Money and Governance

Introduction

Today, there is no paper or forum that is not discussing corruption at all levels of Governance. It is rather becoming stale with people having come to accept corruption as a part of the exercise that we call Governance. When as an Engineer Trainee I was working under Padmashri Prof P K Kau, he used to say, unless one understands how and what created imbalance, one can never find a solution. Of course, Dr Kau was referring to our Toroidal container for the fusion reactor that we were trying to build, in those days. His doctrine of understanding the cause – effect relationships is primordial in solving any problem that one faces in daily life.

Have we understood what causes corruption? Or is corruption the cause or the effect of something else? Is there a scientific study undertaken by our social scientists to know the underlying causes and therefore, the effects that it has on our society? What will be India like ten years hence if this is the status of social living?

I did some analysis myself though not a social scientist. My interest, as my article also clarifies later, is driven more by selfishness; I am selfish for the well being of my own self and my descendents. Here it is.

What drives Governance?

Money and fame drives governance. 

Why would anyone want to be at the top of the political hierarchy? If your answer is to serve the people, please note you are lying your heart away.

About five years back, I was in a meeting with one of the Vice Chancellors of a University in Tamil Nadu. There was an inquiry and I was there with the VC, Director of Distance Education and one of the Trusts that ran a Study Centre in Chennai. One of the questions fired by the Director of Distance Education was, ‘Are you running this study centre with profit in mind?’ The Study Centre person promptly answered, ‘No. We are running it to serve the students and the people’.

How many of us would believe this? Do you think the VC or the Director, DE, believed it or for that matter do you think the person who uttered it, believed in it? I doubt it. I was about to say, ‘Are you running the University for profit or for Service of the people?’ I refrained myself since I was there to get our long standing dues from the University as a Study Centre and did not want to jeopardise it in any way.

So when people come to ‘power’ their intention is to get money and to get fame. Let us not cheat ourselves by saying they come there for serving the poor and for uplifting the livelihood of the millions! Please read Parkinson’s laws on human life cycle and the age old Maslow’s Need Hierarchy. Any constitution that is designed without factoring in Selfishness of human being will fail. And that is what is happening in our country.

So it is right to expect people to get corrupt. You have a system that breeds the virus and naturally, it thrives!

The Art of Controlling Corruption

One of the main reasons for corruption is money; money in the government. More the money in the government, more the corruption will be. Naturally, the amount of corruption you had in the early days of our independence was low compared to what you have today; simply because, you just did not have this kind of money in the government.

There is more money to spend in the government in the order of lakhs of crores of rupees and the corruption is also at that level. Earlier you had crores of rupees and you had corruption in crores. For those people, who thought there was no corruption scandals in the early days of independence, please read about the Jeep Scandal 1948, Mudgal Case 1951, Mundra Deals 1956 and so on and on. The difference was only in the size. There does not seem to be any difference in the mentality of the people. 

In 1939, Gandhiji wrote,  "I would go to the length of giving the whole congress a decent burial, rather than put up with the corruption that is rampant." This was about the Congress Governments ruling in the states after 1937 elections. Corruption is certainly not new to India. If at all it does anything, it shows the uniformity of the issue across decades.

If you want to control corruption, you need to reduce money in the government. How do you reduce money in the government? Reduce taxes of course!

Made by the Government

Most of the issues today are man-made. Be it global warming or poverty, these are created and nurtured by human misbehaviour. If I were to say poverty in Africa is created by the rich west, how many of us will accept it? But close analysis will reveal the truth of the situation. 

So it is in the case of many of the ailments that this country, India, suffers from. Be it unbridled corruption or rampaging black money, they are invariably created and nurtured by the Government. I am not making a wild statement. Let me prove it.

Let us take the case of Black Money. A conservative estimate fixes the size of the Black Money at or about one and a half times the nation’s GDP. To know what or how it got created, let us answer first the question what is Black Money? Anything that is not brought into the book of accounts is Black in colour. Or in other words, all of them for which the taxes are not paid to the government become Black Money.

Black Money exists as long as Taxes exist in an unacceptable form. If you and I pay our taxes without remorse then that implies the taxation regime is acceptable. If we pay because someone is holding a dagger over our head, then it is not a democratic tax payment. It is an extortion promoted by the government. Which category do you consider is our taxation regime? How many of us will be paying taxes if government should stop extortion?

Mass disobedience to taxation and connivance of the government servants to ensure that legitimacy is upheld by avoiding tax; all these point to the unacceptable nature of the taxation regime. 

So who creates Black Money? Is it the people or the Government? By creating a tax regime that is unacceptable, the Government creates, pampers and nurtures Black money! And therefore, it is the responsibility of the government to destroy what it created. They can do so only by making taxation regimes come within acceptable limits.

Governance and Control

Governing people is a different game. It is not a police regime that you are conducting. You are a party to the democratic norms. The control needs to be mild and appropriate. Force is certainly not an accepted control norm in a democratic set up.

As a matter of fact, it is not about ‘governing people’; it is about ‘serving people’. 

May be a smaller and more easily understandable alternate will be an apartment complex. The secretary of the association might be an elected or nominated head of the association but he acts in line with the thoughts of the members. He is not a Ruler of the association. He is under the direction of the association members! He ‘serves’ the association and not ‘rules’ the association.

Whereas in most of the democracies across the world the order is different! The top man is considered the Ruler; the party is a ruling party; Government Executives who are called ‘public servants’ act as the ‘public masters’! They are pampered; they are ‘sir’-ed and they behave as if the citizens are ‘subjects’ to their rule. In reality, it is the citizens who ensure that the public servants and the political bosses get their daily bread.

What is the job of the government? Is it to control people and to subjugate them that we have created this government?

Corruption is an Effect

To close, let us draw our inferences. Corruption is a by product of the large scale money in the government and the unbridled power that we have given our executives and the government, in turn. Corruption is not a cause. It is an effect. Corruption will continue to exist and grow if the cause of corruption is not rooted out. To weed out corruption, we need to reduce money in the government; we need to reduce the power we have given the government. Neither of them is going to be easy! In other words, the end of corruption is not in sight!