A downward slide in rank on the Corruption Perceptions Index 2023 published by Transparency International cannot be good news. Although the perception of corruption in the public sectors of 180 countries shows that in recent years the world has not been able to address corruption effectively, it does not mean that India’s slide down eight places from 85 in 2022 to 93 in 2023 can be ignored. India’s overall score has dropped from 40 to 39. This could have seemed less alarming, except that the CPI report points to a further narrowing of civic space before the 2024 elections with the new telecommunications bill, which might pose a ‘grave threat’ to fundamental rights. It is not difficult to discern the connection between public sector corruption and endangered fundamental rights. But since the index is in effect an appraisal of governments’ principles, any decline seems strange as the Narendra Modi-led government speaks from a high and pious moral ground while using investigative agencies as weapons to uncover corruption among Opposition politicians. Allegations of corruption from the Opposition against Bharatiya Janata Party politicians or their brotherhood are firmly shut down — with suspensions from Parliament if necessary.

For the CPI, corruption is understood as the abuse of entrusted power for private gain. Private gain may not always be visible, but the fact that power in 16 states and one union territory out of India’s 28 states and eight union territories was entrusted to the BJP and its allies in 2023 is visible enough. That, too, was made possible in certain states through a form of corruption that corrodes the scaffolding of the electoral system: not narrowly public sector perhaps, but the basis of public life itself. This corruption is moral; in another form it insinuates itself into people’s beliefs, producing hatred to sabotage equality and peace.

Private gain may be of many kinds and sometimes of a scale not easy to grasp. Besides, the waning of ethics from the political arena has lowered people’s expectations to such a degree over the years that corruption has not figured in a big way in their electoral choices for quite a while. With fundamental rights not always assured, they, too, look for immediate gain: graft is too common to bother about. This is the most poisonous effect of corruption, for it gradually envelops public life so as to blur perception and discernment. The CPI report says that justice systems are weakening all over the world and this has a direct relationship to corruption. Authoritarian regimes and democratically elected leaders are undermining justice — which helps corruption gain impunity — and even encouraging it by removing its consequences. What the report does not say is that this is deliberately self-serving; as long as corruption grows unchecked at every level the less visible or culpable does it become in the highest echelons. That is where the danger for India lies; the slide in ranking is more than a simple warning about the public sector.