Dil naummeed to nahin, nakaam hi to hai, Lambee hai gham ke sham, magar sham hi to hai (page 6)

After opening on a depressing note of petty everyday corruption, Chandan Mitra seems determined to find signs that India has in fact begun its fight against this debilitating cancer. But his closing account of the encounter with the children of Delhi's Shri Ram School strikes a note of helplessness. Britain and Italy, as described by Mitra, may have drastically reduced corruption. But in India, except for the efforts of a few determined but "eccentric" individuals -- most notably T.N. Seshan's clean-up of the election process and U.N. Biswas' investigation of the Bihar fodder scandal -- he can see little effort to combat corruption.

The Corrupt Society is essentially written in the form of six essays. Its canvas of over 50 years is wide in terms of the number of issues and events touched, but is necessarily sketchy in the analysis of specific issues. In writing the book Mitra has chosen to don his newsperson's hat. He has produced a fast, tightly-packed and extremely readable description of politicians and policies that have enabled corruption to spread its destructive tentacles over every section of society. It is not an academic tome. It can however be accused of sweepingly generalised assessments.

For instance, Mitra argues that the most corrupting influence on politics is exerted by business and industry. Yet he ignores the role of politicians in diverting funds into portfolio management schemes that created the securities scam. Then, when asked to investigate the scam, politicians in the multi-party joint parliamentary committee sat around bargaining for their vested interests. Not only did they not allow the probe to extend to politicians but also ignored the need for drastic systemic reform.

These are details that I am familiar with; others may have similar examples. On the other hand, Mitra has clearly defined his target audience as the average reader or student concerned about corruption and looking for a broad canvas. He more than fulfils their expectations.

Mitra makes no new revelations, though several of the events documented in the book were first reported in newspapers edited by him. He packs in a wealth of facts, starting with Jawaharlal Nehru, who he says "presided over the progressive erection of a corrupt scaffolding in which public funds were diverted to assist dishonest businessmen" to his daughter Indira Gandhi's role in destroying institutions and ruthlessly "using corruption as a means of subverting movements antithetical to her political objectives".

The book covers every major milestone in the progressive corrupting of systems: the growth of nepotism and role of politicians' kin as middlemen, breakdown of ethics among bureaucrats and law enforcers, dirty dynamics of election funding, rapacious brazenness of the Laloo Prasad Yadav and Kalyan Singh governments and the small sign of hope during the initial days of the Jain hawala scandal probe.