Ignoring the scourge of corruption Need to rally against the menace
- Sangai Express Editorial :: October 07, 2013 -

Lalu Prasad Yadav in jail for five years. Rasheed Masood in jail for 4 hears.

Immediate disqualification, thanks to a ruling from the Supreme Court of India may be the proverbial icing on the cake. Both implicated in cases that date back to more than 20 years.

The long arm of the law at work. An understanding that one day or the other the law will take its course and there is no escaping it.

Not bad, but it could have been better.

Why not replace the long arm of the law with the short arm of the law, under the understanding that the arm of the law will catch up with the criminals or wrong doers sooner than later ?

With the backlog of cases pending in numerous Courts all over the country, this may be a tough call to follow, but there is the need to speed up the justice delivery system for it is not for nothing that there is the universally accepted observation that ‘justice delayed is justice denied.’

Or is it better off for mankind and India to believe in the message that Tolstoy sought to convey in his short story, “God sees the truth but waits ?”

Lest the gist of this commentary gets lost between the long arm and short arm of the law, there is the growing need to unmask the Lalus and the Masoods here in Manipur too.

Manipur has its fair share or more than its fair share of social vigilantes, starting from the human rights activists, to pressure groups, which may come in the form of civil society organisations, student organisations and even the Meira Paibi movement, but the question is the absence of groups or pressure groups which should have devoted themselves to fight the scourge of corruption.

Or is it a case of corruption managing to silence all the pressure groups when it matters ?

This is not in any way casting aspersions on anyone, but the failure to raise corruption on the public domain to the extent that it should have been, raises many a question, however uncomfortable it may be.

In a few months, that is in 2014, Manipur will join the rest of the country in Parliamentary election.

There will be issues bandied about by different political parties, such as the territorial integrity of Manipur, political stability, the law and order situation in the State, vis-a-vis the numerous peace pacts that have been signed with different armed groups in recent times, the Armed Forces Special Powers Acts, but be sure that corruption as an issue will be added just as a footnote.

Mind boggling it is, since corruption has touched the lives of each and everyone and everyone talks about it in their daily conversation or interaction with each other.

Corruption has never been an issue in any of the election that Manipur has faced, since attaining the status of a full fledged State in 1972 and this is what is surprising.

Down the years, corruption has become more brazen, more in the face, with everyone knowing or claiming to know the price tag of a Government job, which runs into lakhs of rupees yet no one, not the political parties and certainly not the common citizens or the voters have deemed it fit to give it the importance it deserves.

Why is this so ? Tough question and certainly no easy answer.

Or is it a case of the majority of the people throwing up their hands in frustration under the impression that it would not make any difference ?

An indication of how deep rooted corruption has become ? Either way this is not a comforting thought at all.

Manipur has to wake up to the scourge of corruption and there is the growing need to rally the people against this menace.

The question is who will lead the way and how committed will the people be to address this issue ?