Election Commission is weak! How to make it an anti-corruption machinery?
The image of leaders is critical!
There is a widespread perception that India is becoming prone to corruption increasingly. This issue we have to face boldly and talk about it. It is our view that the public at large is not prone to giving bribes. Nor, we dare say, that government servants are also prone to corruption. There are still, today, many highly upright officials. At the same time we see the most powerful; the most popularly elected leaders end up in courts and jails too!
India is a traditional country given to much traditional beliefs of right and wrong and people are ethical when it comes to organise their lives and life styles.This ethical attribute of the Indian people we have to recognise and start analysing the corruption issue from then on.
It is the politicians of the new generation and also the businessmen, the two most emerging powerful segments of the population that are the sources of corruption of all types.
Corruption has to be faced straight its face and people, civil society and NGOs have to be strengthened and the larger social evil has to be fought.
Luckily, there have been many efforts to combat this evil. There are already many NGOs, think tanks and other efforts that have largely contributed to arrest the spread of this evil.
But what we like to highlight here is the reality that also by and large the larger segments of the common man are free from this temptations.
The way elections are run, the way the large and small political parties are organising themselves, more and more as family parties, as family heritages, accumulate large cash hoards and also assets and how these large assets are progressively hidden from the declarations of the EC submissions that lead to further deterioration in the quality of public life.
Even the larger parties are now doing politics not for public service, though the outer face is a pretension, it is a reality that big party leaders are not themselves clean, transparent, and sorry to say, that they are first of all not really qualified to lead the parties.
They get into the leadership slot by accidents.
Either as an inherito, wives or relatives and also some social segments also give opportunities, because of caste and communal tags, as we have been witnessing lately.
One more source of doubtful big money is through spiritual and god men activities/..It is unfortunately, that some of these doubtful god men end up in jails, while others have also been cultivating politicians who identify themselves either innocently or through known connections.
Let us at least take a pledge, all political leader should do this, not to associate themselves with god men for political clean image sake.
If the political leaders, at least one prominent leader, are clean and stick to some values, then, we are sure the entire political and social system can be made clean.
It is time we face the issue of corruption and do the right thing in the interests of the nation.