AMERICAN PERISCOPE. Funny money

The Spring 2014 survey on global attitudes in 34 countries by the US-based Pew Research Center looked at some issues people face — crime, corruption, healthcare, schooling, water and air pollution, food safety, electricity shortage, and traffic. Interestingly, one word can neatly sum up all these — governance.

The countries under study were spread across Asia, Middle East, Africa, Latin America and Eastern Europe, and the top two problems identified by the respondents were crime and corruption, with medians of 83 per cent and 76 per cent respectively. (In India, 72 per cent thought the leaders very corrupt.)

A simple examination of the responses on crime and corruption suggests a high correlation. A common factor links these two — the police! If they are doing a poor job chasing criminals, can we expect them to do any better when it comes to fighting corruption?

The corruption index provided by Transparency International is a composite ‘perception’ score about public sector corruption for a country using secondary data from various other surveys and opinions. Instead, the Pew survey is based on face-to-face interviews of a multi-staged cluster sample of at least 1000 adults per country.

If it took 18 years for the (corruption) case against former Tamil Nadu Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa to be brought to a decision, there can be no better proof of how slowly the wheels of justice move, especially if there is a powerful someone with a hand slowing down the wheel. Not surprisingly, the Pew survey also finds that the people in emerging and developing nations are not pleased about their court systems.

Malaysia formed an independent anti-corruption commission in 2008, yet saw a huge jump in numbers of those concerned from 28 per cent in 2007-08 to 63 per cent now. China, which has targeted corruption under the new regime swiftly sending the guilty to be killed also saw a 15 percentage point increase over the same period.

So what clue can we take from the survey about how to approach the problem? Well, when it comes to opinions about institutions such as the media, the military, and so on, the survey shows that a median of 69 per cent think religious leaders are a good influence.

Religious leaders can certainly help bring in a missing element in all the debates about corruption, namely, the moral angle. Rather than treat corruption only as a police, legal, or enforcement issue, the problem must be made personal. The appeal of religious leaders can reach the perpetrators too effectively. Taking a bribe should be presented as a misuse of power that is not ‘right’ morally.

Sometime ago, posters appeared in Delhi highlighting an anti-corruption campaign based on revenge as a motivating emotion. The people were encouraged not to walk away from giving a bribe but to gather evidence. There is no data in the public domain of how successful this campaign was, but surely, stressing the ethics or morality of the issue may also pay dividends. And it is still a running theme in much of Indian cinema!

The Pew report also suggests that corruption has not been accepted as the ‘normal’ state of affairs in these countries. Actually, the number citing corruption as a very big problem has increased from 63 per cent in a similar survey in 2007-08 to 73 per cent now. People are still hoping something can be done about it.

The writer is a professor at Suffolk University, Boston, and Jindal Global University, Delhi NCR

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