- To ensure all people in public office are punished for amassing unaccounted wealth.
- To ensure all people in public office are under the ambit of a civil society body so that they don't have any ways to escape a trial if they are corrupt
- To ensure all money stashed away in foreign lands is brought back to India by force
These are our main demands. So will that stop corruption? I take the liberty to have my doubts. At best this would have all people in public office scurry to cover loopholes and save themselves and get their accounting right and at worst it will give rise to a Goonda raaj again to quell the voices that are rising. I know, I know, that shouldn't scare us and it doesn't. But somewhere it is a "Cure only" process and there is no measure for prevention.
It is to be noted that most people in public life don't know another way ... and in many ways we the people have been fueling this corruption from day one. We are all at fault and an overhaul of the societal principles and individual principles (in action) is needed for a corruption free state.
Do we really have the moral high ground to stand against corruption? Are we thinking of how we ourselves should stop from being corrupt? To get this right, we need to understand what corruption really means.
Here's the definition of corrupt:
cor·rupt
–adjective
1.guilty of dishonest practices, as bribery; lacking integrity;crooked: a corruptjudge.
2.debased in character; depraved; perverted; wicked; evil: a corrupt society.
3.made inferior byerrors or alterations, as a text.
4.infected; tainted.
5.decayed; putrid.
This being the definition, let's ask ourselves:
- Are we not guilty of dishonest practices?
- How many of us give the exact true reason when we ask for leave?
- How many of us tell the existing employer the real reason of why we are quitting?
- How many of us ensure we don't break any traffic rules? And if caught how many of us agree to pay the fine right away?
- Are we not making things inferior by errors or alterations?
- How much do we care about the quality of our work or words or actions?
- How much time do we spend being self-critics and seeing if we could have done the last task any better?
- When our work is audited at office, how many times have we prayed for an easy-going auditor instead of making sure there are no loop holes in our work?
My worry is we are trying to punish people at the surface of the society and not even thinking about solving the problem at the roots. There is some amount of corruption in the "Chalta Hai" attitude that the whole of our country is diseased by. That needs to be checked.
The society should stop being corrupt by understanding the values of Integrity and Honesty and not by the fear of punishment. Don't get me wrong, the fear of punishment should be there, but the principle driving force for the bigger picture should be the positive incentives of not being corrupt.
This is where quality education (not mere literacy or qualifications) comes into picture. This I'll keep for a later time, but what I want to say here is that while we are up in arms against the very people we have democratically elected to office, we should fix the corrupt in ourselves simultaneously and ensure that our friends, family and off -spring are also encouraged not to be corrupt in our small world of daily life and work.
Lastly and most importantly we need to understand the real meaning of dignity and know that a dignified person never asks for favors or exceptions, and if this can be adhered to, there would be no need for corruption. I know that is Utopian, but that's where we should be headed, if we are serious about a corruption-free society. Otherwise we will always be fooled by rhetoric and Babas.
