RIGHT ANGLE – Character-Building as Antidote to Corruption

After hearing in the morning Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s address to the nation from the rampart of the Red Fort on the Independence Day, I saw noted actor Kamal Haasan’s movie called “Indian 2” on a OTT platform in the afternoon. And I discovered a clear linkage between what Modi had stressed in his speech and what Haasan tried to convey in the movie. Both, it is obvious, are very worried over the menace of “corruption” that has a firm grip over our country to such an extent that it is fast becoming not only more powerful but also more respectable.

Modi did emphasize, rather strongly, during his speech his fight against the corruption for which he has been challenged. He assured the nation that he would not get scared by these challenges and fight harder than in the past against corruption and corrupt businessmen, officials and politicians.

Hardly a day goes by when either income tax or enforcement directorate officials do not discover or unaccounted money from various parts of the country. I distinctly remember at least three such prominent seizures. Last December, income tax authorities recovered more than ₹300 crore in cash during raids in three states across locations linked to an Odisha-based distillery group. This group is owned by Congress Rajya Sabha MP from Jharkhand, Dheeraj Sahu.

Early this year, the ED seized property documents worth Rs 150 crore from the residence of a senior IPS officer in Maharashtra. The raid took place at the officer’s official home in Colaba, Mumbai. Incidentally, her husband has been implicated in a massive Income Tax fraud case.

And most recently, the ED recovered a huge amount of “unaccounted cash”, worth ₹20 crore from the premises of the domestic help of Sanjiv Lal, personal secretary to Jharkhand Rural Development Minister Alamgir Alam (he has since quit). The cash haul was part of raids at multiple sites across Ranchi by the probe agency and the amount was principally in the ₹500 denomination.

Incidentally, Modi has been on record that while the ED seized only Rs 34 lakh that from 2004 to 2014, the same agency , from 2014 to 2024, has seized more than Rs3000 crore and attached properties worth Rs 1.25 lakh crore.

Significantly, many big names have been put behind the bars on the basis of corruption charges in the last few years. These names include really big ones in the industry, bureaucracy and politics. And that is precisely the reason why Modi has been lambasted by many quarters, particularly those claiming to be Left, Liberal and Secular.

In the eyes of the law, everybody is equal. But in our case, if you are leading politicians like Arvind Kejriwal or Hemant Soren (both are Chief Ministers or for that matter cabinet ministers in states (examples galore), then every seizure or arrest is projected as political victimisation.

It is not realised that the governmental agencies only prosecute and the decision to keep anyone jail or release lies in the hands of the judiciary. But the narrative being promoted is that Modi is keeping his opponents in jail. And in cases where the arrested corrupt persons are released on bail, they and their supporters proclaim loudly that the court has declared them “innocent” and they were wrongly accused. “Bails” are, thus, becoming certificates of innocence in this country.

And it so happens that if you are a politician then you gather public sympathy for the “wrongs done to you” and you eventually do well in elections. Last general elections, which denied Modi a majority to his BJP as a party, were full of such examples. Whether it is Rahul Gandhi or Sonia Gandhi (both are also on bail) or Lalu Yadav or the likes of Soren, Kejriwal, Shiv Kumar and Abhishek Banerjee, they and their respective parties all did very well.

In other words, it can be argued that the Indian public is very generous in not only condoning but also lionising the corrupt in many cases. In fact, they even go to the extent of punishing or reprimanding those who fight against corruption.

This theme has been displayed very eloquently in Haasan’s latest film. Here, the character “Indian”, played by Haasan helps in the creation of a strong force of the youth to fight corruption, many of whose parents are utterly corrupt. But the moment one young person’s corrupt father was arrested and his mother commited suicide over the incident, the young crusader and his comrades turned against “Indian” overnight and started a counter campaign all over the country against him as a family-breaker, by forgetting that it is the corrupt officials and businessmen who had broken lakhs of families and pushed thousands of their family members to rapes, murders and suicides. But now, they were after the blood of “Indian”, leading to his arrest. That Haasan escaped in filmy style for another sequel is a different matter altogether.

What is important here is that the crusader against corruption becomes the villain in the eyes of the people in no time. And the oppressors are rehabilitated as heroes.

One does not need to become a great social scientist to explain this phenomenon among the Indians. In my considered view, the root cause is the gradual decline of “values” or integrity among us. Howsoever educated or rich you are, if you do not have “character”, this education or wealth is useless. If you do not have character, then you will be prone to easy money and corruption. Materialism will dictate your life.

During our days in elementary schools, we were taught “civics” or “value education” that talked of what to do and say and what to avoid to become a good human being. I do not see such emphasis on value education in modern schools in the country. In fact, value education as an idea is increasingly becoming a taboo in our intellectual circles, overwhelmingly dominated, as these generally are, by the so-called liberals/seculars. Their invariable argument is that the values of a country are determined by its majority community and hence prejudicial to the interests of its minorities.

Those against value-education argue that teachers of values do not teach; they “moralise”, “preach”, “indoctrinate”, “manipulate”, and so forth. These teachers are also said to be “rigid”, as a result of which “the idea of free inquiry, thoughtfulness and reason” seems to be lost on a student; “he or she is thus unable to examine and weigh his or her own values.”

It is not realised that there are certain core values which are accepted by all religions. These include compassion, courage, courtesy, fairness, honesty, kindness, loyalty, perseverance, respect and responsibility. Learning them goes a big way in building one’s character and the country’s overall value system.

Notably, there are many scholarly works that prove that a nation’s rise or fall is determined by its value system. It is argued that former world leaders such as Egypt, Iran, Spain, Portugal and Great Britain declined as much for their economic failures as for their failures in human and spiritual aspects.

Even India under the great Mughals, as Paul Kennedy has explained in his classic – “The Rise and Fall of Great Powers”, had to fall because of the then prevailing “retarding factors in Indian life” — a Muslim elite whose conspicuous consumption (servants and hangers-on, extravagant clothes and jewels, harems and menageries) amidst the ocean of penury; and the sheer rigidity of the Hindu taboos such as the oppressive caste system which throttled initiative and instilled rituals of not killing even rodents and insects, leading not only to the loss of vast amounts of food but also the bubonic plagues.

In this ‘Information Age’, the values of truthfulness, honesty, integrity, humility, justice, steadfastness and dependability continue to be as relevant as ever. It is important for educators to define expected skills for being successful in family work, social and other environments, and to include those aspects of character and moral development that are deemed important.

Gone are the days of the rivalry between the advocates of ‘Asian value system’ (responsibility towards the family, state and society) and the ‘Western value system’ (individualistic culture and modernity). Now is the time of synergy between the two, something countries like Japan, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan have achieved with great success. In a sense, these Asian countries have accepted the “secular” culture of the west — capitalism, liberalism and democracy—to a considerable extent.

The moral of the story is thus clear. It is time to re-examine the unnecessary politicisation of the question of value education through the fundamentals of all religions, including Hinduism, in India.

Without building characters through value-education, India’s future looks gloomy, something Prime Minister Modi tried his best to disprove in his Independence-Day speech. Sorry Modi ji, I disagree.