Corruption, politics and the Judiciary

By V. Krishna Ananth

AMONG THE verdicts by the Supreme Court in recent weeks, there were at least two which must have come as a ray of hope for all those concerned about the corruption that has come to haunt the nation. One was its order dispossessing the former Prime Minister, Mr. Chandra Sekhar, of about 500 acres he held in the name of a trust. The other was the ruling that a person remains disqualified from holding public office even during the pendency of an appeal against a conviction on charges of corruption.

In the first instance, the Judiciary did nothing more than reverse the consequences of a brazen act by a collective that included a bunch of village elders who decided to (or were forced to) hand over large tracts of land to a trust floated by an important political personality of the time.

But the other verdict pertained to a reinterpretation of the law to say that conviction by a lower court on a charge of corruption will hold against a person in public office even while an appeal is pending in a higher court. This ruling was a reversal of the common understanding of the theory of law (jurisprudential principle) that a convicted person shall be presumed not guilty as long as an appeal was is pending.

These two interventions by the judiciary (as also many other verdicts in recent times) must have infused optimism among a section of civil society that the Judiciary was indeed doing the task of cleansing public life and that it was now possible, by law, to ensure that the corrupt were kept out of politics. These interventions by the learned judges, however, have dangerous implications for the democratic polity. We shall come to this later.

There is something else that strikes anyone concerned over the extent to which corruption has permeated the system, and, more importantly, the dependence of the political class on money managed through unfair means even to run their day-to-day affairs. It is this dependence of the entire political class, cutting across the spectrum, that seems to have guided the parties and their leaders to simply ignore the two landmark verdicts by the apex court. All those men and women in the various parties who never let go an opportunity to wax eloquent on the need to cleanse public life of corruption have been conspicuously silent. This indeed is a shocking comment on their commitment to probity in public life. And even those who claim to be the watchdogs of democracy - the articulate middle classes especially - were not seen celebrating these two judgments.

This indeed is a reflection of the high level of tolerance society and its articulate sections have adopted to the canker of corruption. This is not surprising; people who do not have any qualms about paying huge sums for school admissions or greasing palms to ensure that their telephone lines work, or to carry on with faulty electricity meters, cannot be expected to rise against a corrupt political class whose ways are leading to a serious crisis in the setup called democracy.

And, in this sense, a judge-made law, that could ensure that a public servant held guilty (by the lowest court) of having amassed huge sums of money through corrupt means shall not be allowed to remain in office, is certainly not going to excite them. Such a judgment is, after all, bound to affect them - the political class as well as the managers of the executive and other such institutions as the banks and the public sector undertakings - in the long run.

In other words, the judgment could imply that such leading servants of the democratic polity as the Jayalalithaas, Sukhrams, Balakrishna Pillais and Narasimha Raos shall not be allowed to hold office until the highest court clears them. The apex court did have a definite reason to define the spirit of the law in that manner. ``It would be a sublime public policy that the convicted public servant is kept under disability of the conviction in spite of keeping the sentence... in abeyance till the disposal of the appeal or revision,'' was how the Division Bench of the Supreme Court saw it. And even after this, one finds the political leaders, who revel in raising issues of corruption and scandals within and outside Parliament, refusing to even raise the implications of this judgment anywhere. In other words, we find a rare unity within the political class.

The silence, indeed, is understandable. The leaders facing trial and those convicted, after all, come from a cross section of the political class. And even those parties whose leaders have not been convicted cannot rule out that possibility in future. For, most parties depend on the clout that they enjoy while in power to raise resources to hire helicopters and for other means that have become necessary to fight elections in a ``meaningful'' manner.

It is this that seems to have driven the political class to pretend to ignore the implications of the apex court judgment. But then the law is very clear in that MPs, MLAs and Ministers are public servants too. This was, after all, the burden of the apex court's verdict in the JMM bribery case, in which Mr. Narasimha Rao was involved.

This consensus within the political class (to ignore the need to ensure that the law of the land is explicit about keeping the convicted out of the corridors of power) accords a sense of legitimacy to the idea of judicial activism. And a perception is building that the courts will not fail in the task of enforcing democracy. For want of a better alternative to check the brazen ways of the political class, civil society is beginning to look to the Judiciary unmindful of the dangers this could pose to the democratic process. The dangers are multifold. The people would tend to depend on the learned judges to implement democracy rather than restrict their role to enforcing the rule of law, which is only one aspect of the democratic spirit. To assign this larger role to one set of men and women, however enlightened they are, is as inimical to the spirit of democracy as is allowing individual leaders to take over the polity.

But then, this danger cannot be stopped as long as the civil society institutions and those within the political class (a small minority is all that is left which can be counted as not corrupt) continue to remain silent and let the cleansing be done by the courts. The courts, in the first place, cannot be expected to go to the logical ends. And add to this the possibilities that exist to manipulate the Judiciary (particularly at the lower levels) and the investigating agencies by those in power to fix their political rivals. This factor will have serious implications, particularly in the context of the apex court's verdict that conviction by a lower court shall disqualify anyone from holding office even while an appeal is pending.

Hence, the democratic option lies with the civil society institutions and the people to ensure that anyone with a record of having accumulated wealth beyond known means are kept out of the political process. And identifying such members of the political class - whose affluence levels have increased while holding office - should not pose a problem to the people as long as they are encouraged to detest corruption in their own life. Such a movement alone can help prevent the canker of corruption from eating into the vitals of the polity.

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