It’s 7th December - exactly 9 days after the mayhem created by the terrorists in South Mumbai. For nearly three days, between 26th and 28th of last month, 10 terrorists went about butchering innocent people in the country's financial capital. The whole country saw it on the news channels. And what's more, this was not the first time it happened. Forget counting such incidents from 1993, it's happened multiple times in the last year alone. And as far as the response from the country is concerned, it’s been pathetic.
For the last many days, we have seen the Prime Minister, Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi, L.K Advani, Deshmukh (though I like 'DESHMURKH' better), Modi, Patil (S and RR) and so many others, go into an over-drive, accusing each other, the intelligence agencies, coast guard, Pakistan, LeT, ISI and every other Tom, Dick and Harry, even remotely connected to the case (the award however goes to Mr. Narayan Rane saying "Ahmad Patel helped the terrorists"). But truly, the question remains, who is responsible? Is this a people problem – or as some of the newspapers reports said – it is a systemic failure??
Now, I have always thought that our system, the way the constitution of this country is designed, is pathetic. Over the years however, through many a heated arguments with my father, I have come to realize, that the system is never wrong or right by itself. A system, a process, is designed to achieve some goals and there can be flaws in its design, which may reduce the efficiency of that system. However, these flaws are to be attributed to the designer of that system. And while a large responsibility lies on the designer and the working components of the system, the largest responsibility lies on the feedback mechanism, based on which the system can be tweaked to increase its efficiency or completely overhauled to get the right process. Now borrowing this concept to our country - we have the system in place, but the implementation machinery is extremely corrupt and the feedback mechanism, us, we have completely lost faith in the system. Effectively, nobody believes in following the system and the whole system is rendered useless.
Effect is – we go all out when we want to get something done in this system. And I will give you some simple examples to state my point -
1. How many times, while driving a vehicle, have we been caught breaking a traffic rule? Did we actually admit our mistake, deposit the license, collect the challan and pay the fine? Well some of us may have (and that is an appreciable trait), but I am quite sure, many of us must have quickly fished out a 50 rupee note from our wallet and handed it to the traffic police. And then with a beaming smile you tell your friends, "accha hai na yaar, 500 ka kaam 50 mein ho gaya".
2. Many of us got our passport done, how many of us paid the passport agent to get the work done? Typically agents charge us twice or thrice the passport fees, and he does inform us – "Sahab ko isme ka ek share jayega, humko ek aur baki passport fees".
Well, I could go on, but I am sure, most of us have experienced either of the two situations above.
Now let me connect to some of the findings of the intelligence agencies -
1993 blasts - the then customs collector was bribed by the terrorist into allowing "silver and gold" into the country. The people who actually docked the material and loaded the stuff into vehicles were told, these were "drugs". Well, it was none of those. It turned out to be the RDX, used in the blasts.
Cut to 2008 - Some guy called Rehman, arranged the SIM crads for the terrorist (who eventually attacked Mumbai) from Kolkata. He forged the documents and got the SIM cards at least 3 months before the entire incident.
Now, how did the customs collector take the bribe in the first place? And why did he not check the packages to ascertain its content? But more importantly – what happened to the guy later on? The case against him went on from for 14 long years. Why? He should have been awarded a life imprisonment in that year itself – without a chance to appeal in the higher courts.
Similarly for Rehman, he should be severely punished. But more importantly, the mobile company which did not verify the documents, they should be penalized for not doing their job properly. And where does corruption come in here – well simple. I don’t think the mobile company did not know about the documents being invalid – but who would want to loose out on sales? After all every rupee matters.
In a nutshell, if we address the problem of corruption, many of the problems in this country will fall into place.
