Passionate About India

Normally, it is difficult for me to be cynical like media pundits generally are. But after looking at election results in so many states since 2010, the one sad conclusion that I can draw is that the corruption card is being overstated and over-hyped. it appears as if allies and perception management play a bigger role in deciding elections than actual facts related to corruption and plunder. This should be the biggest lesson that the top BJP leaders must draw from the elections. Compare two states and two parties and see what has actually happened. In Karnataka, the Lokayukta, Justice Santosh Hegde and his office accused the BJP government led by the then Chief Minister B. S. Yeddyurappa of corruption. These charges were related primarily to mining operations in Bellary. Subsequently, Yeddyurappa was forced to step down. At that time, my colleagues told me that senior BJP leaders based in Delhi had a bigger role to play in the ouster of Yeddyurappa than opposition parties! In a s...

Amongst the many critical predicaments that the Indian economy suffers from, corruption has been one of the biggest monsters, and thankfully the most talked about in recent days. Needless to say, corruption has corroded every delivery system and has made it completely dysfunctional. The entire Indian public life is riddled with overriding rates of corruption – from the Adarsh land scam to Commonwealth Games misappropriations to the 2G spectrum scam – the list here has been endless, and the magnitude, obscene. In fact, India’s public life was never clean – the infamous Bofors scandal, Harshad Mehta’s nexus with senior politicians and Ketan Parekh’s stock market manipulation – all had their own perilous impact on the economy! It requires no empirical study or statistical survey to exhibit that we comfortably are the top performers in all corruption related global indices. Take for instance, Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index (CPI) where India’s rank has been slippin...