THE PYRAMID
OF
CORRUPTION
India’s Primitive Corruption And How To Deal With It
THE PYRAMID
OF
CORRUPTION
India’s Primitive Corruption And How To Deal With It
Kiran Batni
Notion Press
5 Muthu Kalathy Street, Triplicane,
Chennai - 600 005
First Published by Notion Press 2014
Copyright © Kiran Batni 2014
All Right Reserved.
ISBN: 978-93-83808-59-5
This book has been published in good faith that the work of the author
is original. All efforts have been taken to make the material error-free.
However, the author and the publisher disclaim the responsibility.
No part of this book may be used, reproduced in any manner whatsoever
without written permission from the author, except in the case of brief
quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
To my parents
Who let me question
The face of truth is concealed by a golden lid. O Pushan!
Remove it so that I, whose dharma is the truth, may see it.
—Ishopanishad.
PREFACE
This book began as a set of notes I made for myself in the course of
nearly six years of independent research on India and its fundamental
problems. Although I had begun to give my notes the form of a book in
the year 2009 itself, the events of the first half of the year 2011, when
public interest in the topic of corruption rose to a feverish pitch in India,
prompted me to view those problems through the lens of corruption.
The result is the book in your hands.
If the book does so much as to initiate a debate on the deeper
and historical problems of India, mainly related to the mishandling of
diversity, which are slipping away from public attention with alarming
speed; and if it can help take public debates on corruption away from
superficialities and towards the deeper and historical corruption that
lies at the bottom of it all, i.e., towards India’s primitive corruption; and
the ways of removing it; it shall have been worth my effort.
This book would not have been what it is today without the help
of many colleagues, friends and family members. I am deeply indebted
to Dr. D. N. Shankar Bhat, Ganesh Chetan, Harshita Rao, Heggere
Raj, Bharat Kumar, Vasant Shetty, my father B.S.Raghavendra Rao and
my brother Rohith Batni Rao, for taking time off their busy schedules
to review the manuscript. I am especially grateful to Bharat Kumar,
Prashant Soratur, and Sandeep Kambi for their trust and financial
support. Last but not the least, I’d like my wife, Alakananda Yelandur,
to know that if it weren’t for her support and sacrifices, I should not
have written a single word.
Kiran Batni
Mysore, 27 January 2014
CONTENTS
Preface
vii
1.INTRODUCTION
1
1.1. Of the British concern for corruption in their Indian
operations; of the need to consider the overall British
rule of India as corruption.
1
1.2. Of the similarity between the concepts of corruption now
and barbarism then; of corruption at the global level; of the
corruption of the clean nations.
7
1.3. Of the two types of corruption—operational and primitive;
of the definition of corruption as ‘abuse of public power
for private gain’; of the greater importance of understanding
and removing primitive corruption.
13
2. CORRUPTION AND INDIA’S NATIONHOOD
22
2.1. Of nationalism and its relationship with corruption; of the
inevitability of the creation of nations in self-defence.
22
2.2. Of the creation by the British of an elaborate infrastructure of
corruption called the Indian nation.
28
2.3. Of the inheritance of the original British edifice of
corruption by the Indians.
32
2.4. Of the denial of the existence of India’s primitive corruption
by nationalists; of the corruption in the selective acceptance
of Gandhian surrealism.
37
3. DIVERSITY AND CORRUPTION
46
3.1. Of the corruption inherent in the assumption of power
over people on the other side of a diversity border.
46
3.2. Of corruption propensity or the propensity to assume
power over others; of the diversity in this propensity.
53
3.3. Of the true import of the words of caution of Gandhi,
Ambedkar and Tagore regarding the intermingling of
diverse peoples.
54
3.4. Of the important role of politics and commerce in creating
corruption when diverse peoples are forced to intermingle. 62
3.5. Of the concept of race in general; of the races of India in
particular.
66
Contents
4. INDIA’S ANCIENT PYRAMID
4.1. Of the mishandling of racial diversity in India’s history; of
the caste-system as a form of corruption that arose in
consequence.
4.2. Of the Upanishads and their message of universal
harmony; of the neglect of that message.
4.3. Of the Aryan corruption propensity and its functioning.
4.4. Of the metaphor of the Aryan Pyramid of corruption.
4.5. Of the influence of the Aryan Pyramid of corruption on
the making of the independent Indian nation.
5. BRITISH CORRUPTION—POLITICAL
5.1. Of cultural centralization of power, the corruption inherent
in it, and the case of the British colonization of India.
5.2. Of the political inertness of Indians; of the reckless
inclusion of diverse peoples in their empires by the
kings of old.
5.3. Of the vast difference in corruption propensity between
the Britishers and the Indian rulers; of the creation of the
Government of India on its basis.
5.4. Of the magnitude of the corruption due to the cultural
centralization of power in the hands of the British in India.
6. BRITISH CORRUPTION—ECONOMIC
6.1. Of the corruption inherent in the cultural accumulation of
capital; of the peculiar nature of India’s economic problem.
6.2. Of trade as a conduit for corruption.
6.3. Of the effect of diversity on corruption in trade; of the
absence of moral barriers to corruption in the presence of
a large diversity distance between the trading partners.
6.4. Of the railways, the telegraph, and the postal service; of the
creation of a unified Indian economy to aid British
corruption in trade.
7. CORRUPTION AND INDEPENDENCE
7.1. Of the psychology of the colonized intellectual; of the
continuation of the corrupt colonial concept of the oneness
of the colonized by the Indian National Congress.
x
73
73
81
83
93
98
102
102
104
108
118
123
123
125
127
131
139
139
Contents
7.2. Of the corruption inherent in the assumption of the power
by the Congress to emancipate people across the diversity
border; of the Congress as an Aryan Pyramid of corruption.143
7.3. Of the induction by the Congress of diverse peoples into
the inferior levels of the new national Pyramid using
age-old Aryan methods of paralyzing minds.
151
7.4. Of the direct application by the Congress of corrupt British
methods and instruments of coercion to force Indian rulers to
submit to the independent Indian nation.
157
8. CORRUPT BY DEFINITION
166
8.1. Of the embedding of the ancient corruption of the Aryans
into the foundations of the independent Indian nation; of
the several protests against it.
166
8.2. Of the corruption due to the mishandling of diversity that
led to the creation of Pakistan and Bangladesh; of the
continuation of that corruption following it.
169
8.3. Of the corruption due to the mishandling of diversity
inherent in the Constitution of India.
175
9. INDIA’S CORRUPT ECONOMY
184
9.1. Of the importance of cultural clustering in commerce; of
the corruption inherent in the cultural accumulation of
power by high-caste north-Indian Aryans who inherited
the capital culturally accumulated by the British in India.
184
9.2. Of the rise of socialism; of the concomitant increase in
the corruption due to the cultural accumulation of capital. 191
10. LANGUAGE AND CORRUPTION
201
10.1. Of the role of language in a nation; of language-related
corruption.
201
10.2. Of the erection by independent India of a linguistic Aryan
Pyramid of corruption; of the advantages and disadvantages
to Aryans and non-Aryans, respectively, due to it.
206
10.3. Of the corruption inherent in imposing Hindi on the
peoples of India; of the use of ancient Aryan methods
of corruption in doing so.
214
10.4. Of the continued treatment of non-Aryans as inferiors
due to Hindi imposition; of the corruption inherent in it. 223
xi
Contents
10.5. Of Aryan migration into south India after independence;
of Dravidian depopulation; and of the corruption inherent
in the two.
11. DESTROYING THE PYRAMID
11.1. Of the importance and the urgency of destroying the
Aryan Pyramid of corruption in politics and economics.
11.2. Of the possible methods of the political de-corruption
of India.
11.3. Of the possible methods of the economic de-corruption
of India.
11.4. Conclusion.
References
Name Index
227
232
232
234
245
252
255
261
xii
CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
1.1. Of the British concern for corruption in their Indian operations;
of the need to consider the overall British rule of India as corruption.
Major-General The Right Honourable The Lord Robert Clive, KB MP
FRS, raised the bar on heroism and service to his motherland like never
before. For his work in India, he was awarded an honorary Doctorate
in Civil Law by the Oxford University; made a Member of Parliament
from Shrewsbury; raised to the Irish peerage as Baron Clive of Plassey;
and named a Knight of the Bath.
The British Parliament conducted a brief enquiry into the sources
of Clive’s enormous riches acquired in a remarkably short period of
time in India. During the enquiry, Clive famously defended himself by
stating that he stood ‘astonished at my own moderation’1 that he did
not make more money by taking advantage of the situation in Bengal.
In due course of time, further praise and recognition was heaped on
him: he was appointed Lord Lieutenant of Shropshire and commended
for ‘the great and meritorious service’2 to the country. To say the least,
his activities in India were rather agreeable to his home country—and
legal. His successors in India for nearly a century afterwards; followed
by the servants of His or Her Majesty’s government that ruled India
for nearly another; had nothing but gratitude to express standing by his
tombstone.3 After all, it was not a small fiefdom whose foundation he
laid.
After plundering Bengal, writes the critic William Howitt, Clive
brought to the Honourable East India Company declared ‘presents’
and ‘restitutions’ worth £5,940,498 (excluding his own ‘Jaghire’ which
was ‘worth 30,000l. per annum’).4 Now, this declared wealth was not
G. R. Gleig (1848): 297.
Ibid: 308.
3
Clive died for unknown reasons. He is said to have committed suicide by
slitting his own throat or consuming an overdose of opium.
4
William Howitt (1839): 49.
1
2
1
The Pyramid of Corruption
acquired illegally or immorally in the opinion of Clive or the Company.
This was business as usual, the legal and moral gain from the practice of
quiet trade between willing parties, at most involving a few insignificant
accidents. Nor was it illegal or immoral for the Company to virtually kill
more than 10 million people by converting the periodic Bengal drought
of 1769 into a full-fledged famine by hoarding and overpricing rice, and
by tripling the land tax—all just in time. Nor was it illegal or immoral to
pitch Indian against Indian and amass wealth by violence and deception
in the battle of Plassey.
But Clive was very uncomfortable with something while he was
making all the legal money for the Company and himself. Something
wasn’t all that right at his workplace. It turned out that the reason for
his discomfort was corruption. He saw so much of it in the Company that
he made not a little noise about it. In Clive’s own words of complaint
written to the directors of the Honourable East India Company in 1772,
Every inferior seemed to have grasped at wealth, that he might be enabled to
assume the spirit of profusion which was now the only distinction between
him and his superiors. Thus all distinction ceased, and every rank became, in
a manner, upon an equality. Nor was this the end of the mischief; for a contest
of such nature amongst our servants destroyed all proportion between their
wants and the honest means of satisfying them. In a country where money is
plenty, where fear is the principle of government, and where your arms are ever
victorious, it is no wonder that the lust of riches should readily embrace the
proffered means of its gratification, or that the instruments of your power should
avail themselves of their authority, and proceed even to extortion in those cases
where simple corruption could not keep pace with their rapacity.5
So, what was the nature of the corruption which pricked Clive’s
conscience? It was the blurring of ranks and levels in the Company
hierarchy, due to the amassing of wealth by inferiors, and their
becoming nearly equal to superiors in wealth. It was not corruption
or dishonesty that fear was the principle of government, or that the
Company amassed wealth using that principle. It was not corruption
or dishonesty for Clive himself to throw all the formal instructions
from the directors of the Company into the wind and make windfall
profits from his own personal acts of fraud, claiming to know the
situation in India better than those who had issued those instructions.
Robert Clive’s Letter to the Directors, Third Report of Parliamentary Committee, 1772,
as cited in Ibid: 50.
5
2
Kiran Batni
The Company that consumed Bengal alive, or he who masterminded
the crime, weren’t rapacious; rapacity was all on the side of the inferiors
of the Company who, instead of obeying orders, tried to be like the
ones giving them. Righteousness and honesty were on the side of Clive
and the Company, while all the corruption and dishonesty were on the
side of the inferiors. How could they threaten to disturb the line of
command in the Company, endanger his authority, and thereby hinder
the attainment of the Company’s moral goals? One can imagine how
difficult it must have been for Clive to reconcile the voice of morality
within him with the presence of such corrupt inferiors around him.
That voice did not cease until steps were taken to remove this
corruption. ‘I do declare,’ it urged Clive to write in a letter, ‘by that
Great Being who is the searcher of all hearts, and to whom we must
be accountable, if there must be an hereafter, that I am come out
with a mind superior to all corruption’.6 So Clive, the crusader against
corruption, appointed a committee to enquire into the matter, and that
committee ultimately rendered the Company as clean as possible. Clean
according to Clive’s definition, of course. Among other things, this
definition involved granting the superior servants of the Company the
right to engage in ‘the private trade in salt, betel-nut, and tobacco, out
of which nearly all the abuses and miseries he [Clive] complained of
had grown’.7 But it was corrupt for the inferior servants to do anything
similar, and it had to be stopped for the sake of ‘that Great Being who
is the searcher of all hearts’. ‘Perhaps Clive thought he had done a great
service’, writes Howitt, ‘when he had attempted to lessen the number
of harpies by cutting off the trading of the juniors, and thus turning
the tide of gain more completely into his own pockets, and those of his
fellows of the council’.8
Needless to say, we will not Clive ourselves in our understanding of
what constitutes corruption. We will treat the overall British plunder and
destruction of India, i.e., the British rule of India itself, including the
legal acts of moneymaking that the entire Company first, and the British
Crown thereafter, indulged in, as corruption. Despite all the formal
humanitarian eyewash emanating from London, and despite Clive’s
concerns over the decreasing hold of morality over those in the lower
G. R. Gleig (1848): 177.
William Howitt (1839): 52.
8
Ibid: 52.
6
7
3
The Pyramid of Corruption
ranks of the Company, he, the Company, and the British Crown, must
all three be considered corrupt—very corrupt—in their Indian activities.
The corruption of the inferiors, which would have never seen the light
of day if the superiors had not indulged in their legal work in India,
formed a trivial fraction of the latter’s overall legal corruption. This
legal corruption, clearly, was not eliminated after Clive’s anticorruption
crusades or even after the Crown took control. In hindsight, if British
corruption had been limited to that of the inferiors at all times, there
would probably have been no British Empire in India; it would, in all
likelihood, have been made impossible by the weakness of organization
and infighting. In this sense, the corruption of the inferiors must be
seen as an antidote for the overall and much more dangerous and deeper
corruption known as the British rule of India. The laws established by
the Company and the Crown were themselves corrupt—very corrupt.
Nay, that they established those laws for India was itself an act of
corruption—a very deep and elusive sort of corruption.
We are conditioned to think of corruption as violation of law.
But what if the law itself is corrupt, as in the case of the Indian laws
enacted by the British? What if the law itself should never have been
written by those who have written it, as in the case of the British? It
is easy to see that it is impossible to curb corruption in the law if our
focus is its violation. It is impossible to eliminate corruption in the
system if our focus is on deviation from what we accept as its normal
operation. Once we realize that the British Government itself was
corrupt, it becomes possible to see that petty officers, petty lieutenants
and other inferiors who might have defied the command of their
British overlords were nowhere as corrupt as the government itself.
Their corruption pales to insignificance when compared to the deeper
and more dangerous corruption of the forces behind the government.
It is only up to a point that those who hinder the loot, plunder, and
the creation and sustenance of hunger, destitution and death, can be
called corrupt for not following orders. Since they check the deeper
corruption by weakening the organization, we must, indeed, consider
them as anticorruption workers from the perspective of the governed.
In the absence of any true movement to eradicate the deeper
corruption, it could have even been desirable to allow the tribe of
such inferiors to increase, assuming it was possible, and to let their
corruption—or anticorruption activities, you choose—render the
deeper corruption ineffective by destroying the delivery mechanism.
4
Kiran Batni
But of course, there was a movement to eradicate the deeper corruption,
popularly known as India’s freedom struggle. This anticorruption
movement, it must be noted, did not let itself be hijacked by concern
for what the British called as corruption, but kept to its own view of what
constituted it, although the word corruption was, admittedly, not used in
this sense. It is a different matter that this anticorruption movement has
left its own trail of an even deeper sort of corruption, and I will take up
this theme in great detail in the coming chapters.
Returning to our friend Clive, then, we note that nearly a century
after his anticorruption campaign, after the Indian Mutiny9 of 1857 to
be precise, the responsibility of ruling India was transferred from the
Honorable East India Company to the British Crown. The British public
welcomed it as a move to publicize the profits that one company was
enjoying, because more and more British businesses were to be allowed
access to the loot and plunder. Clearly, the Indians were not considered
to be even part of the public whose gain was slated to increase because
of the Crown’s takeover of power. For all practical purposes, they were
part of the natural resources created by Providence, tucked away in a
godforsaken corner of the world, for British consumption.
The new Government of India rapidly undertook measures to
tighten control and improve relationships with its Indian subjects
in such a way as to prevent further wars and mutinies. One such
measure was the enactment of the Indian Penal Code of 1860, which
remains the definitive criminal law in India even to this date, amended
only nominally. This Code, authored by The Right Honourable The
Lord Thomas Babington Macaulay, PC, and his colleagues in 1837,
contained separate sections (sections 161-165) on curbing corruption.
For surpassing Clive in giving the form of modern law to the method
of cleaning up the un-cleanable, Macaulay, who credited to Clive the
‘renown of the English arms in the East’, ‘the political ascendancy of
the English in that country [India]’, and ‘the purity of the administration
of our Eastern empire’; and placed Clive on the ‘list of those who have
done and suffered much for the happiness of mankind’;10 must be
Also called the Sepoy Mutiny by the British and the First War of Indian Independence
by Indian historians and nationalists.
10
As quoted in‘The Life of Robert Lord Clive ; collected from the Family Papers,
communicated by the Earl of Powis’ by Major-General Sir John Malcolm, K.C.B. 3
vols. 8vo. London : 1836. Reference: D.H.M. (1891).
9
5
The Pyramid of Corruption
considered the father of India’s government-controlled anticorruption
system.11 Clive, accordingly, will have to contend with grandfather.
Macaulay’s anticorruption law ruled that ‘public servants’, who
had a set of procedures to follow as dictated by the government, if
found indulging in bribery and other acts motivated by the objective of
increasing personal wealth, in violation of the prescribed procedures,
were to be pronounced corrupt and punished. This appears like a
perfect arrangement for those who assume that the actions of the
government itself, and the procedures dictated by the government to
its servants themselves, are always beneficial to the public. Needless to
say, this assumption was flawed. While the flaw was crystal clear to the
concerned Indians of the time, the Code itself produced a different
kind of clarity. The Government of India was not to be considered
corrupt in looting and plundering India, leaving behind a trail of
hunger, destitution and death, and channeling all the profits so achieved
to the coffers of either the private company or the private nation several
thousands of miles removed. On the contrary, those servants of the
government—or anyone, for that matter—who hindered the loot, the
plunder, the creation and sustenance of hunger, destitution and death,
and the channeling of the wealth into the proper hands, were to be
considered corrupt.
So, here was an oppressive colonial administration, whose very
presence on Indian soil must be viewed as one of the greatest acts
of corruption in the history of mankind, talking about undertaking
anticorruption efforts. Here was a set of arguably the most criminal men
of history writing India’s criminal law, waxing eloquent on corruption
and anticorruption, deciding on what punishments to proffer to deviant
‘public servants’, when their assumption of the right to proffer it itself
deviated from morality. When their own corruption made them deserve
the toughest punishment known to man, here they were, acting like the
very embodiment of morality and righteousness, and deciding on fines
and imprisonments for non-conformance with their codes of conduct.
Here was an alien administration trying to curb corruption on Indian
soil, while morality dictated that it was better for it to be consumed by
corruption and decay.
Macaulay is more popularly known as the father of India’s education system,
because the English-language education system which he built remains the
definitive system even to this date. See T. B. Macaulay (1835).
11
6
Kiran Batni
It may be tempting to deny the existence of corruption in Indian
society before the British. But, in fact, as I argue in detail in the
remainder of this book, India has an ancient and indigenous tradition
of corruption embedded deep into the society. The British augmented
it, dragged it into political and economic realms, and carefully ensured
a favorable deal to themselves in the bargain. It was the smooth flow
of the enormous wealth amassed in this manner that they wished to
ensure using the anticorruption laws in the Indian Penal Code of 1860.
Notwithstanding any desirable portions of the Code, it was, most
importantly, an elaborate system of laws devised to control deviations
from a system built by the British to oppress, harass and dehumanize
Indians in order to benefit materially from them.
1.2. Of the similarity between the concepts of corruption now and
barbarism then; of corruption at the global level; of the corruption
of the clean nations.
Let us now place ourselves in the present and consider the state
of corruption in the world at large. Two influential international
organizations, viz., Transparency International and the World Bank, are
at the forefront of global corruption research today, and are known for
publishing worldwide corruption statistics together with maps showing
the geographical distribution of corruption.12 We will not get into the
statistical details published by them because they are immaterial to
our discussion here, but begin by making an important observation:
according to the data collected by these two organizations, the colonized
are corrupt and the colonizers are clean.
Thus, India and other former European colonies in Asia and
Africa, which have arguably not fully emancipated themselves from
colonization, are part of the corrupt pack, while colonial powers such
as Britain and the nations of Western Europe and America are all part
of the clean pack. Of course, the data contains many shades of grey
between corrupt and clean, but the overall labeling, of the colonies as
the corrupt and the colonizers as the clean nations, is unmistakable.
Transparency International publishes a Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI)
which ‘ranks countries/territories based on how corrupt a country’s public
sector is perceived to be.’ The World Bank publishes Worldwide Governance
Indicators with ‘Control of Corruption’ as one of the dimensions of
governance.
12
7
THE PYRAMID
OF
CORRUPTION
India’s Primitive Corruption And How To Deal With It