There seems to be a curious parallel between the war on terror and the war on corruption. Both presuppose faith in the efficacy of might. Consider the war on terror. The perversity of terrorism is that it reposes faith in violence. The war on terror, too, does likewise. The difference pertains only to who resorts to violence.

Not infrequently, the war on terror becomes a mirror image of the war by terror. The insignia of the State is that it enjoys the exclusive right to resort to violence. Citizens taking the law into their hands is anathema because wielding the law is the exclusive prerogative of the State. Resorting to violence is not the issue; the issue is who resorts to it.

The war on corruption seems to stand on the dogma that pitting the might of the State against the corrupt would suffice to eradicate corruption. Every Indian would readily agree that corruption needs to be eradicated. None sensible enough would, however, agree that corruption can be eradicated from the body politic by merely turning the might of the State against the corrupt. Corruption is a disease of the mind. Unless the individual and the national psyche is refined and reformed, corruption will remain endemic. Corruption issues from greed, which is fuelled by the shared notion that the worth of human beings depends on what, and how much, a person possesses. Belief in intrinsic human worth is incompatible with corruption.

This confronts us with the possibility that the idea of development we pursue could well be a catalyst for corruption. Available evidence — the astronomical enlargement of corruption in the wake of globalisation — points in that direction. The power of being — in which M.K. Gandhi believed — has been substituted by the power of ownership.

What, then, are we to make of the much-touted war on corruption? Bringing about a change in the individual and the national outlook on what constitutes human worth as well as what should comprise the essence of authentic, meaningful patriotism is the core task. There is no indication anywhere that this is in the offing under the aegis of the war on corruption. Instead, dogmatic faith in the power of money is being intensified. Moreover, money can procure people’s representatives from any party. In Karnataka, for example, the Bharatiya Janata Party had attained power by procuring legislators. During the campaign for the recent elections, the BJP alleged that corruption would rise if the Congress was to be voted to power. The BJP’s alleged unleashing of investigative agencies on the Opposition needs to be seen in this context as well.

In such a scheme of things, the war on corruption has amounted to no more than a war on the corrupt outside of one’s fold. ‘Who’, not ‘what’, becomes the issue. No one — in the ruling party or in Opposition parties — wants corruption to be eradicated. So long as money-power remains decisive in politics, corruption will remain and reign. Money of the order that swings elections, or procures people’s representatives in the numbers required, can be gained only through mega corruption. So corruption will persist as the mainstay of politics.

The war on corruption of this pedigree gets readily incorporated into the waging of war against political rivals. It weaponises morality; and, in doing so, caricatures political rivals as enemies of ‘national interest’. This threatens to undermine the core of democracy. War on corruption, the manner in which it has been envisaged at present, could institutionalise corruption and legitimise the hypocrisy that individuals are corruption-free for no other reason than that they belong to a particular party.

Valson Thampu is a former principal of St Stephen’s College