When the Saints Go Marching In

As corruption runs amok in India, a colorful cast of activists takes on the politicians.

Back in the 1950s, the British scholar W. H. Morris-Jones identified three idioms of Indian politics. These were the modern, the traditional, and the saintly. Thus, he wrote, “the modern language of politics is the language of the Indian Constitution and the Courts; of parliamentary debate; of the higher administration … ” On the other hand, the traditional idiom was local and sectarian. It “knows little or nothing of the problems of anything as big as India.” Here, “caste (or subcaste or ‘community’) is the core of traditional politics.” Finally, there was the saintly idiom, illustrated at the time Morris-Jones was writing, by the land-donation movement of Acharya Vinoba Bhave, “the ‘Saint on the March,’ who toured India on foot preaching the path of self-sacrifice and love and polity without power.”

To understand Indian politics today, Morris-Jones’s framework is still valuable, so long as we add a fourth idiom that has become increasingly common in recent years. This may be termed the instrumental, a euphemism for political behavior that advances the personal financial interests of an individual, his family, his caste, and his party.

For the first decade of independence, Indian politics was dominated by associates of Mahatma Gandhi who shared his integrity if not his courage. In the 1960s, the first signs of corruption entered the system. The economy was then strictly regulated. Entrepreneurs needed licenses to open or expand businesses, for which some politicians now expected bribes.

When the license-permit-quota raj was dismantled in the 1990s, it was expected that corruption would diminish. In fact, it has increased spectacularly. The state still retains control over land and natural resources and over infrastructure projects. With the surge in the Indian economy, control of these resources is worth hundreds of billions of dollars, encouraging sweetheart deals between politicians and entrepreneurs. The proceeds from these deals are then distributed among the elected members of the legislature and to favored bureaucrats. According to a recent study by the Association for Democratic Reforms, as many as 300 out of the 540 members of Parliament are millionaires. The majority were born in modest middle-class homes; their wealth ballooned after they entered politics.

In the past year, India has been racked by a series of corruption scandals. A housing complex in Mumbai meant for war veterans had its units allocated to politicians and bureaucrats and their cronies. Politicians associated with the ruling Congress Party skimmed off large sums of money from funds allocated to the Commonwealth Games, held in New Delhi in late 2010. Politicians of the major opposition party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), were involved in a mining scandal in the state of Karnataka, where millions of tons of iron ore were shipped to China untaxed and in violation of labor and environmental standards. Then, in the biggest scam of all, a minister of the Union Government was found to have massively undersold licenses to mobile-telephone companies, thus giving them cheap, privileged access to airwaves.