J N Jayashree did not want her husband to die the death of an Indian whistle-blower.
Four years ago, India was rocked by the murder of Satyendra Dubey, a government engineer who exposed corruption in the national highway building program.
Two years later, Shanmughan Manjunath, a manager at a state-owned oil company, laid bare a scheme to sell impure gasoline. His body was found riddled with bullets in the back seat of his car.
To Jayashree, her husband, M N Vijayakumar, appeared to be trailing in their footsteps. Vijayakumar, 51, a bureaucrat in Karnataka, has a penchant for chastising colleagues who supplement their modest salaries with bribes, kickbacks and garden-variety pilferage. In recent months, his chastising ruffled feathers at high levels, and he was flicked around the civil service like a hockey puck, switching jobs seven times in the past nine months.
As her husband made powerful enemies, Jayashree began to fear for his life. And so she devised an unusual ploy to protect him: She blogged.
The result is a small-scale test of whether India's technology revolution, which is empowering tens of millions, can tamp the corruption that hinders India's superpower ambitions.
Jayashree built her Web site, fightcorruption.wikidot.com, with help from her son, a doctorate student in computer science at Delaware State University. On the site she chronicles her husband’s case and criticizes the government. An aficionado of India's new right-to-information laws, she has acquired and uploaded reams of documents.
She updates the site nearly every day and has received responses from around the world, including many from Indian émigrés who say they left the country because they found it too corrupt. Government officials in predicaments like her husband's have sought advice.
Arun Duggal, a senior adviser to Transparency International, the Berlin-based group that monitors global corruption, called the Web site “pathbreaking” for India.
“For an individual to use the powerful media of the Internet to take a stand against corruption, to expose wrongdoing, to build a campaign and a following, I think it's the first time I've seen it,” said Duggal, who is based in New Delhi.
Vijayakumar said he had seen corruption since his first days on the job. He said he had threatened to resign five times and had filed about 25 formal complaints detailing specific instances of corruption to P B Mahishi, the highest-ranking civil servant in Karnataka, which includes the technology hub of Bangalore. His said his complaints were rarely heeded.
The complaints have not been made public, but Vijayakumar offered an example of how he said officials operate with near impunity:
In the government agency that oversees state-owned enterprises in Karnataka, he said it was routine for officials to invent imaginary losses, and to solicit – and pocket – extra budgetary allocations to recover those losses.
Mahishi, the civil service chief, conceded that corruption was “everywhere,” in his own bureaucracy and in bureaucracies elsewhere. But he criticized Vijayakumar, calling him a lazy, ineffective worker who often skipped meetings and stayed silent about corruption for years before suddenly recoiling at it.
Vijayakumar contended that he had always battled corruption, but from the inside. What changed more recently, he said, is that his pleas ceased to make a difference and that he began to sense his life was in danger.
For instance, Jayashree said, one night last year, their doorbell rang shortly before midnight. There were men at the door, and they told Vijayakumar that his younger son, a college student, had been in an accident. Come with us, they said.
But the son was asleep in his bed at home, just steps from his father, and the family concluded that the men had crafted a ruse to draw Vijayakumar from the house. After 13 years in that home, they moved to another neighborhood.
Corruption is nothing new in India. International surveys have consistently described the country as a superpower of graft.
But Jayashree sees the temptation to swindle growing in an era when bureaucratic salaries pale beside private-sector pay.
As India trades socialist dogmas for capitalist ones, the private sector is becoming king.
A sexagenarian veteran of the civil service typically earns no more than $9,000 a year, excluding perks like housing and a car. A 21-year-old engineer fresh out of college can garner about that much at a software firm like Infosys, with annual raises of 15 percent.
As Jayashree tells it, many women who married civil servants began in recent years to see their friends’ private-sector husbands’ whiz into the financial stratosphere.
And while there is ample evidence that men can be corrupted without outside persuasion, Jayashree regards envious wives as a spur to much of the sleaze she has seen.
IHT
