Is Crisis looming ahead for India - Business Line

India seems ominously heading for a fearsome crisis. Evidence is mounting of institutions, commonly regarded as pillars of good and effective governance, rapidly sliding into a state of malfunctioning, if not near-crumbling. One by one, they are losing their sanctity and credibility. Disturbingly enough, whether it is the legislature, executive or the judiciary, people are fast losing their respect for them and, indeed, are heard to be holding them in contempt in their day-to-day conversations.

The so-called `temples of democracy', the elected legislatures, were the first to suffer a precipitous fall in public esteem. Moneybags, musclemen and mafias began invading the electoral arena. Persons with criminal antecedents began entering the portals of State Assemblies and Parliament in large numbers, and it did not take long before they found accommodation in the Councils of Ministers themselves.

This has led to the utterly revolting spectacle of law-breakers parading themselves as law makers, and accused in cases involving heinous crimes making policies as Ministers and lording it over national resources and assets.

Corruption is no longer hush-hush, but a matter of open negotiations openly carried out and concluded, without any sense of delicacy or shame. In fact, it has ceased to shock and is taken as a `transaction cost' by industry and business, `speed money' by those having dealings with the Government and accepted as a way of life by the people at large. We hear accounts from credible sources of this or that Minister, this or that functionary, sometimes even a judge, making demands running into crores of rupees, but we go our way unperturbed, hardly batting an eyelid.

Nobody has the stamina to fight the monster any more, or even to complain. The response to extortionist demands is just one of benumbed submission and compliance. It was hoped that multiple crores of rupees worth of personal assets declared by candidates who till the other day had no ostensible means of living will form the basis of stringent follow-up action by the income-tax or enforcement authorities. But those declarations too nowadays fail to create any ripple. There is no institution, in short, that has not been enveloped by the dark shadow of suspicion.

Pervading rottenness

The news of the action by the Election Commission (EC) against several top officials of Uttar Pradesh is of a piece with the pervading rottenness in every branch of governance.

There can be no more telling pointer to the degeneration in administration than that the EC should have found high officials such as the Chief Secretary, the Director-General of Police, a Divisional Commissioner, an IGP, two DIGs, a District Magistrate and three SPs to be impediments to holding free and fair elections and had to issue peremptory orders for replacing them by those with unsullied reputation for impartiality.

In fact, the EC has had to resort to its summary powers in this regard in an increasing number of instances in recent years in State after State. What was unthinkable until about 20 years ago, has now become commonplace.

This is deplorably indicative of the spread of the rot to the highest echelons of the administrative and police services to such an extent that senior officials see nothing wrong in participating in political functions or openly behaving in a partisan manner.

The Indian state faces the frightening prospect of its institutions being engulfed by the relentlessly advancing tide of corruption, subversion and perversion. Launching of organised efforts by the civil society to roll back the tide brooks no delay.