Jaswant Singh: Society, not the state, holds answer to India’s running battle with corruption

Previously, weeks of anti-corruption protests, launched by Anna Hazare and supported by the country’s rising middle class, had brought India’s government to a virtual standstill. This was followed by an embarrassing surrender to the demand of protesters that a powerful new anti-corruption agency be established.

For some people, the protests that paralysed large parts of the capital were akin to a festival. Others, following the government’s retreat, grandiosely thought the events amounted to a revolution. To be sure, a large part of urban “middle India” has revolted against the tyranny of daily corruption. But will the Hazare-led protests deliver real change or merely media hyperbole?

Whichever side one takes, the consequences are disturbing: Indian society, the core of Indian nationhood, is now questioning the very legitimacy of the Indian state. India’s nationhood resides in a non-territorial civilisational entity. The Indian state, on the other hand, is a historical variable that has periodically governed parts of the subcontinent. Following independence in 1947, a centralised Indian state emerged for the first time.

The strength of Indian nationhood, however, lies not in this state but in society. This was at the core of Gandhi’s beliefs; he emphasised “reform of society”, because only that, he believed, could correct the state’s ills. Herein lies the current disconnect: when an Indian citizen now approaches this state, for even the most routine of needs, the state inflicts pain rather than providing succour.

The state’s fundamental inability to redress grievances, correct mistakes and attend to its citizens’ most basic needs has given rise to a ruinous level of corruption, as citizens, despairing of obtaining their due fairly, try to buy it instead.

For Hazare and his followers, the only solution is another state agency – an all-powerful anti-corruption watchdog with the power to coerce and intimidate. It is no surprise, of course, that crowds cheered for Hazare and his anti-corruption movement, by which they assumed a vicarious role in slaying the demon of corruption.

Unfortunately, India’s government misunderstood the anti-corruption protests from the start. At first, prime minister Manmohan Singh stood firm against Hazare’s demands on technical grounds. But this proved insufficient to halt a growing sense of drift and decay concerning his Congress Party-led coalition.

Were periodic elections the only yardstick of democracy, India would have achieved what US secretary of state Hillary Clinton calls the “gold standard”. But that is far removed from reality and the nature of its ruling party. The Congress Party, to paraphrase Brown University’s Richard Snyder, resembles a “neo-patrilineal dictatorship,” in which “people get goodies for being close to the ruler”. Proximity to the Gandhi family is everything.Congress, at its core, pursues a form of dynastic democracy with the characteristics of a “Sultanistic regime” – one with no purpose or function apart from maintaining the “leader’s personal authority”. But, though such leaders perhaps have more personal authority than even medieval monarchs, their authority is brittle. Moreover, societies lose their cohesion under such regimes.

Gandhi’s yardstick for non-violent protest was satyagraha – “the protest of truth”. By contrast, India’s current anti-corruption protests may be missing the point, for the central challenge in fighting corruption is to establish a freedom born of righteous conduct, not to authorise a new source of state coercion. Indian society must regain its strength – and its proper role. Only when India, as the poet Rabindranath Tagore put it, is a place “where the head is held high and the mind is without fear” will it be able to act with the confidence, honesty and generosity its citizens demand and deserve.

• Jaswant Singh, a former Indian finance minister, foreign minister and defence minister, is the author of Jinnah: India – Partition – Independence.