21st century belongs to Asia , the oft repeated words of Indian prime minister along with a host of other assessors and analysts of world economy and on paper India is perhaps the strongest contender. This global opportunity because of a combination of factors like favourable demography, cheap labour, abundant human resource of all skills and levels and above all perhaps the right time for an impending change in global economic order because of slowing down of developed economies, depletion of their resources and gross overspending on social welfare measures.
The Indian nation and polity understands this fully but the polity chooses to ignore comfortably the first and foremost condition of corruption mitigation and good governance for such revolutions to occur in the history of a nation. Not even a single day passes without the surfacing of a new scam or reports of large scale corruption by mighty and powerful of the nation. The apathy of the government is reflected in the fact that hardly anyone gets punished or money gained through illegal and dubious means recovered. On the contrary the whole polity divides itself into two teams, one vouching for that nothing has gone wrong and that the powerful are not involved while the other raises the rhetoric of asking for the head of individual name involved. The mudslinging and rhetoric created goes on with complete understanding that the gains and losses must be confined only to the aim of getting votes. It is always ensured that no personal or financial harm should come to any individual.
The nation, citizenry and the common man is suffering because of corruption, bribe and black money generation and is well aware of the massive magnitude of these problems. But strangely, the total polity of the country makes an all out effort to undermine the extent, so much so that it is taken to be a minor aberration in the total financial activity of the nation. The most recent case of involvement of a relative of a minister involved in a bribe for the promotion of a railway officer is a typical eye opener to the extent this malaise is eating into the national wealth and hampering India's dream and chance of becoming world leaders. This particular officer's total earnings of the last ten years will not amount to the princely sum of Rs. 90 lakhs, the amount paid as the bribe. This throws open two basic questions. Firstly, the amounts that are being earned through dubious means in this country and secondly the scope of earning much bigger amounts with the likely promotion.
This is as far as the colossus bribe is rampant in Indian government and is a minuscule sample of what has come to light. There is another angle to this which is all the more shameful and deleterious to the growth of nation. The minister in question says that he has no business dealings with this relative as if corruption is a business and he wants the country to believe that all corrupt people have scripted business partnerships with their relatives, cronies and stooges for bribe and corruption money. The officer who paid the bribe was an idiot who paid the bribe without ascertaining that it will produce the desired result by reaching the person concerned.
The country is getting ruined in this game and corruption is blowing away Indian dream of getting prosperous. Corruption has given two separate and distinct methodologies for the functioning of executive and the legal process. Executive thrives on the motto of 'How not to do a thing instead of how to do it' and the legal process thrives on 'How to save a guilty rather than how to nail him' and this is such a win win situation for the persons who are mired in corruption. They not only eat, drink and sleep corruption, they breed corruption too. If such are the nationalists of this country, the persons working under oaths, persons subject to some semblance of controls and accountability, imagine the state of persons who are under no oath and are accountable to no agency.
