A movement for honesty transcending party politics

We are slowly coming to terms with the fact that an honest party like the Aam Aadmi Party will find it very difficult to fight established political parties under the current electoral system and win in significant numbers. As our aim is to 'cleanse' politics of its corrupt elements, we may have to think in novel ways - that fulfill our goals, but may ignore conventions.

The following ideas owe their origin to the discussions we had among ourselves.  Thanks to  Roschen, Prem, Nahas, Prasad,  Ratheesh, Rajan and many others for inspiring me to articulate the following ideas - some of which you may think are unusual, but I request you all to consider them with an open mind.

In the prevailing system of mores and cultural norms of contemporary society, as Ratheesh mentioned, there is a view that about 90% of people are harmed as well as rewarded by corruption - and therefore it is very difficult to convince the bulk of the society about the detrimental nature of corruption.

If our main aim is to cleanse politics of corruption, we have to support all honest politicians regardless of the parties they belong to.  The collective force of all honest elements in the whole of the political community and bureaucracy - in its entirety - has to be harnessed for the fulfillment of our objective of cleansing politics of corruption and dishonesty.  This means - we have to support honest politicians wherever they can be found.  As most of society is confused about the value of fighting corruption, we may not get enough 'moral ammunition' within the AAP or any other single party to effectively combat the forces of corruption and criminality within politics.  But by adopting the unconventional policy of supporting politicians of even our 'rival' political parties, we can hope to gather enough strength for the fight. This means if somebody with proven integrity and honesty belonging to our rival party is standing for election, AAP should support him or her.  In another constituency, we may be fielding our own more honest candidate against a not-so-honest candidate of the same rival party.

We should have a very dynamic and flexible policy of  political support that is responsive to the perceived integrity of individual candidates.  In this way, we may be able to achieve our aim of cleansing the parliament of corrupt elements by replacing them with honest elements. If honesty and goodness are there, ideological differences between parties will not get in the way of serving justice for all sections of the society.  Honesty and integrity may be considered themselves 'ideologies' that are potent to smooth over other political ideological differences based on more superficial economic perspectives.

Therefore let us adopt a policy of supporting honesty and integrity wherever you can find them - in any party, in any office.  We will encourage them morally and politically and with every resource at our disposal.  We will field our own candidates who we believe to be honest only against candidates of other parties who we perceive to be corrupt. (This idea was suggested to me by VR Rajan)

Our main aim is to cleanse politics and administration of dishonesty and corruption and this is best achieved by adopting a policy of 'trans-party conditional support' of honest elements of the entire political and bureaucratic community.

Adopting such a policy, it will be easy to carry out party work.  Party work as carried out by workers at all levels will have a unified focus.  All we need is to tell people - that we need to displace our current corrupt elements in the parliament by electing honest people.  We will have a system of evaluating the worth of candidates by using a scoring system.  Against each parameter that is desired in our representative, we will ask them to score the candidate based on our knowledge of the history of his or her behaviour in the past.  In every constituency, we will tell our voters to vote for the candidate we have chosen to support based on our careful analysis of the individual's honesty and integrity level.  For this kind of activity, we don't need much money. All we need is to publish our position statement just once in the important newspapers a few times before the election.  Those who subscribe to our philosophy (of unconditional support to honesty and conditional support to politicians across party divides based on their honesty-quotient) will vote for our chosen candidate.  This way AAP will be a formidable political force with a single ideology - that 'politicians should be good at heart' and 'Only Good People can Save the Country'.

Rather than frontally and fiercely attacking corrupt elements - as our National leaders often tend to do - it will be more effective to actively support the honest elements in other parties.  Corrupt and dishonest elements do not respond favourably to criticisms with reformation of their behaviour.  Often what happens is that the 'blame' will provoke their egos causing them to create trouble that could be avoided if they are ignored completely.  By supporting the honest elements of other parties, we could get them to marginalize the corrupt elements from within their own party.  The very fact that we don't voice our support to them will be our indictment of the corrupt elements in politics.

I wish there is an open, free and vigorous brainstorming on these issues.  Please come out with your brutally candid views.

The ten headed hydra of corruption

Swaraj can be implemented only at the bottom as its definition necessitates implementation by the people.  But I don't think the common man at the bottom can do much about the major chunk of corruption that happens at more central levels where the control of large funds and decisions that involve huge tenders etc are involved.  In a Swaraj scenario, perhaps the only thing that the aam aadmi at the bottom can do is to initiate a referendum to RECALL the representative or minister who is indulging in the corruption.  

Putting a stop to corruption is more effective when implemented strongly at a central level. For example, the corruption in places like sub-registrar's office, RT office and Village Office cannot be eliminated if at the bottom level, a few honest employees or a few customers refuse to comply with the corrupt practices.  These 'Honest Joes' will be duly ostracized and even physically harmed by the majority who make up and benefit from the corrupt system.   However, a strong stand by a principled minister - someone with tenacity and guts like Mr Sudheeran - can make a difference - as it seems to be happening with the case of the 418 bars that were continuing to flout laws despite repeated directives and warnings.   Another example is our Transport Commissioner,  Mr Rishiraj Singh - who was able to, all by himself, implement traffic rule compliance to a significant extent and even reduce mortality from road accidents.  E Sreedharan who was in charge of the Delhi Metro was able to resist corrupt intervention from politicians and the results were therefore everyone to see.

Therefore corruption can be dealt with only by an enlightened minister or top bureaucrat who has the guts and honesty to enforce the laws strictly.  At the Swaraj level, all we can do is to make sure that we elect only honest people for top level administration.  In the Swaraj that we envisage, suitable logistics should be in place to ensure that only honest people are sent up to the higher administrative positions.  

It is also important that people at the ground level are convinced about the utter necessity of honesty and incorruptibility at executive levels. If as Ratheesh has correctly pointed out, 90% of aam aadmis may be beneficiaries of corruption (although they may be equally harmed by it), a tough task lies ahead to enlighten the community about the ultimate counterproductivity of corruption even for the very corrupt.  For this, those of us who believe that corruption is not a viable strategy at any level and doesn't help in the long run and is the major obstacle to development and progress should not only join hands but also try to recruit honest people from all political parties to create a common force of probity that could eventually acquire sufficient strength to defeat the mighty stranglehold of institutionalized corruption in the country.