Web of corruption in J&K

By David Devadas

Some weeks before the elections to the Jammu and Kashmir Assembly, a government employed doctor told me his chief reason for wanting to see the Farooq Abdullah government defeated was corruption. “It has crossed all bounds”, said he earnestly, pointing to a recent scandal in his own department.

A hundred-odd brooms had been dispatched as equipment for his village primay health centre the previous year, he said, paid for at a rate three times higher than the one at Srinagar’s wholesale markets. They just lay in a store room, for the centre had no need for so many brooms. Clearly, those in charge of making purchase for the department had made a killing, supply thousands of brooms to health centers across the state.

Now that kind of scam might seem like par for the course for many citizens of south Asia. After all, billions of rupees were spent to purchase cattle fodder by a government department in Bihar not so long ago. The difference is that Kashmiris seem to resent corruption more keenly than most other south Asians. While corruption rarely becomes a major electoral issue in most parts of the subcontinent, it has often been a major issue for determinng voting patterns here.

The irony of course is that corruption is endemic in Kashmir- and has been for as long as anyone can remember. Older Kashmiris remember how, even under the tight controls of Dogra rule, marriage proposals for petty government employees were accompanied by information about how much the proposed groom’s “upar ki aamdani (extra income)” was.

There was talk of corruption around the distribution of forest felling leases to relatives of Sheikh Abdullah even during his first stint in power, before 1953, and corruption became a most potent political point against the most dynamic and efficient Kashmiri leader of recent times, Bakshi Ghulam MOhammed. No doubt the issue could be so effectively raked up because his political antagonists ran various governments which did not escape the anger of accusing fingers either. The legend is still to be hear of 30,000 egg yolks from the government hatchery having been mixed with paint to add sheen to the outer walls of the bungalow of one of those successors.

Such charges have not only been levelled aganist Kashmir’s top leaders. Corruption is virtually a way of life. It crops up at every step, not only in government offices but in personal interactions too. I had an amazing experience a couple of years ago. A leading fruit merchant had been telling me of the corrupt practices through which Kashmiri merchants were exploited at Delhi’s wholesale fruit market. When I asked him for more facts and figures so that I could write about it, he beamed and asked me how much he would be paid for the information. At first I thought he was joking but then realised that he was miffed with me for refusing to strike a deal. He seemed to think I had been wasting his time and did not seem to see any contradiction between his wanting to be paid so that I could highlight injustices of which he was a victim. His motto obviously was that no opportunity to make some money was to be lost.

There is a strange contadiction between the fervent moral outrage that most Kashmiris express about the scourge of corruption and the widespread indulgence in it, often by those who bemoan the trend among the rest of society. Perhaps this forked attitude explains what a military intelligence man once told me.

Contractors elsewhere deliver in a slovenly way even after taking a cut for themselves. In Kashmir, he claimed, the cut is extremely generous but, even if only a tenth of the sanctioned amount is actually spent on the work, it is delivered with exquisite grace and hospitality.

The concerned officer may be treaed to a lavish meal, and gifts for his family when the work is delivered, punctually. It is almost an art, perhaps these are the hallmarks of an evolved ancient civilisation that has, in decay, lost its moral moorings but not the trappings of civilised form. These also have to do with the extent to which the practice of Islam in the Valley has moved away from fundamentals to focus heavily on the intercession of pirs and other saints for favours from the Almighty. There is, after all, an element of bribery in promising to present a brocade sheet for the grave of a saint if one gets a lucrative job or admission to a prized institution or a son.

Religion being the fountain-head of morality and standards of behaviour in any society, corrupted religious practices may well lead to distorted perspectives on social conduct.

In Kashmir, these factors have created a situation in which personal morals have been blunted but the awareness of a general social malaise remains bitterly sharp.

(Source: The Tribune)