The Hindu Business Line : Whistle-blowing or ratting?

WORLD over, encomium is showered on any employee who blows the whistle on misdeeds perpetrated to his knowledge in an organisation or government. He is lauded for having performed a public service. Until some years ago, however, a whistle-blower had to risk his career prospects and even his job itself, for having got his associates and sometimes his superiors into trouble with law. He was pushed around, hounded and harassed to such an extent that he ended up as a pauper or a suicide. Latterly, country after country has enacted legislation affording adequate protection to whistle-blowers. (In India, The Public Interest Disclosure (Protection of Informers) Bill is yet become a law).

This may protect him from victimisation insofar as formal official procedures are concerned, but he may still face ostracism from fellow employees in his own organisation or department, and opprobrium from peers outside it. Sometimes, things may not stop there. His life itself may be in danger, as happened in the case of Satyendra Dubey, Deputy Manager of the National Highway Authority of India, who was killed apparently in reprisal for complaining to the Prime Minister's Office about corruption in a major highway project.

Is there a clear difference between whistle-blowing and ratting? Why is it that while whistle-blowing is regarded as honourable, ratting is not. In fact, ratting is viewed with revulsion as an obnoxious trait characteristic of cads. That explains the whistle-blower falling foul of his colleagues.

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines ratting as betraying, deserting, or informing on one's associates and whistle-blowing as revealing something covert or informing against another, making it seem as if the purport and purpose of both are the same. This is because it overlooks a crucial clue distinguishing between the two. Whistle-blowing is done as matter of social duty, out of a spirit of public-spiritedness, to serve a public or social purpose by exposing a misconduct that, if not stopped, will work to the detriment of the whole organisation. The person indulging in it is, therefore, not entitled to any consideration as a colleague, associate or boss, but should be treated as a delinquent or a criminal. Whereas ratting means implicating a fellow-employee based on gossip, hearsay or concocted or false grounds out of sanctimoniousness, malice or animus.

B. S. Raghavan

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