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| Who will tackle godfathers of corruption in J&K? | | | Early Times Report
Jammu, Feb 15: The State government's decision to retire 13 of its employees because of serious charges of corruption is a step in the right direction provided it has not been done as a one-time cosmetic exercise.
It is common knowledge that from a gas cylinder to a ration card through a state subject certificate the common man has to pay through his nose despite the fact that services like these have since been brought under the services guarantee act.
J&K has a long and unenviable history of corruption and all of it has been because of the political patronage to the most corrupt among the civil servants. The honest have often been called 'mediocre, non-accommodative, difficult and dry'. These labels have been given to almost every honest civil servant during the currency of his service. The corrupt have been called 'resourceful, accommodative, efficient and influential'.
It is, therefore, a welcome step that the State government has broken track with the past and started catching the bull by the horn.
But, the 13-member list of civil servants retired from active service yesterday does not include any big name. There are sharks in the administration who have broken all records of nepotism, corruption, favouritism and other imaginable and defined codes of conduct for a civil servant.
Why is it that each time an anti-graft campaign is started in the State, it ends with lower or at the most, the middle rung civil servants? We have yet to see any senior civil servant face the axe on charges of corruption. Is it that all the senior civil and police officers at the top level are upright and scrupulously honest?
The problem with our anti-corruption campaigns has always been that while the small fish get trapped, the big fish sail scot free.
There is no doubt that the state chief secretary, Madhav Lal is an officer of proven honesty and integrity. His intentions are well meaning and nobody ever doubts the chief secretary's eagerness to weed out the corrupt and make administration answerable, transparent and people friendly.
Lal has a great asset in his head of the state vigilance organization (SVO). The chief of the SVO, P.L. Gupta is an upright, honest, efficient and well meaning police officer. Gupta is uncompromising and unpardoning of the corrupt officials.
Despite the most credible intentions of the state chief secretary and the SVO chief, the system is so heavily oriented in favour of the corrupt officials who enjoy political patronage that helplessness often shows when lower and middle rung civil servants get axed in anti-corruption campaigns.
It should not be argued that because the top level corrupt officials are still out of the anti-corruption net, therefore, no action should be taken against the middle and lower rung government officials with murky records. Everybody who robs the exchequer, loots the people and starts believing that he is the master and not the servant of the people must face the axe. That is a given, but the larger question that must be answered is whether such actions are morally justified as long as the godfathers of the corrupt civil servants continue at the helm. The moot question is who will judge the judge? |
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