Writing this Column on the morning of Diwali, the festival of lights symbolizing the victory of light and truth over evil is becoming a difficult task when one surveys India’s polity and the overall political environment. Except for a handful, and I emphasize ‘handful’, the current state of India’s polity and the prevailing political environment makes me hang my head in shame. In the weeks preceding Diwali, the citizens of the Indian Republic have been treated to the sordid spectacle of a series of corruption scams running into thousands of crores of Rupees in which India’s apex levels of political leadership cannot absolve themselves for acts of commission and omission.

Following the Commonwealth Games corruption scam came the scam of the Kargilgate in which virtually the top levels of the Congress Government in Maharashtra are allegedly involved in misappropriating flats built for Kargil Martyrs widows In both cases the TV Channels have exposed the scams in great detail. The country expected that at the recent AICC Session the Congress President and the Congress Prime Minister would come down heavily on these scams. Sadly nothing of this sort happened leading to TV headlines banners screaming ‘Sonia mum on scams’.

Admittedly, one would accept that people cannot be crucified based on media exposes but when the evidence being presented by the media is overwhelming than the least that can be expected from India’s polity and those holding top places in the governance to step aside until the investigations absolving them are conclusively completed. Indian political leaders of all political dispensations when in power have resorted to subterfuge strategies of announcing Inquiry Commissions which would drag for months and the original scam gets lost in public memory and media memory as some other scam of more damaging proportions erupts.

India’s polity has lost its sensitivity to moral shame on acts of corruption in which they frequently find themselves at repetitive levels. It is repulsive to witness the brazenness with which Indian politicians ride out the scams and the corruption charges that stare them in their faces.

The Indian citizens outrage against India’s political class gets further heightened when they end up as helpless spectators of witnessing like in the current scams the lack of swift action in corruption scams by the Congress President and her Prime Minister in the Telecom Scam, the Commonwealth Games Corruption Scam and the Kargilgate Scam. Not only does silence on the scams affect the image of the Congress Party hierarchy but also of the entire political class as a whole.

Outrageous too is the inclinations of all political parties during allegations of such scams to resort to leveling counter-charges against their opponents that they while in power were also involved in such and such scam. This is political juvenilism at its worst as two wrongs do not make one right. The positive response in such cases should have been that unlike you we have taken swift action against the offenders.

The question that goes abegging is as to how India’s political leaders, political heavyweights and the polity as a whole can shamelessly brazen out scams and acts of patent corruption and we the citizens of the Indian Republic vote such people back into power forgetting that the politician in question has a mile long list of dubious record,. Further, how do Party Presidents of political parties give tickets to dubious people and those with criminal records to fight elections again.

Obviously India’s polity has lost its sense of political shame and they are a poor reflection of those who struggled for India’s independence and the thousands of Indian Armed Forces personnel who laid down their lives day in and day out