In this column we will be featuring the writings by award winning women journalists in India found in the collection of the book ‘Making News Breaking News Her Way. It is a publication by Tranquebar Press in association with Media Foundation, New Delhi which instituted the annual Chameli Devi Jain Award for an Outstanding Women Mediaperson in 1980.
YOU HAVE A PROBLEM, I HAVE A COMMITTEE
Chitra Subramaniam
[dropcap]I[/dropcap]t Is Mahatma Gandhi’s birth anniversary today. This year he is everybody’s new best friend. As Vaishnava janato rents the air, people are busy ensuring that their ‘Gandhi’ moment is immortalised in some form. Soon we may have to reserve a place at Rajghat.
As the country reels under scams, price rise, inflation and a general sense of drift, our leaders visit holy and hallowed places and invite the media to witness the spectacle. All of us watch with rapt attention, frame by frame, because drama is as vital to us as air. We look for theories where none exist and we make up stories because nobody cares. Give us a line and we will turn it into an epic. Raise a question and expect to get at least two committees and a sub-committee for an answer, with all of them spying on each other. There is security in numbers. In the age of internet, we survive on the number of jottings in a file. We cannot keep it simple. Nobody will believe us if we did. Truth is very simple -that’s probably why we are unable to find it.
An increasingly clueless prime minister says he has faith in his ministers and that external forces are destabilising India. There we go again. We used to blame everything on the CIA and the foreign hand a few years ago. Now politesse and new mantras oblige, we have become discreet. Down South, a damning Lokayukta Report on illegal mining is forgotten because the prime accused have visited temples claiming they have faith. The Opposition -if we have one -is as full of scams as the ruling coalition. And our own hawa-hawai in Lucknow doesn’t cease to amuse, including when she recently dismissed the founder of Wikileaks as a misguided lunatic.We talk all the time about truth, honesty and integrity as if it is something that will happen like putting on a light switch. At the time of writing, the nation is living the Lokpal debate, with politicians, civil society, the media and self-proclaimed analysts and intellectuals taking pot-shots at each other. The government has set up a committee and they don’t seem to agree on anything. On the menu is the demand for a new organisation that will deal with corruption in ways that India has never done before. Everybody has to be on this boat which, like Noah’s Ark, will save us from corruption which is making the speakers of truth in India an endangered species. During a conversation in Delhi last summer, an influential journalist told me that to be honest in India was to be subversive!
The other raging debate is black money in foreign banks. Every country has this problem and they do their job without drama. Our leaders tour the country and make brave speeches about bringing the guilty to book. We are busy signing treaties I and agreements with other countries in the hope of recovering our money. Television debates show glib speakers telling us why we can and cannot rush things, as that would spoil our relations with countries who have different views on how to deal with the problem.
We can bury our heads in the sand and hope everything will pass, but we live in an increasingly interconnected world. People read, interact, travel, do business, ask questions, etc. India used to be seen as a very attractive place to invest. Some of that is wearing off. It takes a lot to keep hope and faith alive. Money goes where money feels safe. A European businessperson told me that in India the road from rules to decision is a ‘black box’ that defies all logic. You never know what is going to hit you or rather which committee is going land on you. Indians know the meaning of every gesture, every query and every delay when files do not move or decisions are overturned after contracts have been signed. The cost of ministerial clearance is discussed openly and anybody will tell you what the pecking order is.
Corruption is not an ideology. There are no two ways to explain it. We as a people have institutionalised and internalised it. We even cast gods in our own mould competing with each other to pip the post to the hundi. For us it is a power game. If our house-help steals, it is an issue. If someone more powerful than us or from whom we stand to gain something indulges in graft, we throw up our hands and ask who is not corrupt. Few countries in the world, if any, have WIP lines in places of worship. How did we get here?
The remit for this piece was to comment on how things had changed since I received the Chameli Devi Jain Award. I received this honour in 1989, for investigating the Bofors gun deal that contributed to the electoral defeat of our most popular prime minister in 1989.
Bofors was a simple story. India bought arms from Sweden for which bribes were paid to Indians and others in banks around the world, including in Switzerland. In 1988, I secured over 350 documents from Sweden that showed the money trail, names of companies, bank account numbers and other details that nailed the government’s lie that there were no middlemen in the deal. The documents were authenticated by the highest authorities in Sweden, and the tough Swiss courts transferred the relevant details from the bank accounts to Indian investigating agencies. We responded by setting up committees. One group went off to Sweden to inspect the guns. Another trotted off to our border to see the gun in action. They were all reporting to different sub-committees.
Every government from 1990 used Bofors for petty personal and political gain. People who came to power on the Bofors platform were among the first to procrastinate while they pretended to investigate. Our main investigating agency was pliant and in some cases even servile. The emperor was naked, but nobody dared to say so. While the world said Bofors was an open and shut case on corruption -and among the few cases where Swiss courts ordered the transfer of documents to India -we maintained a silence because we thought our economic reforms and India’s market potential were good enough to cover up the corpse in our own backyard. Two years ago, the government shut the case saying there was no evidence. India’s current messiahs and messengers fighting corruption were silent then, as they are now. More than the bribes, Bofors was about faith and the betrayal of that faith by a prime minister, a parliament, the executive and the judiciary. No institution was spared. Individuals were targeted, untruths replaced truths.
So, have things changed in the past years? A friend told me recently that it is almost twenty-five years since Bofors happened, but she could see the damage. We have made remarkable strides in several areas. But corruption has kept pace. It is as if we are living in several centuries. Our leaders seem so removed from reality. Major scandals, 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. This includes our politicians, certain business houses, NGOs and, unfortunately, even some members of the media who have turned into power brokers. A sense of self-preservation in all of the above has tainted their view on crime, corruption and institutional damage. There is little point in telling them that India is not the centre of the world and Delhi is not the centre of India. They live from frame to frame of television channels, decibel over decibel.
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 become resistant to change. They share a basic set of beliefs and seek to manipulate rules to achieve their goals. When systems in a democracy abdicate their raison d’etre, i.e. to provide institutional checks and balances, crime and corruption become the glue that binds them all. Unaccounted and unpunished, crimes begin to bleed the system slowly and surely. They create space for bigger and worse crimes. This is the situation we find ourselves in today.
And we have got here all by ourselves. We have lost our basic sense of pride in ourselves and whenever the topic comes up, you see it as demagogy instead of a quiet faith in our ability to grow into a global power. The journey from sheer arrogance to ridiculous subservience is done effortlessly. As a journalist, one has got many opportunities to witness logic being stood on its head and having to report on it. Some stories are worth re-telling.
Did you know that till not too long ago, almonds were the biggest item of export from the US to India? We decided to buy Californian almonds as a priority because former President Ronald Reagan had an election to win. Welcome to the strange ways of international trade talks where nobody lets India down more than Indians.
In September 1986, the Uruguay Round of multilateral trade negotiations was launched in Uruguay. The Uruguay Round was an attempt to tackle issues of strategic importance for the design and management of the global economy, including the linkages between money, trade and finance. The launching of a new round of talks when older issues had not been addressed was an issue with some developing countries, including India. The fifteen items on the table were a mix. There was the normal market access for products; there was agriculture where rules of trade were not applied uniformly -India for example, was prevented from exporting its textiles through a series of long- and short-term measures. Finally, there were three new issues -trade in services, trade- related intellectual property rights (TRIPS) and trade-related investment measures (TRIMS). Textiles, together with TRIPS and TRIMS, showed up the negotiations’ real agenda –the rules of the game were being written by developed countries. The mould was being re-cast so as to place developing countries in a permanently weak position. The Uruguay
Round was important because by agreeing to liberalise under pressure and at a pace it could not cope with, India gave transnational companies near-sweeping rights to set up shop in the country without similar guarantees for itself. There were secret negotiations between Geneva and New Delhi that made our official negotiators look small; there were green room decisions leaked to the press before official India could react and there were several drafts of the treaty in circulation sometimes without the knowledge of our negotiators. Commenting on the Uruguay Round package, a senior Indian negotiator said, ‘This is not good for India. In fact, the whole Uruguay Round package is loaded against us. But, I would have retired by the time most of it comes into effect so I am not really concerned.’
The real story of who writes India’s economic script will probably not be known for some years. We speak so easily of living in globalised times. True globalisation should have meant that Indians could work anywhere in the world without any visa or work-permit restrictions. The question is not whether it is a yes or no to the private sector. Who else can create jobs and assist in the process of nation-building if not them. The question is one of priorities. But when we are unable to agree on the basics, who is to steer the nation? We use the excuse of isolation, but if Pakistan can tell the rest of the world where they get off, why can’t the world’s largest free-market economy play its cards better?
It all comes down to leadership, courage and pride in yourself as a nation. India stood completely isolated against the US, France, UK, China and the rest of the world when we came under intense pressure to sign the controversial and discriminatory Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). I remember the ugliness of the anger that was directed at India. Arundhati Chose, our permanent representative to the UN in Geneva stood alone, solid as a rock. She did not blink. Her every move was watched by the international media and she was accused of being a treaty-breaker. Will India walk out of the talks and be a treaty-breaker was the question on everyone’s lips. There were no committees then. There was India and India’s interests and nothing else mattered.
I remember one press conference in particular where the US, claiming to speak for the rest of the world, said India was a treaty-breaker. Our representative intervened with just one sentence. ‘You do not speak for the one billion Indians who don’t want this treaty. My people matter as much as the people you are talking about,’ she said as a packed and hostile room burst into unanimous and thunderous applause. There was no drama, no posturing and no committee. It was all done and said very matter-of-factly. It made one feel proud as a nation standing up for its interests, its people and its future.
Truth is simple. The many movements against corruption in India have unleashed anger and generated hope. If we fail, each of us will be responsible.
Chitta Subramaniam is an award-winning journalist and author. She has received the B D Goenka Award for Excellence in Journalism. Moving on from journalism, she worked at the WHO in Geneva where she led the Policy Analysis and Communications work for the Tobacco Free Initiative, a cabinet project whose remit was to negotiate a global convention on tobacco control. In 2004, she started her own company to promote business between India and Europe. The 1989 Chameli Devi Jain Award was given to Chitra Subramaniam. She shared the award with Nalini Singh.
