Bureaucratic corruption

SOCIAL scientists and reformers have given increasing attention to bureaucratic corruption during the last forty years. Setting aside semantic and definitional quibbles, let us say that corruption in the following discussion will mean taking by public officials that which does not lawfully belong to them, and giving away from the public domain to persons of their choosing that to which the latter are not entitled.

Bribery, embezzlement, and nepotism have been condemned and forbidden by authors of law and morality everywhere. Allow me to recall an interesting account that I once read. The house of Imam Malik bin Anas (d. 795, AD) in Madinah adjoined one in which his daughter and her family lived. A window in their common wall enabled the Imam’s wife and their daughter to chat and exchange things, including food. When their son-in-law took a job in a government establishment, Malik closed up the connecting window. He did not want anything from his daughter’s house coming into his home because her husband’s income was now likely to be tainted.

This account testifies to Imam Malik’s righteousness, but it also tells us that even in those early years of Islam’s journey through history corruption in the public services had become common enough for him to assume that a government employee’s income was, ipso facto, unclean. It means also that, his own disapproval notwithstanding, the prevailing culture at the time tolerated bureaucratic corruption to some degree. This remains the case in many societies, including Pakistan.

Why this tolerance? We might do well first to ask whom this corruption is hurting. In many instances the giver of a bribe, having saved much more than he has given, is a happy man. The loser is the government that has been cheated out of the monies owed to it. But the government as a victim evokes no sympathy from the public, because for hundreds of years it has only been seen as a grabber and as an oppressor that does little for the people.

A subsidiary cause of corruption may be that our indigenous culture does not generate regard for the public domain and dedication to the public interest. Those who enter the public service do so not because they are particularly interested in serving the public. They were looking for a job and this one came along; it was also more secure and less exacting than any others that might have become available. There is no reason then to treat it as some kind of a sacred trust and keep it unsullied.

This is not to deny that there may indeed be a few persons in Pakistan who choose to work for the government because they would like to exercise the power that will come with the job to promote the public good. There was once a whole class of persons (the landed aristocracy) in England and certain European countries whose members, independently wealthy, accepted positions in the public service in the expectation that it would bring them the highly fulfilling experience of managing the world of affairs beyond the essentially local and limited experience of managing their estates.

We have had a landed aristocracy in Pakistan but it has never fully come out of its feudal tradition and parochial concerns. Its vision does not take in the national dimension. Nor has its ethos absorbed anything like the educated English aristocrat’s zeal to “serve the Queen and country.”

It may be noted in passing that not only governments but society and the economy also lose as a result of corruption. Using cross-national data, researchers suggest that if a country improves its position on the corruption scale, let us say, from six to eight (one being the most and 10 the least corrupt), it will likely experience an increase of four per cent in its investment rate and an increase of 0.5 per cent in its per capita GDP.

They find no empirical evidence to support the view that corruption helps entrepreneurs by greasing, and thus quickening, the rusting wheels of the bureaucracy. They report also that when bureaucratic corruption results in a distortion of governmental priorities (more money for combat aircraft than for improvement of human resources), the economy slides.

Returning to the matter of causes, how shall we respond to the argument that a public servant’s salary is much too low to keep him going, and that he has to supplement it with bribes to make ends meet? Are “low” salaries a cause of bureaucratic corruption? Yes and no. Given the urge for survival, if a police constable’s salary does not enable him to feed, clothe, house his family, send his children to school, pay transportation costs, he will look for ways to increase his income. He may take a second job or, if that is not feasible, take bribes.

This, however, is not the end of discussion. How shall we understand the need for food, for instance? One may say that a person should have at least as much of carbohydrates, proteins, fats, and vitamins as health specialists prescribe. Wheat, rice, lentils, vegetables, and a bit of oil will provide the needful. A great many Hindus in India live, and remain healthy, on this kind of diet. Clearly, roasted and broiled meats, biryani and qaurmas, cakes and pastries are not required for healthful living. In other words, distinctions have to be made between needs and desires, between needs and luxuries, between need and greed. While state and society may conceivably be held responsible for enabling their employees to meet their needs, the same cannot be said of their desires and fancies.

Another cause of corruption, more relevant to Pakistan than to many other societies, may be mentioned. Pakistani Muslims belonging to the upper and middle classes are big spenders, fearful of losing the “rat race” to the “Joneses” (friends and acquaintances). It was the same in the old days. Before independence Muslim landed aristocracy and gentry were notorious for living beyond their means. Much of the time most of them were heavily in debt to Hindu money-lenders.

During the last forty years, I have never gone to an American home for dinner where the hostess had put on the table more than one meat dish, one vegetable, salad, some bread, and later dessert and coffee. A Pakistani hostess will not hear of it; her servants will cover her table with a huge and variegated spread. She will be similarly excessive with regard to shoes, clothes, jewelry, housing, interior decoration, etc. No salary in the public service can suffice to maintain her life style.

Can anything be done to persuade Pakistani Muslims to adopt simpler life styles? If they understood and cared for the spirit of Islam, the ulema would preach simplicity, even austerity, to their audiences. But their concern with “wine, women, and dice” leaves them little time for anything else. Heads of government have, now and then, endorsed austerity as a value. Nawaz Sharif once said he would not go to a dinner where more than one meat dish was to be served. But by all accounts his own table was exceptionally well laid.

Some observers argue that public servants should have the same kind of compensation as persons of equivalent qualifications command in the private sector. Sounds reasonable, but closer scrutiny will reveal that in most cases qualifications, beyond formal educational attainments, are not comparable. If a junior executive in a corporation is to sell his employer’s product and maximize his profits, he should be outgoing, pleasant, and apparently friendly. He should have a way with words, and be able to convey a genuine interest in his customer’s welfare. He will have quick promotions if, in addition, he is imaginative, innovative, and creative.

Now consider a junior executive (with similar education) in government, working as an income tax officer, assistant superintendent of police, or a magistrate. He need not have any of the qualifications pertinent to the junior business executive mentioned above (pleasant smile, way with words, etc). In fact, some of these qualifications — imagination, innovation, creativity — will most likely retard, not advance, his career. Public servants have advantages that corporate executives or self-employed professionals (lawyers and doctors) do not have. First, they do not work as hard. Successful lawyers, doctors, and business executives — not only in America but even in Pakistan — work ten or more hours a day. I don’t know of any civil servant who puts in that many hours on a regular basis. There is much greater job security in the public service, and advancement in salary and rank is virtually automatic, none of which is the case in private employment.

There are officials in Pakistan whose salaries, allowances, subsidized homes, automobiles, and other perquisites add up to a very substantial package. Yet, many of them take bribes. They are moved not by need but by greed and acquisitiveness. Something more compelling than preaching, such as a balance of forces in society, may be needed to restrain these impulses. It has been found that levels of corruption are lower in societies where political and governmental institutions (parties, legislatures, judiciary) and organs of civil society (press. professional associations, chambers of commerce and industry, NGOs) are vigorous.

Lastly, we may take notice of a facilitative agent. The greater the scope of governmental regulation of societal interaction the greater will be the opportunity for bureaucratic corruption. One way of reducing it may then be to “take government out of business” and privatize as much of the public realm as may be prudent and consistent with the public interest. But do not leave us with the burdens of funding a government that does nothing to make us safe and comfortable.

Corruption cannot be eradicated completely. It can begin to diminish when the primacy of the community and its interest over personal and private concerns (taught by Islam and then again by the British but allowed to fall by the wayside after independence) is restored in our political culture.

The writer is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, US.

e-mail: anwarsyed@cox.net

From rhetoric to reality

DEPARTING for the first time from the litany of “impregnable defence” and no one dare “cast an evil eye,” President Musharraf now speaks of the overhanging danger of foreign powers bombing Pakistan’s territory. Likewise, the much trumpeted economic “take-off”, might fall prey to international sanctions and trade boycott. Rhetoric, thus, is finally giving way to reflection.

The president has concluded that religious extremism will “drown” the country and the prime minister, at the same time, wants to know from the extremists whether it had ever occurred to them to wage jihad against poverty, inequality, ignorance and disease. Yet both of them — the PM and the president — are bending over backward to woo the very parties which have spawned extremism and stand for jihad but not of the variety about which the prime minister questions them.

The president’s statement that doubts are cast even on his commitment to the war on terror is borne out by the US assistant secretary, Christina Rocca’s refusal to confirm to the House of Representatives that Pakistan’s military intelligence had indeed been purged of the ideology and supporters of the Taliban militia. Reinforcing the doubts entertained by the US and European Union is Hamid Karzai’s repeated allegation that it is not his own warlords and drug dealers but the terrorists coming from Pakistan who pose a real threat to Afghanistan’s peace and security.

Mr. Karzai may thus be looking for an alibi for his own ineffectual administration and that too confined to Kabul, but Pakistan concedes that the Taliban fighters as well as the Pakhtoon victims of the Karzai regime both do seek refuge in Pakistan’s tribal territory but it is difficult to set one apart from the other. That difficulty gives rise to the grievance of Pakistan’s own tribal elders that the Pakhtoon youth escaping from the tyranny of the Karzai forces are being driven back into Afghanistan in violation of the Pathan code of protection and hospitality.

In this tragic imbroglio, the Afghan allegations, the US-EU suspicions and Pakistan’s dilemma all deserve a measure of understanding, for none is without a basis or reason. Yet as despair grows, the faltering pursuit of terrorists might soon extend into Pakistan’s tribal territory. Then, if the US administration can subpoena the accounts of the Royal Saudi embassy in Washington on the suspicion of money going to the terrorists, it would have no qualms about bombing the territory of a lesser and more hapless ally to flush out terrorists.

To avert such a catastrophe reliance needs to be placed more on the support of the tribes and their elders straddling across the frontier rather than in a military campaign — that is the lesson the British learnt and, in more recent times, the Soviets did. The long-term effect of such a campaign can be devastating on the loyalty of the tribes which has been always precariously balanced between Peshawar (as a symbol of Pakistan) and Kabul. Over the years this loyalty has been steadily shifting towards Pakistan. It should not get in the reverse because of the Afghan civil war and America’s global interests.

More than the tribal shelter to the fighters and their armed forays into Afghanistan, the international doubts about the government’s commitment to the war on terror arise from the current trends in Pakistan’s politics, its active support to insurgency in Kashmir and its nuclear capability.

Taking up the last first, it was the development of nuclear weapons which put Pakistan on the world watch-list and brought upon it economic sanctions and suspicion of terror. The nuclear policy thus has doubly impoverished the country: first by investment in weapons which remains undeclared but must be huge, and then by the loss of aid and trade for brandishing them.

Many scientists (Parvez Hoodbhoy), strategists (Asghar Khan) and pacifists (Dr Mubashar Hassan) opposed the nuclear tests but personal egos and mass hysteria had the better of them. The motivation in acquiring the weapons was to match India’s capability which had tested theirs earlier; the justification was found in “minimum deterrence” because in conventional armament India was far ahead.

In the present age of guerilla warfare, sabotage, suicide bombing, preventive strikes and so forth, nuclear capability has ceased to be a deterrent. The victory quickly won through superior arms has landed America in both Afghanistan and Iraq in a primitive warfare which looks interminable and which the Americans can neither quit nor afford to lose.

The remnants of the defeated Taliban and Saddam Ba’athists are bringing down helicopters by firing rockets carried on shoulders or donkey carts, and are destroying the military establishments of the victors by driving improvised explosive-packed vehicles into them. The superior weaponry in the present-day warfare has a limited role. It can overwhelm an adversary but does not take you to final victory. The nuclear arms do not have even that limited a role.

They were not used when superpowers menacingly confronted each other almost for half a century nor have they been used in the past over 50 years by big powers against the defiant or recalcitrant small countries, nor will they be used in the future howsoever serious a particular conflict or the relative strength of the adversaries.

Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal cannot stop the bombing of its territory by the warring groups in Afghanistan nor Pakistan would be able to retaliate with a nuclear strike if, following the American example, the Indians too were to bomb the camps of the freedom fighters (terrorists to them) in Azad Kashmir.

The sad and humiliating fact to note however is that in the course of the “nuclear decade” while India has gained ten positions in the world human development index, Pakistan has lost ten. In the talks which are now in sight after Prime Minister Jamali’s uncharacteristically forthright offers, India and Pakistan both should agree to place their nuclear arsenals under international control. That would rid them of tension and expense and induce a sense of security in reaching an understanding on the future of Kashmir.

Political collaboration between the military-backed Jamali government and the MMA religious alliance now looks all but certain with General Musharraf taking charge of the on-again, off-again negotiations and the alliance changing its pressure strategy from boycott to participation in parliament. A government born of this arrangement would not give the assurance the international community needs to conduct the war on terror and to raise its financial stakes in Pakistan.

The partners in the upcoming government (the military-backed Q League and JUI-JI) both were sponsors of the Taliban and at least the JUI is still their unrepentant sympathizer and its government in the NWFP is a source of comfort to them. To the Q League and JI it may be just a lingering sentiment but to America and its allies which preside over the destiny of the region, the Taliban still are a scourge.

Once they are subdued, an unrepresentative Pakistan government artificially assembled will become utterly dispensable. To find a secure and trusted place in a world united by compacts and divided by conflicts, Pakistan must establish its democratic credentials through fresh and free elections.

India’s economic refugees for generations

IT was the time of Lagaan. My grandfather was 11 or 12 (the poor don’t celebrate birthdays, so age becomes a vague fact very quickly) when famine in his corner of Bihar made him an orphan. Starving, and alone, he left his village near Hajipur and managed to reach the outskirts of Calcutta, to a labour colony called Telinipara.

It existed entirely because of the presence of a new factory built by Scotsmen from Dundee and named, appropriately for the era, Victoria Jute Mill. My grandfather was fortunate; he could easily have become one of the hundreds of thousands of Biharis who were being shipped off as slave labour for European planters in the West Indies, Fiji or Mauritius. Since the age of “emancipation” had arrived, thanks to the anti-slavery crusader William Wilberforce, the practice was not called slavery.

It was known as “indentured labour”. But that is what it was; slavery leavened by the fraud of pretence. And yet it was not entirely forced transmigration; the starving Bihari preferred the tears of departure to death at home. Biharis have been India’s foremost economic refugees for many generations.

A refugee, any refugee, evokes mixed feelings. There is resentment at the invasion of local space, at the competition for limited resources. But there is also some human sympathy for a refugee’s plight: no man leaves home willingly. When the victim has been uprooted by political or religious violence, the sympathy is proportionately higher.

The Bihari was doubly unfortunate, because while he got a job, he never got any sympathy since his only reason for migration was failure. He got a job for the most basic of reasons. He was cheap labour, as much in Calcutta as in Fiji. Of course Calcutta was better than Fiji. He could return home once a year, and perhaps hope to retire and die in his village as well. But he became the archetypal servant: born poor, illiterate and destined to die as he was born.

The European treated the Bihari with unconcealed contempt. The Indian converted him into an unconcealed caricature. Caricature too is a form of hatred. The joke that folds you into the embrace of laughter also lacerates the victim, particularly if he is required to join in the fun out of a “sense of humour”. When the joke becomes part of the mass idiom, a staple of Hindi cinema, and a cornerstone of advertising, then it has become more than a joke. It is now a stereotype.

How does an object of derision react to such derision? In the old days, docility was the preferred Bihari response. Fear of hunger ensured as much. But over the years docility had to evolve, and discover less supine manifestations. In different societies, local realities shaped this evolution. But in a very fundamental sense, the writer-polemicist V.S. Naipaul and the comedian-politician Laloo Yadav are two sides of the same coin. Naipaul, a Bihari (the term, of course, extends to Bhojpuri-speaking eastern Uttar Pradesh) driven to the West Indies, is a genius who has never been able to outgrow his insecurity, which in turn induces bouts of intellectual self-loathing.

Naipaul has two answers to his insecurity. First, he needs someone safe to love, and finds the British in Oxbridge. Protected by this security blanket, he then goes out in search of someone safe to hate. And so in An Area of Darkness he shines his torch upon the defecating Indian. It is the 1960s, and it is safe to hate the Indian who has won independence but is not yet showing much evidence of being able to do anything apart from groan under self-inflicted wounds. But gradually, India discovers a dynamic, and sneering is no longer very safe. So Naipaul transfers his disaffections towards Muslims. It is also more lucrative to dislike Muslims. But that is dyspepsia in an ivory tower. It is more interesting than influential.

Laloo Yadav, who must live or die by public support, turns caricature on its head by an extreme form of self-caricature. By living out the distorted image, he is also taking on those who have painted the Bihari into a psychological corner: “I will become what you have made me, and then deal with you on my terms.” But he too needs safety, a perch into which he can retreat when threatened. That social fortress is a limited alliance between the two most populous Bihari castes, Yadavs and Muslims (Bihari Muslims are, predominantly, a backward caste and therefore comfortable with Yadavs).

Laloo Yadav’s success is both explosive and limiting. He can succeed where he stands, but he cannot move out. He can draw an audience, like any star (or filmstar); but he cannot draw a vote except in a demographic borough of Bihar. Wherever the Bihari went, circumstances forced him to survive in a ghetto. Today, Bihar itself has become a ghetto of India.

Why? It is silly to say that there is an IQ problem, although that is what the caricature suggests. Genes do not make a Bihari foolish, or, worse, a criminal. But history does. The most startling fact of Bihar is that it has not been a centre of significant political power since the end of the Ashoka empire. Perhaps such glory demands the compensation of centuries of defeat: who knows. The political map of modern India began to form during the two hundred years of stability in the north created by the Mughal empire, and in its chaotic aftermath when regional and sub-regional powers turned India into a complex chessboard.

The only time when Bihar became a knight on this chessboard was when Sher Shah Suri took his Afghans to Delhi. But once that brief intervention was snuffed out by Humayun, fortified by Persian troops, the area between Awadh and Bengal was ruled by either Agra/Delhi or Bengal. Patna owed allegiance to the Murshidabad Nawabs before the British, and when the British established their power the Bengal presidency included the non-princely swathes of Bihar and Orissa.

The Bihar feudals were sometimes, as in the case of Darbhanga, strong enough to amass substantial personal wealth, but never powerful enough to create an economy or a political base. Awadh, in comparison, was capable of doing so. All over the subcontinent, regional powers left their impress upon the destiny of their people: the surging Marathas in the west; the Nizam of Hyderabad; the Maharajahs of Mysore and Travancore; the great feudal kingdoms of the Central Provinces; the Sikhs in the northwest, to name but the principal powers. There was no equivalent in Bihar.

The British, who set the course for the twentieth century, had no regional power to contend with when they converted Bihar into a swamp from which they periodically drained human labour. Ironically, Bihar had great natural resources (now transferred to Jharkhand), but they were exploited for industries that branched up along the Hooghly from the British capital of Calcutta. Nothing was kept for the industrialization of Bihar.

If you want to see evidence of how political power can create something out of nothing, read the history of Calcutta. Similarly, Delhi, which was an overgrown village till the Sixties, has become an economic engine of the north thanks to political patronage. The Biharis who once knew only the road to Calcutta are now streaming to Delhi, Mumbai and wherever work is available — including Assam and Kashmir.

British Calcutta denied, and thereby destroyed, Bihar. It was entirely in order that Mahatma Gandhi should make Bihar the battleground of Indian nationalism, because the Bihari, without either people’s power or feudal power to defend his interests, was decimated by British colonialism. Gandhiji’s first victory against the British (surprisingly unknown) was the abolition of indentured labour. His second, historic, fight for indigo farmers launched the Independence Movement.

Could Bihar have reversed its history after freedom? “Could” is not the correct word; “should” is more appropriate. But during the first three decades after freedom Bihar fell into an abyss of corruption and political sleaze, complemented by public sector decadence and private sector loot. Everyone was to blame. The only golden lining was land reform, which, despite sabotage by grasping landlords, worked sufficiently to ensure agricultural growth. But agriculture by itself cannot meet the aspirations of Bihar. Since there was nothing else, the migrations continued.

The tensions that are now in ferment in places as far apart as Assam and Maharashtra come from a twist in the tale. As long as the Bihari in Mumbai or Gauwahati filled the void left for cheap, manual labour, he was left undisturbed in the urban slum. But those “coolies” who went in search of sustenance now have adult children who want better, because they have the education that their parents missed. They also have the hunger for achievement that burns in the deprived. That is why they compete and get jobs. This turns into resentment that explodes into violence.

The Bihari is trapped between stagnation in Bihar and anger outside. In principle, a greater law should prevail: Indian unity is cemented by the spirit of a free job market. An Indian has equal rights anywhere in India. In practice, no region can continue to be a parasite on the rest of the body politic. There is only one way to stop Bihari deaths in Assam: Bihar must be reborn.

The writer is editor-in-chief of Asian Age, New Delhi.