India needs a political renewal just like Italy

The San Vittore prison in Milan, Italy, is not a famous tourist spot. But, a few years ago anybody who was anybody in Italy’s business and political circles was headed there not for a view from outside but for an extended stay inside. Television crews kept all-night vigils outside the prison’s high walls. When police cars arrived with screeching sirens, jeering crowds would throw coins at the handcuffed politician or businessman in the back seat while others shouted “thieves.”

Italy’s corrupt political parties have often been compared to those in India and as India sets itself firmly on the road to coalition politics leading to a massive churning of old equations, the questions arealso the same. Will the old-wine-in-new-bottle leadership of the Congress party oversee the party’s destruction just like the Christian Democrats did? Will the United Front disappear like the Italian Socialists? Will there be a swing to the right in India before the pendulum goes the other way towards a renewed centre-left coalition that will address the country’s economic needs? How will the system renew itself without attacking its corrupt roots? What role will India’s President play in restoring a sense of dignity and how will he restore confidence in a badly fragmented Parliament?

For forty years after the second world war, Italian politics could be best described as a merry-go-round with the same politicians emerging richer after every round. Governments would come and go but the politicians remained the the same. Two generations of Italians grew up hearing the same political names.

The two main political strands the Christian Democrats and the Socialists tossed around for forty years and youngerItalians found they were being led by a geriatric ward. The anti-corruption drive called Mani Pulite (operation clean hands) launched in the early nineties has changed all that.

In early 1994, coming in the wake of the anti-corruption drive and reformed election rules, the country saw a shift towards the extreme right and the decimation of the Christian Democrats who had ruled Italy for long years.

The old Socialists have disappeared. The old Communists have also been wiped out partly because even though they sat in the opposition for most of the time, they were seen as condoning corrupt governments.

A series of short-lived governments followed and in April 1996 a coalition of centre-left parties led by professor Romano Prodi was sent to power.

Today, Italy unlike India does not have professional politicians. It has professionals – economists, technocrats, professors – running the country.The old corrupt Christian democrats and the Socialists are a thing of the past. New parties and newer faces haveemerged, but the road to this renewal has not been easy. This is not to say that corruption has disappeared, but there is a clear political impatience with it. The magistrates attacked the heart of the post-war politico-economic system. The system had been so permeated by corruption that there were fears that the very institutions of democracy risk being weakened if the judicial surgery was too abrupt or all-embracing.

There was also the question of how guilt would be apportioned in a system that was so thoroughly corrupt and whether individuals are to be punished or whether society as a whole should be blamed for allowing the situation to develop. The scope of the investigation was limitless, as limitless as the voter’s quest for change. Magistrates were the country’s new heroes. It was no accident that the investigations were the most rigorous where the Christian Democrats and the Socialists were most powerful – in the north and central Italy.

In the south or Mafialand, voters kicked out the ChristianDemocrats whose collusion with the Mafiosi had been documented by investigating magistrates. With the rotten interiors gone, Italy’s governments are falling less frequently.

For when is India’s Mani Pulite?