Former Karnataka Chief Minister B.S. Yeddyurappa, who had lost his ground after being accused of corruption, is now back in a prominent role as the BJP’s Karnataka unit president. Is this not double standard? Are we lacking value based politics? If we add a layer of hypocrisy to the transgressions committed by Modi, his electoral manifestos gets even more alarming, harrowing and unspeakable. The JMM – BJP , the JMM- Congress in Jharkhand a prominent example. They speak high but in practice they show their reflection, original one. This not with one party, all parties are accountable for it. Whether you call it political compulsion or cravings for power. If that trend to join hands with most corrupt continues, then the state and nation together is at loss. And the corrupts will be emboldened with such wins to loot further with much impunity.
Take for example Mr . Subhramanium Swamy’s opportunist politics . Swami is a very cunning, opportunistic and selfish politician. Presently betraying Indian on religion. He is a very unpredictable person which must be the reason that he is called the “Captain without a ship”.Swamy also hated Vajpayee for his socialist and communist thinking. And this is also a reason why he likes Modi – Modi is pro-liberalisation. In 1999, the sudden bonhomie between Swamy, Sonia Gandhi & Jayalalitha at a tea party hosted by Swamy. This was an attempt to bring down the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government. Today both these “Ladies” are on his target. But Gandhi’s attempts at cobbling a government together then failed. Soon after this, Swamy fell out with both the Congress chief and Amma. He blamed Vajpayee for denying him the finance minister post in the Morarji Desai government. Samanth Subramanian writes that Swamy claimed Vajpayee spread a rumour that he was a CIA agent and Swamy in his memoir struck back by calling Vajpayee a drunk. No surprise he didn’t make it to the Vajpayee cabinet either as finance minister or foreign minister. He cannot be trusted for his side changing. The Indian politician is always peculiar when compared to his fellow politicians world over. The average Indian politician likes to be flattered. The degree of flattery or the height to which it reaches depends on the party to which he belongs to and to which part of India he hails from. Every political party of India is guilty of unabashed sycophancy, with varying degrees. The fawning nature of Indian politics, whereby many leaders are surrounded by yes-men and rarely bother to learn how to laugh at themselves, makes such jokes all too rare in the public sphere.
Sycophancy in power politics is perhaps as old as politics itself. Since time immemorial politicians jockeying for positions of power and pelf have invariably had recourse to this time-tested tactics to curry favour with overlords empowered to decide their fate and fortune. The long and repetitive honorific tagged with the names of ‘Rajas’, ‘Badshahs’ and ‘Emperors’ during princely rule and supposed to be proclaimed ad nauseum by minions provide proof positive not only of the bloated sense of superiority of the rulers but also of a crying need for sustenance in a larger than life self-image-a tinge of megalomania. In the exalted Mughal court visitors including members of nobility had to walk backward after paying obeisance to His/Her exalted Majesties because showing back to the ‘Badshah’ or to the ancient Roman Caesers was impermissible. Those were customs or codes of conduct but sycophancy remains a potent weapon in a favour-seeker’s arsenal as much as it retains its potency. Such a resurgent country, cannot and should not be bogged down by sycophancy. I am waiting for the day when every Indian thinks that he or she is his or her own leader.
The actual problem of Indian politics is Chamchagiri (Sycophancy) and this can be very easily seen in the Congress party and many other parties where party cadets start worshipping a new comer who is some relative of an influential politician and don’t bother to judge him based on his actions. Most of the people get promotion wholly based on Chamchagiri. Indira Gandhi herself said that “My grandfather once told me that there were two kinds of people: those who do the work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the first group; there was much less competition.” We think all Indian political parties should seriously ponder about this quote from Indira Gandhi and bring the necessary change in Indian politics.
All politicians are same when they occupy power. Are citizens fed up with political parties and ideologies? Or is “anti-politics” just a lazy excuse not to engage with issues? Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build a bridge even where there is no river. The current political system doesn’t properly engage with or address the huge problem of economic disparity; however, a revolution looks unlikely. People below certain socio economic levels don’t know anything about political parties . Certain sections want some specific things, like: students wants free laptops, farmers power tariff waiver, they are not concerned or cannot think about major things like foreign policy or economics etc. so they vote parties offering them. Appeasement and vote bank politics are at worst – poor form and below-the-belt tactics .Their damage has been horrifically over-hyped by the BJP and their supporters, as one of the primary causes of India’s problems. They’re wrong – the primary cause is the Socialism of the Congress which has prevented India from having a strong economy, which is not due to appeasement.
The country is struggling hard to make its mark as the emerging leader in terms of economy and development but the blemish to its own image is the gigantic number of abet and aberrant leaders having the heinous charges of rape, theft, dacoity, murder, extortion etc. The radical cause of increasing criminalization of politics is nexus of muscle power, money power and politics. Criminalization of politics is actually a mysterious enigma.The statutory limit is- Rs 15 lakhs for a Lok Sabha seat (depending on the constituency and the number of voters), Rs 3 to 6 lakhs for state legislatures (depending on the area), and Rs 75,000 for municipal corporations. The criminals and mafia thus dwell and flourish under the aegis of these MPs and MLAs. This nexus is the real shoot in arm to the criminalization of politics or in other words ‘Bemired politics’. Indian politics is not a philanthropic activity instead it has become a means to accrue power by the avid and abhorrent leaders. The politics in India has become a profitable business for rowdies.
The political parties do not pay attention to inculcate noble political values and principles of citizenship in the people. They do not promote patriotism and commitment to nation-building. They do not want to unite the people of nation by stressing the importance of harmonious living. On the contrary, they perpetuate the differences among the people and make full use of those differences for creating conflicts among them.
The decency ,decorum and sobriety once considered inseparable from the public offices are thrown to the wind; these elected representatives would stoop down to any level, for achieving their personal political aims or the interests of their parties. From village panchayat meetings to Parliament, the common behavior includes selfish quarrel, cheap arguments, disrespect to authorities, violation of healthy conventions, and waste of time.
The political system that exists in India is not democracy. It can be called ‘richocracy’, i.e. the rule by the rich. When the affairs of the state are decided by political parties that are funded and controlled by the very rich, who are a small minority, when the institutions of the country such as the courts are dominated by the very wealthy class, such a system is not democracy.
How can you have true democracy when the the majority of Indians who live in the rural areas live in poverty? They have no electricity, no clean drinking water and no good schools? The fact that the traders, and the middle classes, who live in big cities, and who constitute a minority of the one billion Indian people, enjoy wealth and have good schools does not prove that we have true democracy.
Unfortunately, in India many of the eminent politicians and business tycoons use the same means to transfer lump sum to their foreign accounts. Of late our Indian democracy being throttled to slow death by the stinking corrupt politicians. Whole India is facing this sort of undue advantage by these political bosses and they dictate who runs the administrations as well as policies of governance. If we take a look at the number of wealthy candidates contesting elections and lure the voters it is clearly visible that Indian Politics has stooped so low to the money & muscle power. Most of the elected representatives of state assemblies and central parliamentary itself a fine example of how the money power dominates the governance. Root cause for additional corruption of course and the lust for money grows day by day to remain in power.
It is a human story, but it’s also a political story that speaks volumes about our democratic system. It’s a story that can be multiplied innumerable times at every level of public life across the nation where, alas, bribery—either explicit or implicit—remains far too common. Ideal politics talks of some ideals like truthfulness, welfare of the people, faithfulness and oppose individual benefit. When the political parties or political leaders follow the above- mentioned policies then their politics will be called value based politics. In today’s India, the works for the national benefit, secularism, wel¬fare etc. are the main themes for the value-based politics. But these days negligency regarding the value-based politics is generally avoided.
To ac¬quire power, the political parties and political leaders do not mind ignoring the value-based politics. Corruption, forceful politics and the presence of force, money and crime in politics are re¬ally harming the whole political system. There is a strong need to end the dirty politics. It should be noted that by following the value-based poli¬tics only the democratic aims can be fulfilled and by doing this, the establishment of human wel¬fare will also be possible.
Politics has become a dark room where all politicians are of same colour, and if someone generous like you all enter here will also get lost in that darkness. I am not against corruption. I get my Gas connection illegally, I used to drive a car when I did not have a driving licence and I drove when drunk. I save as much tax as I can, some of it unethically. I give bribe to the ticket checker when travelling on a WL ticket in train so that I can reach home earlier. I don’t like standing in lines for filling up government forms and hence bribe the government official to allow me my permits. I love corruption as it makes my life easier. I am not sure we Indians are ready for a honest government as this will mean making ourselves honest. Honesty is a lost virtue.
Corruption can be need-based or greed-based. Better governance can at least help to check need-based corruption. Better governance can check greed based corruption also because punishment for the corrupt will be very effective and prompt in a better-governed country. the very pervasiveness of corruption also imparted to Indian political rhetoric a distinctive spirit, namely, a focus on personal character, reputation, and integrity, which in turn had two consequences. One was that mud-slinging became the preferred form of attacking one’s rivals and opponents. This in turn led to the constant need for those unstained by corrupt practices to defend themselves and their integrity against charges that they were themselves corrupt. Let God save the nation.
INDIA
FACTS & FIGURES
* POPULATION (2010):
1.2 BILLION
* GDP (2010):
$1.73 TRILLION
* INFANT MORTALITY RATE (PER 1,000 LIVE BIRTHS – 2010):
48.2
* LIFE EXPECTANCY (2009)
64.78 YEARS
* LITERACY RATE (2006)
62.8%
(* World Bank data)
The 2015 Corruption Perceptions Index clearly shows that corruption remains a blight around the world. But 2015 was also a year when people again took to the streets to protest corruption. People across the globe sent a strong signal to those in power: it is time to tackle grand corruption.José Ugaz,
Chair, Transparency International
TABLE OF RESULTS: CORRUPTION PERCEPTIONS INDEX 2015
A country or territory’s score indicates the perceived level of public sector corruption on a scale of 0 (highly corrupt) to 100 (very clean). A country’s rank indicates its position relative to the other countries in the index. This year’s index includes 168 countries and territories.
| Rank | Country/territory | 2015 Score | 2014 Score | 2013 Score | 2012 Score |
| 71 | Serbia | 40 | 41 | 42 | 39 |
| 72 | El Salvador | 39 | 39 | 38 | 38 |
| 72 | Mongolia | 39 | 39 | 38 | 36 |
| 72 | Panama | 39 | 37 | 35 | 38 |
| 72 | Trinidad and Tobago | 39 | 38 | 38 | 39 |
| 76 | Bosnia and Herzegovina | 38 | 39 | 42 | 42 |
| 76 | Brazil | 38 | 43 | 42 | 43 |
| 76 | Burkina Faso | 38 | 38 | 38 | 38 |
| 76 | India | 38 | 38 | 36 | 36 |
| 76 | Thailand | 38 | 38 | 35 | 37 |
| 76 | Tunisia | 38 | 40 | 41 | 41 |
| 76 | Zambia | 38 | 38 | 38 | 37 |
| 83 | Benin | 37 | 39 | 36 | 36 |
| 83 | China | 37 | 36 | 40 | 39 |
| 83 | Colombia | 37 | 37 | 36 | 36 |
| 83 | Liberia | 37 | 37 | 38 | 41 |
| 83 |
Courtesy Transparency International
