A tale of two corrupt countries

As The Economist  put it, they lost the empire, the military might, do not dominate the world anymore but they still had claim to ‘Mother of Parliaments’. Same Economist describes it now as The House of Ill-repute.

Within a matter of a month-and-half, starting from the 8th of May to be precise, literally a political earthquake is rocking this island. A country which used to look down on american democracy as a circus [the only country they really look  <up> at otherwise, rest being anyway inferior to them], has been coming to grips to the fact that their own country is a caricature of democracy. The realisation of how rotten at core the Mother is a kick in the teeth.

There are a number of issues involved – parliamentary democracy, arrogance of elected representatives of people, power of media and some earnest soul-searching about how to better the system – all these are very relevant to the Indian democracy.

Daily Telegraph, a british newspaper has been publishing stories of two or three Members of Parliament everyday since May 8th –  how they fiddled their expenses to milk the government, that is, the tax-payer. It started initially more with Labour MPs, the ruling party, perhaps because their ‘mole’ is an active conservative supporter but soon enough, both the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats came under the harsh spotlight. The british parliament has some 650 MPs, some 400-odd have been exposed to be petty thieves by now. Not merely day-to-day politicking but the entire parliamentary system has been shaken to the roots. Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister already in a fragile position has been further enfeebled. He has just about managed to stay in power until now. But the 4th June elections to european parliament and local council elections around then saw a big decimation of Labour Party all over the country. And as a result of loss of face of [and of faith in] the three major parties, for the first time, a white-supremacist ‘britain for british only’ [read whites-only] party got Members in the european parliament. In difficult economic times the ultra-right always does well as it provides a hate-object to the majority to take their ire on.

According to one survey, 40% british do not want to vote for any of the main three parties now. And 85% think their MPs are self-serving crooks, least bothered about the electorate, leave alone the interests of the country. One by one, the MPs whose petty manipulations have been published declared that they will not contest the next election. That means, parties will have to look for candidates for at least 300-350 new seats, a situation that had arisen last in 1945, an indication of the damage.

To summarise what has happened. British MPs draw regular salaries as MPs but also enjoy two main types of perks. One perk is reimbursement of expenses incurred solely in discharging duties towards their constituents. Remember this is a perk not a right. Another perk relates to housing arrangement. As the british parliament is in London, most of the MPs have to stay in London during the sessions of the parliament and also for other parliamentary work. Government bears this expense. Most of them have bought flats near Westminster on loan and the government repays the loan installment. For those who live in hostels, hotels, clubs, etc., or in some rental accommodation, those expenses are also reimbursed. Most of the mischief occurred in these two perks. If the salary is, say 50000 pounds a year and allowance for reimbursement of constituency-related-only expense is 20000 pounds a year, the MPs treated the allowance as salary, that is as if they had a salary of 70000 pounds. With vengeance they claimed all the allowable expense for reimbursement, when it was not at all a must that they exhaust the limit. Daily Telegraph printed the details of what all they claimed everyday. It was amusing to read for a day or two, then it started getting infuriating as this money was people’s money. People justifiable felt not only cheated but insulted as well.
A few examples will illustrate the extent to which the MPs stooped. Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary until this eruption, claimed money for a pornographic movie watched by her husband on satellite TV. Keith Vaz, an ex-minister of Indian origin purchased sixteen pillows all silk, nothing short of that for an Indian!! And claimed the expense. A male MP claimed a pound for buying tampons for his wife. A few bought not only plasma TVs at some 8-odd thousand pounds and showed these as reimbursable expense but even made the treasury pay for TV stands and aerials! A female MP claimed for horse manure for her partner’s house 100 miles away from her house. Keeping up their image, a scottish MP even claimed 4 pence for plastic bag he had bought! What took the cake was though, an MP claiming expense for cleaning the moat around his house and another building a duck-house in the pond in his estate. Even as a foreigner in this country it was humiliating for me to read these daily details. Needless to stress, none of these expenses [and all others, really, the Telegraph published] was remotely for work related to their constituencies.

Real hotchpotch was in housing perks though. Mostly an MP has a house in his or her constituency and buys or rents another in London. The whole racket revolved around the definition of which is the ‘first’ house and which the ‘second’. As per british Income Tax department, if you sell your ‘first’ house and make profit, that profit is not taxable as you normally reinvest the entire money you get from the sale of that house [including the profit] in your next ‘first’ house. But if you sell your ‘second’ home and make a profit, that profit attracts income tax at 18% because this was anyway your investment. MPs employed many tricks to make money and avoid paying tax.

Mostly they bought a ‘second’ home in London. Government paid for the mortgage. When the house appreciated in a year or two, they re-designated this house as ‘first home’, sold it, and made profit which was not taxable. Now they started claiming mortgage on the ‘second’ home in their constituency until it appreciated, and continued ‘flipping’ houses.

When a husband and wife both were MPs, they put ownership in the name of husband or wife and claimed expenses for both the houses! A few had repaid the entire loan but did not inform the government and kept on merrily pocketing the installments.

Some others kept everything in the family – ‘sold’ houses to children at half the market price, then ‘rented’ it from them, etc.

Many ‘employed’ immediate relatives as secretaries and claimed their salaries and so on.

Since 2001, on an average each MP made about 10000 pounds per year through such manipulations. Immorality of it was not only they made the rules convenient to themselves but also saw to it that these accounts would never be publicly scrutinised. Culprit was the judge, so there was no culprit.

As luck would have it, with typical bureaucratic inefficiency seen all over the world, a hard drive containing all these details came by to a mole, a retied senior army officer who passed it onto the Telegraph and the deluge started, which continues till date. Like the chinese torture of drops of water from the ceiling at irregular intervals to drive a prisoner crazy, the Telegraph e-mailed ‘tomorrow’s MPs today at mid-day, gave them 5 hours to come clean or offer explanation, and then published the account next day. It has held the MPs on tenterhooks for over 40 days now, everyone in gut-wrenching suspense if it is them tomorrow.

Finally under this pressure, or unable to withstand it, the government volunteered to make all the details of MPs’ expenses available on-line and did so on the 18th. But it blanked out a number of details, as is governments’ style, calling it sensitive. This fuelled further suspicion that the government has something to hide. On 20th June Scotland Yard announced that it will be investigating some MPs for criminal offences, That is about as low as public life can go.

There are a number of facets of this scandal pertinent to the Indian situation. I might narrate a personal experience before turning to it as I want to elaborate on the difference in political cultures between Britain and India.

May be three or four years back, the door-bell rang at around 4 p m. I opened the door and saw a neatly dressed lady, may be in her 50s waiting out. I thought the face was familiar but could not place her. As is the british culture no one EVER invites a stranger in the house [even friends are sparingly welcome, for that matter!]. In deference to this custom the lady started talking from the door steps. I urged her to come in and have a seat. Then I realised she was our local Member of Parliament. She had come to introduce the next candidate of the Scottish National Party as she would not be contesting the forthcoming election. She was going from door to door on this mission.

In India, even a lowly candidate for a local council seat does not stir out without 15 or 20 hangers-on. Hierarchically, higher rung is state legislature and Member of the Parliament the highest you can go. So, a sitting MP, alone, walking and knocking on your door, that too canvassing for a person who is about to replace you is an impossibility in that feudal environment. Point is, in Britain, at least some residual feeling prevails that the representatives of people are meant to be public servants.

This sense of humility made Gordon Brown and the leaders of the other two major parties render public apologies. They promised to overhaul the system. In India, there have been, are and will be innumerable instances of MPs with ill-gotten wealth. They are convicted murderers, mafia-leaders, white-collar swindlers committing crimes in broad day-light and going scot-free. There is no chance that any of the political party leaders will ever have think of apologising for their minions’ behaviour.

Next comes the issue of amounts the British MPs fiddled with or pocketed. Most of the expenses were really petty. An ordinary salary earning income tax payer would do the same, mostly. For example, if your telephone bill was 100 pounds last tax-year and you are allowed to claim 200 pounds, you would put the figure of 200 pounds. Most of the manipulation was of this order. Recent parliamentary election in India saw a number of self-proclaimed millionaire or billionaire  candidates. It is impossible to reconcile their known sources of income and the assets they themselves declared. This disparity is plain criminality. An income tax raid on the residences of a past minister yielded a few millions in cash plus jewelry plus immovable asset-ownership documents. This was in 1996 and the case was concluded only this year, sending him to jail. This is a rarest of cases where justice was met. 99 per cent of cases never come to the court of law and the swindling continues of which everyone is aware. In other words, the british corruption is small change compared to the prevalent Indian scene. Even if a hasty conclusion is drawn that ‘politicians all over are corrupt’ it is worth remembering the levels of corruption.

Most of the MPs tried to defend themselves - ‘they acted within rules’. But ‘within the rules’ does not always mean ethical. And the rules were anyway framed by them. More important is the expectation that Caesar’s wife be above suspicion. Common citizen might fiddle Income Tax returns. He is aware that is on the boundary of right and wrong but wants his rulers and law-makers to be impeccably clean. And of course a common citizen will be penalised if the Income Tax Department turns his claim down, he may even face jail. There was no such possibility of punishment for the MPs’ crime and they acted with impunity. This arrogance enraged people.

The present economic downturn has meant rising unemployment. Memories of irresponsible and reckless banks having played with savers’ money and then gone under, are fresh. This very government has been trying to save the banks by pumping in tax-payers’ money. And as soon as they get it the bank-bosses pocket fat bonuses and pensions and go scot-free. On the one hand the government rewarded these economic criminals, on the other, sensing public anger, MPs made a big noise against the bankers too. This duplicity rankles with the ordinary people. For example, during the G-20 summit in April in London, a popular slogan of globalisation protesters was – ‘fight cold, burn a banker’. The public resentment was that strong. And now to discover that these very MPs were doing the same thing in their small pastures tipped the balance. After all, bankers too made money ‘as per the rules’.

The tempest started claiming victims one after the other. First to go was Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, the Hazel Blears the social Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, many more followed. The heaviest casualty was Michael Martin, Speaker of the Parliament. He was trying all along to suppress official publishing of these details. When it was disclosed that he had claimed 6000 pounds in taxi-fares his wife spent on shopping trips, the axe fell. The last Speaker, and Speaker is a very powerful and symbolic post in a parliamentary democracy, to suffer a shameful exit was in 1695. The then speaker was caught red-handed taking a bribe. A few heads rolled from the Conservative Shadow Cabinet as well.

Predictably a civil war started within the Labour Party braying for Gordon Brown’s blood. Some ministers, not tainted by this scandal but who had personal scores to settle with him resigned too.  The tantrums against him by one Caroline Flint, and minister for european affairs who liked to pose as a pin-up girl were in utter poor taste and vitiated the already murky atmosphere.

Now this is no longer an event, it has started a process. It will have long-lasting effect on british parliamentary system. Britain claims an 800 year old tradition of parliamentary democracy though the stranglehold of rich landlords on the parliament was loosened only after the 1832 rising against it by the urban poor. It is said that the parliament became only then pro-people. This desirable change lasted only for a hundred years though, until the World Wars. Then the governments started to raise walls between themselves and the people again. People’s space in participation in deciding the policies went on reducing. Recently, MPs in Thatcher and Blair governments again started having a sense of  ‘entitlement’ - their being above the law they made. When Rajiv Gandhi became Prime Minister of India after the assassination of his mother Indira Gandhi, he ‘imported’ ex-patriot Indian management experts who had settled in the USA. This clique wanted to apply the latest management techniques to that sub-continental size poor country. The sheer disparity in wealth, skills, diversity in public consciousness, rural-urban, agricultural-industrial gaps were to be fixed by a few models on the lap-top. This bunch of idiots was just not connected with ground realities. Same thing happened in Blair times. During Indira Gandhi’s tenure a ‘kitchen cabinet’ , a medley of sycophants used to run the country. Brown’s cabinet was only a bit better. People resent this top-down approach. It is humiliating when you elect the jokers and they look down upon you.

Now a number of proposals are being aired to overhaul the system. It is not possible to weigh pros and cons of each but they need a mention being relevant in the Indian context.

First suggestion is increase the salaries of the MPs so that they are not tempted to do such tricks. This demand has been in India too for long. As if! Other suggestion is to make all their expenses available for public scrutiny. Scottish Parliament already has their MPs’ expenses on-line. I can imagine what would happen India – they will submit false details. It is said that sunlight is the best disinfectant for public life. Transparency in handling of public money raises the social standard. When you have something to hide, you make rules and then quote the rules to resist disclosures.
Third suggestion is to reduce the number of MPs from 650 to, say 100, like in the Sates. Idea is to reduce both the election expense and the expense of running of the parliament as an institute. It will also speed up the process of law-making and make scope for corruption that much less quantitatively.
I doubt if this will work in India. As it is, that country with a billion plus population has 550 MPs, some representing constituencies as large as a million people. Even then an MP, assuming he is honest, wants to work for his people, etc., has a mammoth task ahead of him.

Then the influence of donors to parties is also sought to be reduced. This may restrict it in Britain. It will never work in India. Business, bootleggers, mafia, smugglers finance all the parties there.

Then there is the recurring proposal to change the election system from first-past-the-post to representational system where it is the party who gets the vote and not the candidate. A party with 25% votes nationally will get 25% of seats for its MPs, etc. This is a double-edged sword though. The vested interest of main parties is to keep smaller people out effectively resulting in dictatorship of parliament. Seen that way, it is a good proposal. But in the Indian context it will bring in many smaller parties and the horse-trading will increase. That is, nuisance value and bargaining power of MPs on sale will increase. They will join an alliance of parties which pays them more. It will increase, not decrease political corruption. One uncertain effect in India would though be that the ‘fringe’ parties like ultra-right and ultra-left, permanently out of the parliamentary system due to first-past-the-post system might be mellowed. If this helps in their diluting their ideology and help civil society can not be predicted with any certainty.

Right to recall your MP like in California is also considered. This is a good measure, esp in India though the mechanism is going to be yet more expensive and open to fraudulent practices and violent suppression of voters’ will by a sitting MP.

Interestingly, none of the above ensures reduction in corruption. That is because the assumption of increase in number of rules or laws will deter bad MPs is dubious. Public vigilance will ensure that, implying more public politicisation when public apathy is already a big problem in western democracies.

If corruption is going to be an integral part of democracy, there are two or three options, outside this system. One is the chinese dictatorship of the few. They hang the culprit to death in public there. Other is family rulers as in some middle-eastern muslim countries. There the ruling family has monopoly on corruption. Third is the Gandhian way where an examination of human tendency, needs and greed is warranted. Given present circumstances in Britain or in India none of these options is feasible.

Therefore, like lower middle-class n India ‘increase’ the area of their 10ftX10ft  ‘living room’ by ‘including’ the adjoining ‘balcony of 3ft by 6ft’ , or in Britain such class adds a
conservatory on, only cosmetic touch-ups will be done. The long-term effects on british democracy will be that people will soon realise inadequacy of these measures and the discontent will continue.

All said and done, again, it is important to stress the main difference between british and indian democracies. There is no public shame left in Indian political life. If at all it ever was there is doubtful too. But at least we had a railway minister in ‘50s who resigned accepting the moral responsibility of train accidents. [He became Prime Minister later on]. In the next generation we had a Chief Minister of the largest state in India, who accepted moral responsibility for his inability to contain murderous mayhem in country-side by mafia and resigned. That was in early ‘80s. No such instance comes to mind since then. Here, in Britain a railway minister resigned on similar grounds just a few years back. But in contemporary India ‘political conscience’ is a contradictory term.

In Britain things are a bit better. May be with tomorrow’s Telegraph hanging over their head, a few MPs rushed to their constituents and bared all the expenses. Many admitted the wrongdoing, quite a few returned the wrongfully claimed expenses to the treasury. All implicated have announced that they will not contest the next election.

Of course there are a few arrogant crooks. Like one Anthony Steen, a conservative MP. He had claimed some 90000 pounds in ‘second home’ expense. When this came out and he was questioned, the rascal even had the temerity to say that because he lives in a palatial house his constituents are jealous of him. But such feudal lords are mercifully a rarity in Britain, while they are the overwhelming majority of MPs in India. Steen announced his retirement after this parliament only due to pressure from his party leader, not because his constituents wanted him out.

The gesture of ‘not contesting the next election’ is also worth examining. If they resign before the term of the parliament, they do not get pension as MP on retirement. No one has resigned from the parliament as yet. In other words, people will pay their salaries until the elections are announced and then continue them their pension for their lifetime! Still, at least they will not contest the next election and are a notch better than the Indian leeches.

Coming to the power of the media. That a single newspaper shook up the establishment is an amazing feat. In India a newspaper – Indian Express had launched such a campaign against a powerful business house in ‘80s. Nothing much came out of it. People continued to buy that company’s shares, today it is one of the biggest multinationals in the world. But here, after a first couple of days, BBC and all the TV channels, other main newspapers like The Times, The Guardian, The Independent are continuing to hound the politicians relentlessly 24/7. The MPs have been shamed to such an extent that a sensitive soul committing suicide is also a mentioned  probability.

It is worth noting how power has shifted from politics to media. Archbishop of Canterbury, a learned man and a thinker has questioned the wisdom of undermining the political process due to this mission. If media have only a criticising role is also being asked.

Anyway, with the flip-side of the democracy exposed, the mother of parliaments is in a pathetic state.