LIKE AIDS — though unlike Ebola — corruption is a global phenomenon. In recent months, there have, for instance, been scandals relating to international banks with complicity in tax evasion among the charges. Sport is another such sphere. The football giant, Fifa is currently being investigated for fairly spectacular corruption.

In our own neighborhood, a former Delhi law minister made headlines when he was picked up days ago for possessing a fake law degree.

The subcontinent contributes substantially to the corruption pool. So while the Axact affair made many sit up, it did not really surprise, smacking, despite a touch of legendary excess, of déjà vu. It would seem that, punctuated as it has been by episodes of corruption, our national experience has, on the whole, hardened us to such jolts.

It is almost axiomatic that, while the country may lack coherence, it does not want for colour. While condemning those in charge of Axact, we must clearly commend them for ingenuity and invention. There is, it seems, no dearth of innovative ideas — if only at a negative level — in the country.

Those of us who have struggled to obtain our respective bona fide degrees must ask ourselves if our prolonged labours were perhaps in vain. At the same time, we are bound to feel some measure of dismay at the fact of our fellow-citizens having been purveyors of sham.

Our experience has hardened us to episodes of corruption.

It may, of course, be argued that bogus degrees have been around for some time in Pakistan and that we should be inured to them as one of the many hard facts we have to live with.

However, one cannot help wondering who is the worse — those who provide bogus degrees or those who acquire them.

Aside from the more obvious dimension of wrongdoing, it does not seem to have struck at least the recipients of these degrees that they may have been bartering away the one thing that should have mattered to them: their own genuineness.

Sadly, since the end is mostly seen to justify the means, the need to examine such issues does not usually arise. Our society seems blithely to have cut through all the good around it like a knife through butter. Corruption may have been a cute pet once when it was still historically a rarity. Yet it is now a rather horrid beast that needs, with some haste, to be put down.

Our media leave no stone unturned in exposing the scandals that keep rocking the country.

Unfortunately, though, the headlines that bring the country’s various scams to light seem, more often than not, to prove counterproductive.

While blowing the cover of those concerned, they also, tend to blow the relevant scams away.

This betokens a blinkered approach with regard to social issues or, at any rate, an inability to see the wood for the trees. The fact is that corruption is not just a vertical but horizontal phenomenon.

Besides individual instances of corruption, there is also the fundamental factor of moral bankruptcy, of corruption as an underlying national disease. Curiously, we are given to overlooking the latter in our slightly smug encounter with the former.

Overall, the hazard attending coverage of the vertical to the exclusion of the horizontal variety of corruption is that the issue as such — financial as well as moral — tends to get brushed aside.

Also, the sheer hyperbolic bluster with which the issue of corruption is addressed simply serves, in the absence of any significant outreach, to trivialise it.

What is equally the matter is that, where the situation should rightly have called for zero tolerance, our own threshold has risen to a degree unthinkable before. It seems that, at some level, we condone where, by a peculiar sort of perversity, we also simultaneously dep­lore. So somewhere it is ourselves, as observers, as much as the offenders, that we must be looking at with a view to checking what seems to be a case not just of double standards but a basic irresponsibility and levity.

There is a glamour attached to the business of disclosure or exposure — the limelight of the moral high ground — that we must try, if possible, to forego. Analysis is — and has to be — different from gung-ho reportage. It must not, for instance, be seen to bask in sanctimoniousness and forget the need to call to account or, in fact, clean the Augean stables.

One would have thought that — Axact aside — the sphere of education would at least be free from taint. But it is not. It is known that government schools and colleges engage in graft. Exam grades are ‘improved’ for money. Admissions are arbitrary. Tragi­cally, everything is possible — at a price. Whither Pakistan?

The writer is the founder chairman of Dialogue: Pakistan, a local think tank.

Published in Dawn, June 15th, 2015

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