:: Farrukh Dhondy

Why are desis cool about corruption?

Farrukh Dhondy

"No, I am not without sin,

But casting the first stone is such fun!"

From Haramnama by

Bachchoo

May.23 : I sometimes drink at a seedy pub in South London, somewhere off the South Circular Road. It’s a good place to meet riff-raff, buy fresh joints of meat which "fell of the back of a lorry" (were stolen) at a quarter of the price the supermarket would charge, pick up packets of ganja or the odd Viagra tablet. Not that I do any of these. I drop in to indulge my taste for perfectly legal, warm English beer.

But this day as the bar props me up (weak knee, not drunkenness), in walk three guys, one of whom, Jimmy, I know.

"Been with one of your geezers", opens Jimmy, "generous bloke, gave me 30 for hauling his gear", he says

"My geezers? You mean writers of deathless prose? Failed candidates for Poet Laureate…?"

"Nah, one of yours, Paki, Indian, whatever!"

"So which was he?"

"Indian, wasn’t he? He was one of your minister Johnnies, part of your government".

"A minister? Who? What were you doing?"

"Drove the vans down with his furniture. For his gaff!"

"In London?"

"Yeah, opposite Knightsbridge Barracks".

"Indian minister? A house?"

"Not ’alf!" says companion one, his jeans and T-shirt grimy with labouring. "Your lad has a £9 million building, I reckon, in Central London. The whole Monty — his own flat and the three other buildings next to his’n."

The second companion tells me which Indian ministry was mentioned by the caretaker of the property. I know the name of the minister.

"That’s the feller! Diamond geezer. Gave us ’firty each and gave Dave sixty! Reckon he fancied ’im. The round’s on Dave."

"I didn’t drop the piano, did I?" says Dave.

This particular Indian minister and a piano? Well, tastes develop.

The other drinkers at the bar were now vaguely interested.

"Indian ministers must be paid very well", says Phil, the resident bar philosopher, whose accent speaks of having seen better days. He smiles with his pipe in his mouth, a self-satisfied smile which says he knows that his sarcasms are not intended for the hoi-polloi.

"He would have bought it in dog’s name", I say.

It would be invidious to mention here the name of the minister whom Jimmy and gang had acknowledged as their benefactor. After all, he may not actually own such a property and an accusation of corruption in a national newspaper may be actionable.

The encounter in the pub set my mind on the track of a sting. I had possibly stumbled across information which may be the grave secret of a Union minister of the Indian government. Should I call the Indian investigative journalists of my acquaintance in India and tell then that I have a lead to a corruption scandal? Would any of them care? Would any of them even bother to get away from their computers to find out if a senior Union minister or his surrogates had bought a London real estate property for £9 million and had generously tipped the guys who moved furniture into it, personally introducing himself and allowing his subordinates to divulge his rank and designation? What would be the mechanism of such an investigation?

I thought of a few ways of journalistically tackling the issue, but who in the Indian media would play ball? Obviously, if this was a Union minister of the Congress coalition then one would look to a BJP-leaning editor or reptile-cum-sleuth to deal with it. If the minister in question were not actually from the Congress Party (I want to give no clues) but part of the coalition and very likely to wait for the outcome of the current election before making his/her bargain with the Congress or the BJP, then the journalists would also be hedging their bets and neither side would want to offend him/her by digging into benami British property deals. And even if the exceptional journalist ventures to dig the dirt on corruption, will it affect the course of democratic politics?

To the Indian electorate the revelation that X or Y is corrupt and owns, against all odds or common sense, a £9 million property in London would probably have the same effect as the revelation that today is Saturday. Tigers have stripes, leopards have spots, birds have wings, skunks smell, politicians have properties abroad, bank accounts in safe havens and money under the mattress.

Contrast the turmoil that has overtaken Britain in the last two weeks. Newspapers have got hold of a CD which contains records of all the "expenses" that the British members of Parliament of both Houses, the Commons and the Lords, have filed in the last few years. The "rules" of Parliament allow parliamentarians to designate either their residence in London or their residence in their constituency as their main home and the other as their second home. They can then, within the rules that they themselves framed, claim for reasonable upkeep of the second home. It now seems that hundreds of them, including ministers and shadow ministers (Opposition’s spokesmen and women), grossly abused the system and made outrageous, immoral, untenable and, in some cases, criminally fraudulent claims. Several of them have charged the taxpayer, through this "expenses" fiddle, for homes that don’t exist, for mortgages or rents of fictitious addresses and for mortgages of houses of relatives and friends. Some of them have filed for cash to the tune of £18,000 for book cases, money for "clearing a moat around a castle", for swimming pools, for installing heating under a tennis court and even for mortgages that they have already paid off, for dog food, for tampons, for chocolate bars, for a plug for a bath… The list and the revelations range from the shocking to the absurd.

The revelations, far from being shrugged off, have provoked the deepest crisis in the British Constitution since Cromwell cut off Charles I’s head (all right — almost!). A few MPs, including the Asian MP Shahid Malik, have resigned their posts on the front benches. One Baroness Uddin, of Bangladeshi origin, is under suspicion of fraud and 40 others have started to pay back the booty they took home in a damage-limitation exercise which is doomed to fail.

The public is furious, the media is diligently sanctimonious, the Opposition have called for a fresh election. Heads will roll.