In the early 80s, Tulmohan Ram was sentenced to five and a half years’ simple imprisonment in what was known as the license scandal case. Tulmohan was an obscure Congress MP whose only claim to fame was that he had taken a bribe of Rs 50.000. He shaved his head, renounced politics and embraced Buddhism.

Why he thought of changing his religion, 1.do not knows. Nor do I know whether Buddhism is more benign toward computation than Hinduism; Kautiya at least, did not think corruption was immoral; He prescribed only fines for it. He thought people in Government would always be Corrupt,” just as it is impossible not to last the honey or the poison that finds itself at the tip of the tongue, so it is impossible for a Government servant not to eat up at least a bit of the king’s rev.

A study by the British High Commission around the same time as the Tulmohan Ramease, linked corruption to Hinduism, in Hinduism, “it said, there is no good or evil sin the case of dualist religions such as Christianity, Judaism or Islam.”

Hinduism is widely believed to be a way of life. So also corruption, The British report had gone on to say that while in every country politics was a carver, in India it was a business, “The first respond of those starting out in electoral Politics is to get back the money invested in their candidates.”

Ones often told there is no moral stigma attached to double standards: One for personal life, another for business. Nirad C. ‘Chadhuri brings us this quote from an article Bankim Chandra Chatterjee wrote in 1984:“Weknow of a landowner who is a Brahmin and a very strict Hindu. He gets up early in the morning and takes his bath. Performs puja, He takes only one ‘vegetarian meal during the day. Then he attends to the business of his properties, At that time his mind becomes wholly intent on the problem of running one or the other of his tenants, depriving an unprotected widow of all her possessions, healing his creditors, securing false witnesses to send some innocent person to jail, or concocting evidence to win his cases, And his efforts in all these dire cons are successful. Yet, we also know for certain that he is wholly sincere in his devotion to the Gods and Brahmins and there is no hypocrisy whatever about it.

 

Article extracted from this publication >>  January 31, 1996