Personal rivalries can destroy families but when they assume political dimensions, they can damage the system itself. The tendency to settle personal scores is inexorably demolishing values like fairplay and democratic procedures. Politicians seeking vengeance stop at nothing. In power, they twist the already malleable administrative machinery to serve their purpose. Jayalalithaa in Tamil Nadu, Laloo Prasad Yadav in Bihar and Mayawati in Uttar Pradesh are among the chief ministers known for the grand vendetta. Their methods are ruthless; they can harass and hound their adversary till he or she breaks. Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh is the latest to join their ranks. His enmity with former chief minister Parkash Singh Badal is nothing new. Both are Jats — the community is known never to forgive or forget. Amarinder Singh’s allegations against Badal would have carried credibility if he had produced any evidence of the alleged corruption. Police officers were sent abroad to rummage for proof. They returned empty-handed. The first FIR was filed only a few days ago. The exercise smacks of personal vendetta and political witch-hunting. In Punjab, a transparent procedure was established many years ago when former chief minister Pratap Singh Kairon was indicted. The Opposition prepared a chargesheet which it submitted to the Centre. The then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru constituted a one-man commission under the chairmanship of a Supreme Court judge. Hearings were held in the open. Why didn’t Amarinder Singh opt for the same procedure when he claimed during the election campaign that his party had a long list of charges against Badal? What seems to be happening in Punjab and many other states is that the government is diverting people’s attention from its non-performance. A chief minister raises the bogey of corruption or indulges in some other diversionary step to keep the people occupied in some tamasha or other so that he does not have to be held accountable for what economic progress the state has, or rather hasn’t, made. In fact, not many chief ministers are even interested in developmental work. They relish power and make money. They occupy themselves with petty schemes and manoeuvres to crush the Opposition within and outside of the party. Nor is the Center insulated from these sorry trends. Human Resource Development Minister Murli Manohar Joshi has closed down a Gandhian institution at Varanasi because he did not like the old dedicated Gandhians running the institution. They had been running it for decades. Joshi used the pretext of ‘‘disputed ownership’’ to take over the institution after starving it of funds from his ministry. He used all methods — also Shiv Sena activists — to disrupt the peaceful dharna the Gandhians were conducting. The Gandhians are still running the institution from another place. It is a matter of saving the Gandhian ideology which is under attack from the sangh parivar, they say. Something ugly has happened to the system. There is a brazen collusion between those in power and the administration. Spurious cases are filed against opponents and critics. Police pick up innocents and keep them in lock-up for days on end to extract information through third-degree methods. And bureaucrats who dare to defy the rulers are persecuted to send out a message to other employees. Everyone can see how the indifference to a chief minister’s wishes can ruin the career of a civil servant. Not many dare to follow an independent line. For people, the thin line between right and wrong, moral and immoral has got blurred over the years. It has ceased to matter on which side they stand. Political and personal motives of those who lead have got so meshed that there is no sensitivity left about the wrong that they do or the heinous conspiracies they hatch. It is necessary to emphasise, even at the risk of sounding pedantic, that morality must have a role in whatever governments do. Mahatma Gandhi once said that if means were vitiated, ends were also bound to be sullied. This is as true today as it was when he enunciated it many decades ago. But after his assassination, India has been rapidly going downhill. In all segments of society we see that the end justifies the means. No political party is better than the other when it comes to grabbing power. No method is mean enough to win. The advent of the Janata government after the Emergency was to be the great dawn. I regretfully recall that it dismissed all the Congress governments when it came to power. It was morally wrong. Those who fought to revive democratic values demolished them at the very first opportunity they got. After returning to power, Mrs Indira Gandhi did the same thing and ousted the Janata state governments. It was tit for tat. And it spread the feeling that power justified the means. Rulers, Walter Lippman said, are the custodians of a nation’s ideals, of the beliefs it cherishes, of its permanent hopes, of the faith which makes a nation out of a mere aggregation of individuals. But today’s rulers do not think beyond an election. As a result, people have begun to scoff at ideals and commitment. They are disillusioned. They feel that politicians have failed them. They believe they are caught in a system that cannot deliver the goods. Nor do they have an alternative that can throw up better leaders. Who do they turn to?
