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Bad laws make bad people

Why are we Indians always in the thick of every scam? Raj Sethia entered the Guinness Book of Records as the world's biggest bankrupt when he got embroiled in a dud deal in Nigeria. Chandra Swami and P V Narasimha Rao were involved in a bribery case in London. The deadly duo were also part of the infamous St Kitts affair, where they were accused of forging and fabricating evidence, while Rajiv Gandhi and his goons, Ottavio Quattrochhi and Win Chaddha, were neck-deep in the 155mm howitzer purchase scam, where the money was banked across several continents.

Now Mohammed Azharuddin is in trouble, with the South Africans pointing the needle of suspicion in his direction. Some days back, Kapil Dev got his comeuppance when the match-fixing story broke. It is up to each one of us to believe how much we want in such cases, since the evidence is fragile and the courts have to finally decide who is guilty, who is not. But one thing is clear: We love breaking rules and making money on the sly.

Why? Why do we need to break rules and make money on the sly when we are such an accomplished and hard-working people who can make lots of money in the normal course? Sethia was a brilliant businessman, a millionaire many times over. He did not need to get embroiled in scams. Chandra Swami was rich and famous. Heads of state and businessmen crawled at his feet. Adnan Khashoggi and the Sultan of Brunei were his chamchas. Why did he need to get involved in forgery and bribery? As for Rajiv Gandhi and Narasimha Rao, the less said the better. It is an ugly sight to watch prime ministers dragged into cases of petty bribery and crime. It not only ruins their reputations, it embarrasses India as well.

The same is true for the cricket revelations. Finally we discover that most of the betting and match-fixing was being done by people from here. Players, bookies, media bosses, game administrators. They are all trapped in the murky web of deceit and lying. More and more icons will hit the dust as more and more charges keep flying around. The Bombay Gym locker case is one such, where not a shred of evidence is available of any wrongdoing. Yet you have Sunil Gavaskar dragged into the sordid controversy and there is no end to the ugly speculation over whether he bet on matches or his poor father did.

The point is: why does this happen so frequently? Why do we wash our dirty linen before the entire world? Do we have more than our share of crooks and conmen?

No, I would say. For every Raj Sethia we have a Narayanamurthy, internationally revered for the way he runs his business. For every Rajiv Gandhi and Narasimha Rao we have a Nana Deshmukh and a Mohan Dharia slogging away in some tiny corner of this great nation creating an oasis of excellence and trust. For every Kapil Dev and Azharuddin, we have a Viswanathan Anand and a Geet Sethi who have come up from absolute zero and won huge global acclaim without compromising their ethics. Yet India always gets a bad name when it comes to dark deals.

The reason for this is we live in a land where the laws have been framed to harass and intimidate people, not to catch wrongdoers. MISA, TADA, COFEPOSA, FERA. None of these laws deserves to be around in any civilised society. Even the new IT bill is a shame. It allows cops to enter your place of work or mine on pure suspicion, without a warrant, to check out whether we are criminals. In no country of the world would such a law get past the lawmakers. But we, in our wisdom, have allowed it because we see dollars dancing before eyes every time someone talks about IT. We do not even notice the booby traps laid by a cunning government out to grab a share of the loot.

That, in fact, is the purpose of many of our laws. To terrorise, loot and extort. They have been devised specifically for that purpose. It is these wicked laws, inherently wrong and unfair, that breed among our citizens a disrespect for all laws. This, in turn, leads to lawbreaking, insidiously or flagrantly.

If we do not get to the root of this problem, if we do not change the way we govern India, through intimidation and extortion, we can never change our image as a nation of lawbreakers. We are a clever, hardworking people. We have high moral standards and a strong spiritual legacy that governs our lifestyle and value systems. Let not foolish, irresponsible governments destroy that legacy by putting in place laws that make us look like a nation of crooks.

For example, betting on cricket is openly allowed in England. Now find out how many English cricketers have been named in the recent match-fixing scam and you will realise how bad and foolish laws end up making us looking bad and foolish all the time.

Pritish Nandy

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