A Brief History of Corruption in India

Merely shouting from the house tops that everybody is corrupt creates an atmosphere of corruption. People feel they are in a climate of corruption and they get corrupted themselves.’ The words of Jawaharlal Nehru, spoken shortly after India’s independence from British rule, seem particularly apt given the overtly Gandhian style of today’s anti-corruption crusader, Anna Hazare. But for most Indians, Hazare’s movement has produced few surprises: there is a long-standing popular critique of the country’s apparently growing crisis of corruption that cuts across nearly every strata of society.

Popular resignation about the permanence of corruption is partly explained by the political purchase of ‘corruption’ as an idea and a term. Accusations of corruption have historically been wielded as a political weapon – a means of tarnishing rivals in the right circumstances. During India’s very first General Election in 1951-2, newspapers and party offices, particularly those of the Congress party, were bombarded with allegations about corrupt electoral candidates. The system of food and civil supply was subject to commodity controls and rationing – a legacy of the war years which had generated complex systems of patronage. These involved deeply entrenched black markets in lucrative industrial and agricultural concerns. This was the background to what was later known as ‘Permit-Licence-Quota Raj’ – the linking of business interests with political brokers. It is partly this nexus that underpins the protests in post-liberalization India.

But it wasn’t just the circumstances of war that generated concerns about graft in the 1940s and fifties. More broadly, the problem of corruption seemed to correspond to phases of rapid political transformation. The first, officially coordinated ‘anti-corruption’ drives, described as such, took place under the auspices of provincial Congress governments in the late 1930s, while the British still ruled at India’s centre. The Congress juxtaposed its democratic principles against ‘corrupted’ systems of colonial despotism.

The Congress governments of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh in those years also aimed to project themselves as realistic alternatives to the Raj – regimes which took the notion of ‘public service’ seriously. The Special Police Establishment, which undertook to prosecute (albeit quite ineffectively) instances of government servant corruption, followed from 1941. And in March 1947, on the eve of independence, the Government of India passed the Prevention of Corruption Act. In the wake of Partition’s mass migrations, seizure of evacuee property and mob violence, state governments across India sought to ‘clean up’ their administrations. In Uttar Pradesh, this operation was described by the early 1950s state government as an ‘efficiency drive’ to ‘root out useless officers’. Conveniently, many of them were actual or intending evacuees to Pakistan.

It took a massive (pending) regime transition to initiate official drives for anti-corruption at that time. On the streets too, independence helped to generate citizens’ movements in the late 1940s to protest against corrupt local rationing or police officers. The vernacular and English newspapers, previously muzzled by the British, were replete with corruption scandals, especially those linked to black marketeers. But there was something more profound happening in early postcolonial India, just as there is today. The larger discussions of ‘corruption’ reached to the roots of what Indians thought about the state, and their own sense of national belonging or alienation. The recent criticisms of Anna Hazare bear this out. The writer Arundhati Roy points out the danger of creating another unaccountable anti-corruption ‘oligarchy’. Others argue that Hazare’s proposed Lokpal Bill could jeopardise constitutional protections for disadvantaged communities. Some Dalit organizations fear that Hazare’s Lokpal Bill, the drafting of which has not hitherto involved minority representation, may undermine some structures of reservations. Still others suggest that Anna Hazare’s style, and that of his supporters, smacks of demagoguery and ‘aggressive nationalism’. In some ways, this is business as usual: India has a complex and highly developed system of fundamental rights provisions within its Constitution, and the country is certainly no stranger to vibrant public debate.