The majority of the young people in our country today are tired of
being helpless in the face of corruption at the hands of those in
authority, whether they are policemen, petty officials and Panchayats or
those in the highest offices of state. These have come to light in
scandal after scandal since the decade of the eighties, whether it is
the signing of WTO agreements, handing over of coal mines to cronies,
the 2G scam and now the involvement of the Minister of Foreign Affairs
and a Chief Minister of Rajasthan to allow an alleged fugitive from the
Enforcement Directorate with some sixteen charges framed against him,
ranging from money laundering to match fixing, to escape justice and
possibly the country as well. The fugitive is none other than Lalit
Modi, a young man from a wealthy family who began his sordid career with
sentence for drug peddling as a university student in USA from which he
has never looked back.
Now, it has come to a pass where he has successfully compromised the Minister of Foreign Affairs to secretly plead with British authorities to give him a document to leave Britain, while her own ministry fought a case against him in India with her daughter as his lawyer defending him. Also her husband has been a lawyer for Modi for over 22 years, bailing him out a number of times.
The other person also compromised in getting Modi off the hook is the Rajasthan Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje Scindia, who has allegedly pleaded his case with a British court on the specific condition that the Indian authorities should not know of it. This is understandable as it was he who bought shares in her son’s company at over 9000 times higher their value. Moreover, the Rajasthan Government has signed an MOU with the Portuguese hospital where his wife was being treated, for some Rs. 60 crores. There is obviously a nexus between these people over decades and the give and take may be shifted over a number of transactions.
But to defend them, the Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, has now come out on record that the share deal is merely one between two individual companies and there is nothing wrong with it. It is interesting that a similar excuse was given by the former Congress Chief Minister of Haryana for changing land use in Gurgaon in favor of DLF and Ms. Sonia Gandhi’s son in law Robert Vadra, getting him a windfall profit of over Rs. 500 crores in a land deal allegedly entered by one of his companies with a dud cheque of Rs. 52 lakhs that the DLF ignored despite receiving no money for it. Obviously the disease of corruption is not limited to this or that party. It is systemic. As long as speculative finance capital and free for all profiteering are not controlled such corrupt practices and equally corrupt explanations for them can not be checked. The only way to fight this is to attack the nexus and not the deal. The deal is only one element in a criminal nexus that has to be destroyed.
Behind this nexus is the belief that the rich are above the law, or rather , the laws are made to benefit the rich. The only thing the poor can do is to find a rich patron to plead their case for them before the authorities for a bribe. Nothing could be worse than this. It is like how Dronacharya got Eklavya to cut his own thumb in the Mahabharata. The result of such defeatist thinking is that some 920 of the richest Indians have cornered the fifth of the wealth of the country while over half of the hungry and underfed in the world live in India. But the hue and cry that should result from this unusual accumulation of wealth by a handful is not heard.
Further, it is shocking that over 3 lakhs of farmers have committed suicide in the country, facing ruin because of bad harvests, loans at high interest, and sky rocketing prices of inputs with no proper minimum support price or government intervention to match them. This should have brought any self respecting parliament to a standstill; but neither the UPA 2 nor the NDA had to face such a challenge for overlooking the needs of a huge majority of the Indian people. On the contrary both these governments sought to make the sale of land from small holders easier for corporates and land mafias. Even laws like the MNREGA have been violated by both the UPA 2 and the NDA governments with impunity and poor people on the verge of starvation are denied wages for more than a year, not given work in the latest phase and certainly not paid unemployment relief. It is time that militant movements are developed from the village level upwards to ensure that farmers can keep their assets in hand and landless labour be given their work, wages, and house sites before any hand over to corporates and speculators.
It is also a lie that these new land sharks will develop the land and provide jobs in the non farm sector for those whose assets they have taken over. In fact over 67 % of land given over for SEZs is lying unutilized waiting for its price to rise and speculators to profit from it while cultivators are faced with constantly reduced per capita land availability even when they are capable of increasing production. The NDA government is now hoping to transfer this land that should by law be given back to the original owners after five years, to its land bank. These land banks will become a new source of corruption in the villages. So the nexus between the administration, panchayats and mafias must be targeted, fought against and defeated on the ground.
How are we to best accomplish this task ? We must organize peasants for their demands, agricultural labourers and rural landless for their urgent needs and ensure credit, government investment in agriculture, distribution of assets to farmers and landless and work and a living wage for labourers. This is easier said than done. In a society divided among castes and under the control of the rural rich a tough battle has to be fought to educate the rural poor, more than half of whom are illiterate even today. This means that those who are young, educated and determined to fight corruption must turn their eyes to India’s villages today for support and help to organize them to resolve their problems through their own efforts. Ultimately we will only succeed in fighting corruption when the victims of corruption resist it and are prepared to defeat it themselves. Our task as students is to inspire them to do just that. Their resistance will awaken the middle classes in the cities to resist as well. The price is likely to be high. Every day we hear of journalists and people fighting for rational thinking being killed for exposing the land mafias, sand mafias, human traffickers, criminals and local land lords. They are only targeted because of the lack of organization among the rural poor to defend them. A movement against corruption must defend the lives, livelihoods and rights of the rural masses. This task cannot be accomplished by individual heroes who will only become easy targets for the criminals they are fighting. We require teams of leaders and mass organizations of activists for this job. Therefore rather than individuals going into the villages, teams of students and youth committed to fighting corruption must prepare themselves and go in a planned manner to ensure that a mass resistance to it develops where it is most required. This resistance will have to challenge not only the land mafias, but also caste panchayats and the ignorance, defeatism and despair that the rural masses are victims of. This broad based resistance is likely to be attractive to young people with diverse interests and ideals. Everyone can participate at the levels they are best fitted to tackle and target the sources of corruption in our villages which they feel they are best fitted to fight. Without rooting out corruption in our villages we will fail to root it out in the cities or in the country.
The young must come forward with their energy and inspiration to accomplish this crucial task at this crucial time. They must be aware that similar resistance can be seen in Greece, Britain, Brazil and many other countries in the world. They must understand that they are not alone and in many countries people have taken resistance to dispossession, unemployment, the price rise and so called austerity measures against the working people to a higher level than we have in our country so far. The September 2nd call of the trade unions and solidarity actions will help to carry forward our struggle against corruption as well in the context of global resistance to neo-liberal policies that it is rooted in.
Now, it has come to a pass where he has successfully compromised the Minister of Foreign Affairs to secretly plead with British authorities to give him a document to leave Britain, while her own ministry fought a case against him in India with her daughter as his lawyer defending him. Also her husband has been a lawyer for Modi for over 22 years, bailing him out a number of times.
The other person also compromised in getting Modi off the hook is the Rajasthan Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje Scindia, who has allegedly pleaded his case with a British court on the specific condition that the Indian authorities should not know of it. This is understandable as it was he who bought shares in her son’s company at over 9000 times higher their value. Moreover, the Rajasthan Government has signed an MOU with the Portuguese hospital where his wife was being treated, for some Rs. 60 crores. There is obviously a nexus between these people over decades and the give and take may be shifted over a number of transactions.
But to defend them, the Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, has now come out on record that the share deal is merely one between two individual companies and there is nothing wrong with it. It is interesting that a similar excuse was given by the former Congress Chief Minister of Haryana for changing land use in Gurgaon in favor of DLF and Ms. Sonia Gandhi’s son in law Robert Vadra, getting him a windfall profit of over Rs. 500 crores in a land deal allegedly entered by one of his companies with a dud cheque of Rs. 52 lakhs that the DLF ignored despite receiving no money for it. Obviously the disease of corruption is not limited to this or that party. It is systemic. As long as speculative finance capital and free for all profiteering are not controlled such corrupt practices and equally corrupt explanations for them can not be checked. The only way to fight this is to attack the nexus and not the deal. The deal is only one element in a criminal nexus that has to be destroyed.
Behind this nexus is the belief that the rich are above the law, or rather , the laws are made to benefit the rich. The only thing the poor can do is to find a rich patron to plead their case for them before the authorities for a bribe. Nothing could be worse than this. It is like how Dronacharya got Eklavya to cut his own thumb in the Mahabharata. The result of such defeatist thinking is that some 920 of the richest Indians have cornered the fifth of the wealth of the country while over half of the hungry and underfed in the world live in India. But the hue and cry that should result from this unusual accumulation of wealth by a handful is not heard.
Further, it is shocking that over 3 lakhs of farmers have committed suicide in the country, facing ruin because of bad harvests, loans at high interest, and sky rocketing prices of inputs with no proper minimum support price or government intervention to match them. This should have brought any self respecting parliament to a standstill; but neither the UPA 2 nor the NDA had to face such a challenge for overlooking the needs of a huge majority of the Indian people. On the contrary both these governments sought to make the sale of land from small holders easier for corporates and land mafias. Even laws like the MNREGA have been violated by both the UPA 2 and the NDA governments with impunity and poor people on the verge of starvation are denied wages for more than a year, not given work in the latest phase and certainly not paid unemployment relief. It is time that militant movements are developed from the village level upwards to ensure that farmers can keep their assets in hand and landless labour be given their work, wages, and house sites before any hand over to corporates and speculators.
It is also a lie that these new land sharks will develop the land and provide jobs in the non farm sector for those whose assets they have taken over. In fact over 67 % of land given over for SEZs is lying unutilized waiting for its price to rise and speculators to profit from it while cultivators are faced with constantly reduced per capita land availability even when they are capable of increasing production. The NDA government is now hoping to transfer this land that should by law be given back to the original owners after five years, to its land bank. These land banks will become a new source of corruption in the villages. So the nexus between the administration, panchayats and mafias must be targeted, fought against and defeated on the ground.
How are we to best accomplish this task ? We must organize peasants for their demands, agricultural labourers and rural landless for their urgent needs and ensure credit, government investment in agriculture, distribution of assets to farmers and landless and work and a living wage for labourers. This is easier said than done. In a society divided among castes and under the control of the rural rich a tough battle has to be fought to educate the rural poor, more than half of whom are illiterate even today. This means that those who are young, educated and determined to fight corruption must turn their eyes to India’s villages today for support and help to organize them to resolve their problems through their own efforts. Ultimately we will only succeed in fighting corruption when the victims of corruption resist it and are prepared to defeat it themselves. Our task as students is to inspire them to do just that. Their resistance will awaken the middle classes in the cities to resist as well. The price is likely to be high. Every day we hear of journalists and people fighting for rational thinking being killed for exposing the land mafias, sand mafias, human traffickers, criminals and local land lords. They are only targeted because of the lack of organization among the rural poor to defend them. A movement against corruption must defend the lives, livelihoods and rights of the rural masses. This task cannot be accomplished by individual heroes who will only become easy targets for the criminals they are fighting. We require teams of leaders and mass organizations of activists for this job. Therefore rather than individuals going into the villages, teams of students and youth committed to fighting corruption must prepare themselves and go in a planned manner to ensure that a mass resistance to it develops where it is most required. This resistance will have to challenge not only the land mafias, but also caste panchayats and the ignorance, defeatism and despair that the rural masses are victims of. This broad based resistance is likely to be attractive to young people with diverse interests and ideals. Everyone can participate at the levels they are best fitted to tackle and target the sources of corruption in our villages which they feel they are best fitted to fight. Without rooting out corruption in our villages we will fail to root it out in the cities or in the country.
The young must come forward with their energy and inspiration to accomplish this crucial task at this crucial time. They must be aware that similar resistance can be seen in Greece, Britain, Brazil and many other countries in the world. They must understand that they are not alone and in many countries people have taken resistance to dispossession, unemployment, the price rise and so called austerity measures against the working people to a higher level than we have in our country so far. The September 2nd call of the trade unions and solidarity actions will help to carry forward our struggle against corruption as well in the context of global resistance to neo-liberal policies that it is rooted in.
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