling governance while enforcing the values of the ruling system already in place, notwithstanding the divulgence of democracy.
