Gehlot faux pas releases corruption stench in Rajasthan
After months of discord within the ruling Rajasthan Congress, the high command finally shook up the ministry to make it more representative and revamped the party unit. The reset, however, was not about improving governance. It was about striking a better balance between the competing ambitions of the old guard led by Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot, 70, and his young challenger Sachin Pilot, 44, who inspired the party in his capacity as the then state unit chief to wrest power from the BJP in the Assembly elections in 2018, before palace intrigue in Delhi robbed him of the crown.
Had it been about good governance, the high command would have at least paid lip service to tackling some of the glaring shortcomings in the Gehlot administration. Like the stench of corruption that permeates the system. Ironically, it was the wizened and inscrutable Gehlot who inadvertently let the graft genie out of the bottle the other day. Addressing a gathering of government teachers, he sought to make it participative by asking if they had to pay speed money to get their service transfers. What followed stunned him and embarrassed his loyalist, PCC head and education minister Govind Singh Dotasra, who too was on the dais. For all teachers said in unison that bribing for transfers was the norm. No prizes for guessing who the beneficiary was. Gehlot then tried to create some wriggle room, saying he would formulate a transfer policy to end the scourge of bribing. It was a policy he had promised in the run-up to the 2018 elections but failed to deliver.
The episode was symptomatic of the widespread corruption across the bureaucracy. From securing government jobs to awarding contracts, the entire path is lit up with bribery. The story of how a powerful minister bought his way out of a job scandal elsewhere in the country by repaying people who dragged him to court, with the judiciary looking the other way, is indicative of people in power managing to thrive. Little wonder, India’s rank slipped six places to 86th among 180 countries in Transparency International’s corruption perception index in 2020. The clean-up has to be done at all levels starting with the electoral system where voter bribery is a fact of life. Piecemeal efforts won’t work.