Are Indians Turning Indifferent and Sceptical Toward Corruption

When Indians see opposition leaders being raided and arrested such as Manish Sisodia was recently, they know this is just political warfare, not a blow for integrity in public life

Vir Sanghvi

There was a time in India when corruption was a hot political issue. Now it’s just another political weapon. Let’s take a case from the headlines: the socalled Delhi liquor scam and the arrest of Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) leader Manish Sisodia, who resigned from the post of deputy chief minister Tuesday.

If the charges levelled by the CBI are upheld, then the consequences should be devastating for CM Arvind Kejriwal and his party. Kejriwal first came to national prominence skulking behind Anna Hazare’s dhoti. At that stage, during UPA-II, Kejriwal asked us to trust him because neither he nor his partners in the Anna movement were in it for themselves.

They had taken to the streets, he said, only because they wanted to fight the menace of corruption. In time, most of his claims proved to be hollow. The first to be thrown off the bus (metaphorically, at least) was Anna Hazare who had been put forward as the movement’s ostensible leader.

Next Kejriwal also flung all his other allegedly high-minded fellow agitators off the bus, one by one. Kiran Bedi, the Bhushans, Yogendra Yadav, Kumar Vishwas and all the others who had once appeared on TV shows talking about the battle against corruption disappeared from view.

Next to go was the claim that they were all in it for the public good, not for power or position. Among the few people of consequence left standing after the purges in India Against Corruption movement, was Kejriwal’s long-standing associate Sisodia.

The two of them became the founders of a new political party, AAP, and both have enjoyed political power since then. So what does a party born out of an anti-corruption platform do when its ex-deputy CM gets arrested on corruption charges? Or that another former senior minister Satyendra Jain is already sitting in jail? Does the AAP worry when the CBI and the Enforcement Directorate say there is substantial evidence of corruption in the government? Isn’t this the exact opposite of what Arvind Kejriwal had claimed he stood for? Shouldn’t AAP be embarrassed?

Actually, no. They are not at all embarrassed by the arrests or the innumerable corruption charges. There is no merit to any of the charges, says Kejriwal. His government is being ‘targeted by the Centre’. This is bold but not unusual.

Every politician who is caught with his or her fingers in the till always claims that it is a frame-up. The difference is that this time, this defence seems to be holding up. There is very little evidence that AAP has lost support in Delhi or that the charges have hurt the government in the way that, say, Kejriwal’s allegations crippled the Manmohan Singh government and led to Sheila Dikshit’s defeat.

This is becoming the pattern. In the run-up to the 2021 West Bengal Assembly election, central investigative agencies claimed to have uncovered scam after scam, nearly every one linked to the Trinamool Congress (TMC).

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) launched a high-decibel campaign against TMC and key political figures were arrested. But when the election came around, not one scandal seemed to matter. Mamata Banerjee and TMC won by a landslide.

The no-result playbook

Slowly but surely, corruption has ceased to be a political issue. Either people have become so cynical that they no longer care whether a politician is corrupt or they simply don’t believe the charges. This seems to be true across the board.

The BJP spent much of its first term telling the world how corrupt the Gandhis were and that they had used the National Herald newspaper to make money. It had such little impact that the matter is hardly discussed now. Rahul Gandhi’s 2019 Lok Sabha election campaign was fought entirely on the Rafale deal where he levelled personal allegations against Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Very few people paid the slightest bit of attention. More recently, the efforts to link Gautam Adani’s growth to Modi’s personal camaraderie with the businessman seemed to have done little damage to the PM. There are many possible reasons that corruption has ceased to be a political issue. It could be that people have worked out that nothing comes of the big corruption scandals.

Despite the BJP’s best efforts, all primary accused in the 2G spectrum case were acquitted by the courts. There is also a weary recognition that all political parties make money so it’s hard to be judgmental about one party; far better to look at other reasons to decide who to vote for.

Another reason for the lack of any co