A lot of hoo-ha is made in the media about registering of cases and arrests for a variety of heinous crimes, but there is always the suspicion in the minds of the people that, if they involved political big shots or influential money-bags, they will be smothered after going through the motions of investigation until nothing more will be heard of them.

Reports on every kind of reform are liberally sprinkled with the buzzwords of accountability and transparency, but both the precepts are nothing more than a chimera in day-to-day dealings with administration.

Fortunately, technology is coming to the people’s rescue. Media glare, hidden cameras and tapping of conversations have been doing the signal service of exposing malfeasance.

It is only because of the series of sting operations conducted by the media or public-spirited individuals that the prevalent rot, in which political leaders and MPs were caught negotiating payoffs for facilitating deals or asking questions in Parliament, or senior police officials brazenly taking bribes, came to light and forced the governing and political classes to take action.

There are, of course, finicky souls expressing unease about the propriety and morality of such operations on the ground that they deliberately seek to exploit the vulnerability of the victims by offering them inducements which, otherwise, they may not have sought on their own. In my opinion, they are only the variants of traps. In any case, desperate situations warrant desperate remedies, and considering how poisonous public life on the whole has become, there need be no squeamishness in adopting any method that would smoke out evil-doers.

Of late, there are a number of instances of official documents containing details of shady goings-on being leaked to the public domain and CDs containing transcripts of conversations among politicians and officials being made available to the media for dissemination. From the very look of things, these are jobs of disgruntled insiders, who feel suffocated for lack of opportunity to blow the whistle in the open, and hence, are resorting to these subterfuges. To the extent they make misdeeds a matter of public knowledge, they should be welcomed as contributing to transparency.

Sometimes, they also lead to beneficial results, such as the resignation of the Tamil Nadu Social Welfare Minister, Ms Poongothai Aladi Aruna, for her intercession, as disclosed by her tapped phone conversation with the State Director of Vigilance and Anti-Corruption (DVAC) Mr S. K. Upadhyay, on behalf of a relative who was facing prosecution in a trap case.

In this particular matter, going by the transcript published in the media, the DVAC too seems like going out of his way to obliquely suggest to the Minister how withholding of sanction for prosecuting the employee can be one way of letting the employee off the hook.

So also, but for another reported version of a tapped conversation, the public would not have known of the subtle manner in which the DVAC was sought to be influenced by the senior officials of the State administration in some high-profile cases.

The more those in authority ignore the mandatory requirements of accountability and transparency, the more will be the number of stings and leaks in the future.

B. S. RAGHAVAN

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