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India's Selective Rage Over Corruption by Manu Joseph

The best thing about Indian politicians is that they make you feel you are a better person. Not surprisingly, Indians often derive their moral confidence not through the discomfort of examining their own actions, but from regarding themselves as decent folks looted by corrupt, villainous politicians.

This is at the heart of a self-righteous middle-class uprising against political corruption, a television news drama that reached its inevitable climax in Delhi on Tuesday when the rural social reformer Anna Hazare was about to set out for his death fast — the second one he has attempted this year to press his demand for a powerful anti-corruption agency.

He was arrested by the police, ostensibly in the interest of law and order.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, in his Independence Day address to the nation on Monday, took digs at Mr. Hazare and his tactic of using hunger strikes to twist the arm of an elected government. Mr. Singh said that he did not have “a magic wand” to end corruption in India.

The anti-corruption movement has the simplicity of a third-rate fable.

There are the good guys (the reformers and the average Indian citizen) and the bad guys (the politicians). But the real story is not a fable but art cinema.

Indians have a deep and complicated relationship with corruption. As in any long marriage, it is not clear whether they are happily or unhappily married. The country’s economic system is fused with many strands of corruption and organized systems of tax evasion. The middle class is very much a part of this.

Most Indians have paid a bribe. Most Indian businesses cannot survive or remain competitive without stashing away undeclared earnings.

Almost everybody who has sold a house has taken one part of the payment in cash and evaded tax on it.

Yet, the branding of corruption is so powerful that Indians moan the moment they hear the word. The comic hypocrisy of it all was best evident in the past few months as the anti-corruption movement gathered unprecedented middle-class support.

When Mr. Hazare went on a hunger strike in April to protest against political corruption, the film stars of Mumbai added much glamour to his cause by coming out in unambiguous support. Two months later, when a yoga instructor called Baba Ramdev went on a fast demanding that the government investigate “black money” hidden in foreign accounts, the film stars went silent. For good reason.

The film industry is much cleaner today than it was more than a decade ago, but, revenue officials say, huge quantities of secret wealth are still a part of its system.

One reason the mafia could get such a firm hold on the film industry in the 1990s was that it had established a business relationship with producers and actors and functioned as an efficient conduit for illicitly transferring their money to safe foreign havens.

Following Mr. Ramdev’s fast, when the government agreed to investigate Indian money hidden in foreign banks, The Times of India ran an intriguing essay that argued that the law should make a distinction between the “black money” of corrupt politicians, earned through kickbacks, and the “black money” of businessmen who had moved their cash abroad years ago to save themselves from unreasonably high tax rates in socialist India. The essay implied that corrupt politicians were the real evil and that the tax-evading businessmen were just smart.

Corruption is such an integral part of Indian society that the chief economic adviser to the government, Kaushik Basu, has suggested legalizing the payment of bribes. He received enthusiastic corporate support, which is to be expected since the largest bribe-payers in India are corporations.

Mr. Basu’s reasoning is that if the payment of bribes were legalized, the bribe-payer could be persuaded to reveal the recipient. This would inject fear into the hearts of politicians and officials who expected bribes. N.R. Narayana Murthy, founder of the Indian software company Infosys, said in a television interview that Mr. Basu’s suggestion was “a great idea.”

In an informal way, Indian society does grant legitimacy to the bribe-payer because “bribe-payer” is a description that fits most of the country, including many of Mr. Hazare’s nicely dressed supporters.

This legitimacy is a bit absurd when extended to corporations.

If the lament of Indians is that political corruption pilfers public resources, then who are its chief beneficiaries? It is the companies that secure licenses at discounted rates in exchange for kickbacks.

But the public rage is directed only at the middlemen — the politicians.

There are several reasons for this. Among them is the plain fact that many of the new supporters of the anti-corruption movement are corporate executives themselves, and there is a common perception that, while a company has to be practical, a politician has to be virtuous.

Also, the mainstream Indian news media are efficiently controlled by corporations, which can threaten to pull advertisements in the face of any negative coverage.

Behind the power of India’s anti-corruption movement is the rise of a new emotion: Young urban Indians are more interested in their nation than ever before. As a consequence they are more politically aware.

Seven years ago, I went around Mumbai asking fashionably dressed college students questions like, “Who is the deputy prime minister of India?” Often, I was faced with long, embarrassed silences, or “Oh my God, quiz question.”

When I asked a young Muslim woman the question “Who is Narendra Modi?” she said she had not heard the name before. Mr. Modi, the chief minister of Gujarat, was then and still is accused of assisting riots that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of Muslims.

Today, there is a perceptible increase in the number of young people who are acutely aware and interested in the fate of the nation. That is because they are different from the generations before them whose only objective in life was to escape India. Now that the world is what it is, there is no place to escape to. So they want their home to be a better place — where bribe-takers are punished and bribe-payers live happily ever after.

Manu Joseph is editor of the Indian newsweekly Open and author of the novel “Serious Men.”