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Canon Of Grease

Beyond India's Rs 64 crore in Swiss bank accounts

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Canon Of Grease
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Where’s the outrage?

My remit for this piece is to comment on how investigative journalism in India has changed over the last 20 years since I led the Bofors investigations. Vir Sanghvi, a former colleague, summed it all up when he wrote, "Bofors will always exert a special hold on the national imagination because it was one scandal that made us lose our innocence and realise that all politicians, no matter how different they may seem, are at the end of the day, just the same." As far as I was concerned, I was just doing my job as a reporter. Jobs don’t make people. With a little bit of luck, people make their own paths, in their careers and in their lives. You may be a journalist, a businessperson, teacher or parent, the stuff that you are made of will influence your activity and not vice-versa. In the following lines I share what I learnt from that experience as a reporter and as a person.

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The real issue in the gun deal was not the Rs 64 crore that was traced or the Rs 250 crore that the Swedish arms manufacturer was required to pay as bribes. The real issue was one of faith and the betrayal of that faith by a system, a government, a prime minister. Bofors crippled one of the most popular governments elected by the Indian people and prevented it from getting on with the business of running the country. For over 20 years, successive governments, politicians and journalists have used and abused Bofors for political mileage and personal gain. The public cannot be duped.

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The rot is deep. Major scandals in India, whether they are political, economic or social, have exposed a rather stable line-up of allies and opponents on both sides of the ethical and moral divide—allies whose sense of self-preservation has tainted their view on crime, corruption and institutional damage. The basic interaction between and within these coalitions today is about the levels of corruption and crime, but not about corruption and crime itself. Once aberrations turn into core beliefs, they are resistant to change. These coalitions consist of actors from a variety of institutions, both public and private, at various levels of economic and political engagement. They share a basic set of beliefs and seek to manipulate rules to achieve their goals. When systems in a democracy are made to abdicate their raison d’etre i.e. provide institutional checks and balances, crime and corruption become the glue. Unaccounted and unpunished, crimes bleed the system slowly and surely. They create space for bigger and worse crimes. Over the years, systematic attacks on our institutions have created a situation where crime is constant. Only their frequency and violence fluctuate. It would not be an overstatement to say that in some ways, our systems now threaten our democracy. There is no external plot, no grand foreign design. We have got there all by ourselves. We have let ourselves down.

It would be wrong to equate investigative journalism only with political investigations. A lot is happening in the country, some good, mostly indifferent where trivia gets elevated to the rank of serious work. Journalists do not live in a vacuum. Like the rest of us, they too are influenced by the environment they live in. The only difference is that when we put pen to paper, we take on a responsibility to which we are expected to do justice. That responsibility includes trying to break this coalition of lotus-eaters for whom no crime is bad enough, no corruption is high enough and no amount of starving children and raped women can shake them out of their self-preserving stupor.

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That is easier said than done.Many hurdles remain, but one major issue is the pattern of media ownership. For a reporter, it is vital to know where the journalist in the editor ends and where the media owner or member of the board begins. It is important to know how much of what the editor is saying is stemming from journalistic rigour and integrity and how much from having to secure the bottomline or serve a personal goal. This is not easy for a cub reporter out on a story. In this struggle, framing is key. Frames tell us what is at stake, frames tell us who is responsible and frames tell us where solutions can be found. Frames also give intentions away. If the frame is correct and the intentions of getting to the bottom of a story in a systematic and rigorous manner are genuine, truth will stare you in the face.

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If people working on a story are coming from different frames, there will be dissonance and the pecking order will kick in. For example, when powerful people are caught with their hands in the till, we throw up our hands in despair and say who is not corrupt. Yet, if the person who cleans our house steals a piece of bread we react rather differently. There is something about all of us in this helpless acceptance of a pecking order for crimes and corruption. There is something about our institutions in each of these issues that go unresolved. Together we have contributed to making our institutions blind and deaf. Challenges, such as the one raised by the many scandals we know about, should ideally reinforce basic values and their corollary in institutional learning. Instead, all of us have abdicated our responsibility. We have thereby created a situation where institutionally and emotionally our democracy remains feudal even though intellectually the men and women who helped craft our Constitution dreamt of a modern Indian state where there would be no place for the Nellie massacre, the Bhagalpur blindings and certainly zero tolerance for the starvation deaths that occur all over India.

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Responsible democracies cannot debate acceptability of thresholds of crime and certainly not expect criminal behaviour to be the constant glue of our political, economic and social life. Unless of course we are talking about a coalition of criminals.

All this will change. The younger generation, more educated, more ambitious and more willing to take risks, will push our systems to respond. Today, India accounts for less than one per cent of global trade. That too will change in the years ahead and as globalisation starts kicking in, it will bring with it systems that require more credibility than what is on offer today. The media, too, will have to change and deal with competition—for advertising space and journalistic integrity.

In the meantime, Rs 64 crore waits in Swiss banks waiting to be claimed by India. I am told Rs 64 crore is not a lot of money. Sixty-four crore is a lot of schools and a lot of primary health centres, not to mention incalculable self-respect for a nation.

(An award-winning journalist, best-selling author Chitra Subramaniam has moved on to public health. She is now CEO of a Geneva-based business development and marketing firm, the Indian arm of which focuses primarily on public health. Some of these reflections have appeared in a chapter in the book Breaking the Big story—Great Moments in Indian Journalism edited by B.G. Verghese.

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