Who cares for Caesar and his wife?

“Caesar’s wife should be above suspicion” is a canon touted – and flouted - from time immemorial. Corruption is a hydra-headed monster, its tentacles never dwindling but multiplying. No wonder there is a global coalition against corruption addressing itself to studies on myriad forms of the canker and coming out with periodical findings on Corruption Perception Indices across a vast spectrum of nations.

Corruption has been rightly held to be a violation of human rights, particularly the basic rights listed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Right to Equality, freedom from discrimination and right to life with dignity.

Equality of opportunities is blatantly violated when the rich thrive at the expense of the poor. The rich easily bend the power wielders and decision takers to have the rules bent, while the poor, even to get the rules correctly applied, have to struggle for the necessary grease. Discrimination scars and disfigures every corrupt deal since the poor lose their rightful due and the rich hog the bigger share of the national pie. Denial of the right to live with dignity is the inevitable corollary.

The way high profile corruption cases take — starting with a bang and ending with a whimper — is a frontal slap on rectitude in public life. Feigning total blindness or seeing things through the Nelson’s eye, coupled with the use of coloured glasses, stultifies investigation processes. Half-baked cases supported by weak or inadequate evidence get thrown out through the window. There is, therefore, an urgent need to enact on more comprehensive laws, and do away with restrictive definitions for corruption that give adjudicators that little elbow room to mete out adequate justice in specific cases or vesting them with greater interpretational power so as to effectuate the objectives behind the legislation. Linking a case of administrative wrong-doing merely to immediate direct and tangible quid pro quo has to go, and even the probability and possibility of future returns, not necessarily money or its concrete equivalent, should be subjected to examination to decide on culpability. The paramount consideration should be public interest.

Ah! A utopian dream!

- The reader is an author and a retired Reserve Bank Officer based in India.