Whistle-blowing as an anti-corruption tool

CORRUPTION IN Asian countries has become a popular topic of international research. Publication of country-wise indices of corruption perception is now almost an annual feature. We have the Corruption Perception Index of Transparency International and that of the Business International, the Global Competitiveness Report Index and the Survey of the Political & Economic Risk Consultancy Ltd., Hong Kong to mention a few. In all these cases, India has the dubious distinction of being ranked high in the perceived level of corruption. No wonder, therefore, that corruption in India is now seen as a dangerous disease warranting a desperate remedy. One such remedy, advocated among others by no less a person than the Chief Vigilance Commissioner, is whistle- blowing.

Normally, one associates the blowing of a whistle with giving a green signal to go on, as in the case of running race or a departing train. In the context of fighting corruption, it means a red signal to stop something fishy going on. It is in a way the opposite of the three monkeys which see, hear or speak no evil. Whistle-blowing says: keep your eyes and ears open to see or hear anything evil, and if you do, speak about it openly! The term whistle-blower, however, is used to refer only to an insider who exposes the evil in a system of which he is a member. Feroz Gandhi who exposed the Mundhra scam in the LIC was not a whistle- blower, but Manoj Prabhakar who exposed match-fixing was a whistle-blower. It would apply to any public servant who exposes corruption in government.

Not an entirely new concept

In a sense, whistle-blowing is not an entirely new concept. An accused who turns approver is a whistle-blower in a special judicial context. But what we are discussing is a general authorisation to all public servants for exposing corruption in government whenever and wherever they see it and whoever may be involved. No special dispensation is required for a public servant to tackle a corrupt subordinate. If he has to cut across the systemic hierarchy and expose corruption at levels higher than his own, then a special dispensation is required which is what a Whistle-blowers (Protection) Act is meant to provide.

It was the U.S. which pioneered the pursuit of the concept of whistle-blowing. It started as an exposure of unsafe working conditions and practices in private factories by some employees. This produced a positive response from the government which amended several statutes providing protection to such employees from managerial reprisal. Some examples are the Toxic Substances Control Act, Water Pollution Act, Fair Labour Standards Act, Occupational Safety & Health Act, etc. This developed into a general ethical resistance to any type of lawlessness and fraud, especially in government agencies, by employees who had no other motivation except to ``sleep well at night.'' A few sensational cases dramatised the potential of such exposures:

(i) Employees who pointed out defective seals in the Challenger Space Shuttle (which exploded within minutes of the launch in 1986) were overruled in order to avoid postponing the announced date of launch.

(ii) In 1968, Ernest Fitzerald, an employee, exposed the collusion between Defence officials and contractors.

(iii) In 1970, Frank Serpico, a New York policeman, exposed the corruption in his department.

Several interesting non-governmental initiatives followed such exposures. Some of them were:

(i) Ralph Nader, the consumer activist, organised the first whistle-blowers conference in 1971.

(ii) A group of attorneys set up the Government Accountability Project and convened the second whistle-blowers conference in 1977.

(iii) An organisation called Coalition to Stop Government Waste instituted an annual whistle-blower Patriot Award.

(iv) A public interest attorney, John Phillips, got passed the False Claims Amendment Act in 1986 according to which a whistle- blower who exposed a fraud in government was entitled to a share of the amount recovered from the guilty party.

(v) A book, The Labour Lawyer's Guide to the rights and responsibilities of a whistle-blower was published to enable lawyers to defend whistle-blowers from harassment by employers.

(vi) In 1978, Congress passed the Inspector General Act authorising the audit and investigation of complaints from employees on the functioning of federal agencies and providing immunity to employees from departmental action.

As a climax to all these developments, the Senate and the House passed the Whistle-blowers Protection Bill unanimously in 1988 but it was vetoed by President Reagan. (It was predictable behaviour on the part of a person who called the Occupational Safety & Health Act a ``pernicious watchdog'' and asserted that ``trees caused more pollution than automobiles.'' But, strangely, the Bill has not been revived by any of Reagan's successors or even by Congress. Experience of whistle-blowing in the U.S. shows that it calls for extraordinary emotional fortitude on the part of a whistle-blower, and that without exception both private and public sector managements consistently unleashed harsh reprisals. It was the employee's own courage and the support from external agencies like NGOs and the media that have finally compelled corrective action. Literature does not indicate the presence of a strong or active whistle-blowers movement in any other country.

Tackling corruption needs two things: the will and the weapon. The Chief Vigilance Commissioner's point is that the former does not fall entirely within his control, especially at the political level. All that he can do is to sharpen existing weapons, procure new weapons and plead passionately for their use. The available weapons as far as public servants are concerned are: conduct and disciplinary rules, the Prevention of Corruption Act, investigative agencies, propriety-oriented procedures, audit and, of course, complaints. The CVC has been actively initiating action and making suggestions on all these. Why, then, do we need whistle-blowing?

Advantages

As an anti-corruption tool, whistle-blowing has the following advantages:

(i) An insider has first-hand, fresh information compared to an external investigative agency. He may, therefore, be able to supply clinching evidence for pinning down the guilty.

(ii) An insider may give early warning signals which may help abort corruption.

(iii) Protecting whistle-blowers may deter corrupt behaviour by others.

(iv) Protection to whistle-blower employees will place honest employees right in the centre of administration unlike the present situation where they are often helpless spectators, or are bullied into acquiescence by their corrupt colleagues and superiors who dominate the department.

(v) Making whistle-blowing official and acceptable would obviate anonymous petitioning and unauthorised leaks to the media.

(vi) The common law expects every citizen to report the occurrence of, or attempts to commit, a cognisable offence. Why, then, should any employee not have the right to report corruption in his own department?

Problems

As against this, protection to whistle-blowing may throw up the following problems and issues:

(a) Any department or organisation needs to be an internally cohesive entity with a certain degree of mutual trust and dependability among employees. If every employee is a potential ``squealer,'' will this not destroy trust, teamwork and open communication, and create fear and suspicion in their place? (Remember Communist Russia encouraging children to spy on their parents?)

(b) In every organisation there is an unwritten code of silence which expects every employee to be loyal to the others to the extent of not betraying them. If this code is broken, there are umpteen ways of humiliating or harrassing the employee without recourse to formal disciplinary action. At the least, such employees may be marginalised by being assigned to inconsequential posts or remote stations. At worst, they may be subjected to intimidation or physical assault if the interests of political goondas are involved.

(c) Officially encouraged whistle-blowing may discourage corrupt behaviour. What if it also discourages initiative and the willingness to take bold, quick decisions, and encourages negativism, defensiveness and procrastination?

(d) Unlike a stranger or a casual acquaintance against whom one makes a complaint of lawlessness, colleagues and bosses are people with whom one has to live day in and day out. Even if whistle-blowing was morally justified, how many employees would be willing to face organisational ostracism?

(e) In the present politically and morally vitiated administrative environment, is there not a risk of whistle- blowing being used to blackmail colleagues or even bosses? Even if it is found to be baseless later, what about the mental agony and the adverse publicity that an honest victim of dishonest whistle-blowing has to go through?

(f) The political executive will not agree to whistle-blowing covering the conduct of Ministers. Very few subordinates will have the courage to blow the whistle on top officers. Ultimately, the big game hunters will all go scot free and only the small fry will get caught. Is it then really worth the trouble?

(g) Millions of ordinary citizens face corruption everyday at the cutting edge of administration. Employees at this level usually gang up and operate an unwritten Mamool Manual. It is doubtful whether whistle-blowing can impact this level of administration at all.

(h) If we can permit whistle-blowing, then why not go the whole hog and introduce electronic surveillance in all offices?

Balancing pros and cons

It is now necessary to balance the pros and cons and take a view on whether or not whistle-blowing has a net advantage. The following considerations are relevant in this connection:

(a) There is a saying that all that is needed for evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing. Any reform which puts power in the hands of the good and the honest, therefore, deserves earnest consideration. It is necessary to rescue the administration from the corrupt hijackers and it is only the empowered honest who can do it.

(b) C. D. Deshmukh once said in Parliament, ``Corruption can be eliminated not by mere disapproval but by a fanatical intolerance of it.'' Maybe whistle-blowing, once legalised and encouraged, would fan the resistance of the few into a fanatical intolerance of the many.

(c) Most books on management emphasise the importance of encouraging dissent and managing it in the interests of the organisation. Whistle-blowing is a form of dissent. Unlike dissent on business goals and strategies on which different views are possible, whistle-blowing has an unimpeachable moral basis and needs to be given a legal basis.

(d) However lofty and desirable an idea may be, putting it into practice cannot be done on blind faith and has to consider organisational and cultural realities. The idea itself needs to be defined precisely and operationally.

(e) Norman Bowie, in his book Business Ethics, has suggested the following norms for legitimate whistle-blowing:

(i) should spring from moral and not selfish motives

(ii) should have exhausted internal remedies first

(iii) should be based on evidence that would normally persuade a reasonable person

(iv) the whistle-blower should perceive serious consequences if the whistle is not blown

(v) should be related to his or her normal responsibilities in the organisation.

These norms are sound enough to start with and could be fine- tuned based on experience.

(f) Violation of the above norms should be punishable. Adherence to the norms need not be specially rewarded as the intention is to empower employees with high moral values to assert themselves on principle and not with an eye on rewards.

(g) Should whistle-blowing be a right or a duty? Once immunity is given to an employee whistle-blower, does it not follow that ``not blowing the whistle when he ought to'' should be treated as connivance? To start with, at least All India Service Officers should not only be empowered to blow the whistle but made duty- bound to do so even if it involves Ministers.

(h) A good way of implementing the idea would be to try it out as pilot projects in a few offices of sensitive departments like PWD, Excise, Commercial Taxes and Registration and learn from experience before extending, modifying or abandoning the experiment.

(i) Internal whistle-blowing - that is, approaching higher levels in one's own department without any restriction - may be first tried out before allowing access directly to external government agencies like CVC, CBI, CAG, etc. Similarly, access to these external agencies directly may be experimented with before allowing direct access to external agencies like the media, MPs, etc. Progress from one stage to the next should depend on how well the idea takes root and how healthily it grows.

Other qualities

Anti-corruption campaigns tend to create the impression that corruption is the only obstacle to progress and that once it is contained, the land will flow with milk and honey. For the country to progress, it is not enough to be honest; it is also necessary to be sincere, disciplined, generally law-abiding, hard-working, efficient and a host of other things. Corruption, to the extent it bypasses or marginalises these other qualities, is a symptom of their absence. Separate, positive action is, therefore, needed to promote and reward these other qualities. For example, supporting whistle-blowing by a subordinate is an indirect admission that the head of the department may not be honest and cannot always be depended upon to check corruption. The solution, surely, is to make sure that top officials are properly selected, rightly motivated and wisely deployed. If this is done, whistle-blowing, instead of appearing to be an external graft, would merge with the normal interaction between bosses and subordinates.

Rajaji with characteristic foresight, said in 1912: ``Elections and their corruptions will make our life hell as soon as freedom is given to us.'' Many believe this has come true. Maybe whistle- blowing will provide just the shock the system needs and arouse public conscience.

P. K. DORAISWAMY

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