Abuse as power

And corruption as its by-product

If you were the Prime Minister of Pakistan and your mother had applied for an electricity connection, and she was waiting for her turn to get the connection, would you help her get the connection out of turn? If you did, would you consider that to be wrong in any way? Would you consider that to be abuse of power? If you did not ‘help’ your mother, would you consider that to be a principled stand? How do you think most people in Pakistan would see this?

If you did not help your mother my guess is that most people in Pakistan would consider you to be weak and/or arrogant, and they would think that you should have helped your mother, even if it meant bending or breaking some rules. They would not understand your attempt to live by principles, that all should be treated equally, to be of any moral value, and would usually retort that others do not live and play by these rules, that you are someone special or that you have come from another planet.

A lot of people in Pakistan currently consider corruption to be an important problem in Pakistan. Imran Khan and PTI have made it to be ‘the’ main issue facing Pakistan. The argument is that if corruption could be controlled, we would be able to collect a lot more in taxes, make public expenditure more effective, slow down capital flight and in fact reverse it, get money stashed in foreign countries back into Pakistan, receive more foreign direct investment, have more domestic investment, achieve higher growth due to all of the above, and hence be able to create more jobs and tackle poverty and other deprivations more effectively. There is no doubt that corruption does hurt in all of the above ways and more. And reduction in corruption will help in achieving some of the above if not all. But what is not fully understood or appreciated is that corruption is not just the desire of the people in power to make money, there is a much more entrenched problem that we have to face.

Anyone who is in a position of power is considered to be powerful only and to the extent that he or she is able to bend rules or break rules in favour of his/her constituents. Whether he/she takes money for doing that or other favours is a secondary issue.

A policeman is powerful because he can institute false cases against you, can arrest you on false charges, and can beat you up or have you tortured. A legislator is powerful because she can get things done for you: she can get jobs for you, have postings/transfers done, can get government services for your area (roads, water projects, etc) and intermediate with the various departments of the state on your behalf and so on. It is not the fact that she can make laws that makes her powerful. A tax officer or a DMG officer is powerful for more or less the same reasons.

It is important to understand the above as a lot of people argue that having stricter laws and/or implementing them more strictly will rid us of corruption. Where this might hold, in general, it might not be the way to go if corruption is one way in which the powerful show their power. If the ability to flout the law is the way to judge how powerful a person is in our society, then it will not be possible to root out corruption by making the laws stricter. We will have to dig deeper than that.

Why are potential Senators, MNAs, MPAs willing to spend crores of rupees to be elected to have a chance to be become legislators? The salaries of these people do not justify what is spent on elections. Yes, many legislators do make a lot of money when they are in power and recoup much more than what they spend on elections. But this cannot be the motivation for all of them. In fact, even for many who make money, money is an instrumental variable. It is a way of showing their power. This partially explains why many industrialists and businessmen decide to join politics at times as well: they want to show how much power they have.

Kant had long ago postulated that as individuals and as moral beings we had to treat all other rational beings as ‘ends in themselves’ and not as means to an end. The same, I think, applies to how we think about power and democracy as well. If power refuses to come under the rule of law and if democracy only means ‘now it is my turn to be above the law’ then whether people are elected or selected, there will be little change in the lives of the majority of the people in the country. Financial corruption is just a symptom of the above or, more precisely, a manifestation of the above.

Many people think that corruption exists because those who are given powers are usually not given enough salary and so on. A policeman is given immense powers while his salary is not even enough to enjoy a lower middle income life style if he sticks to just his salary income. This might be true of a lot of lower level functionaries. But it does not explain why so much corruption is present at the higher levels? Was the Prime Minister and his family poor? Or some of the other leading politicians of the country? Or the generals or senior bureaucrats?

Corruption is definitely a constraint on our growth, economic performance, and development. But it is not just about the greed of people for making money or for making ends meet. We are embedded in a political economy where the only way to show power is through abusing the law and showing that you are above the law. The more you can do it, in more areas and more publicly, the more powerful you are. And the game is about showing how powerful you are and how you can abuse the law and be above it. Financial corruption is just one way of doing this and exhibiting it. Countering corruption will require changing the discourse on power as well. But this will, without doubt, require challenging entrenched beliefs about hierarchy in our society as well. And nothing short of at least a mental revolution, if not a physical one, can achieve that.

The writer is an Associate Professor of Economics at LUMS (currently on leave) and a Senior Advisor at Open Society Foundation (OSF). He can be reached at [email protected]