Where did SBI’s ethics go?

As the electoral bonds saga unfolds, there’s just one query buzzing in everyone's mind.

As the electoral bonds saga unfolds, there’s just one query buzzing in my mind. To you, the reader, it may seem unwarranted prejudice, but please lend me your ears. For the last 25 years, I’ve had a savings bank account with an institution that calls itself ‘the banker to every Indian’. In that time, transacting routine business at that institution’s innumerable branches across the country has rarely been pleasant. In my personal estimation, and I’d like to believe I echo the sentiments of innumerable common Indians with accounts there, the said institution exemplifies Indian misgovernance and gets away with it all the time.

The regular SBI branch is etched in my mind forever as a place where things don’t function, and where the following expressions are mantras: ‘no, it cannot happen’, ‘Sir/Madam, your papers are not alright’, or where urgent work is met with ‘come tomorrow’. You get the drift. Now, how on earth did such an institution shapeshift like quicksilver to execute electoral bonds? An institution that keeps you on your toes with KYC norms becomes all-for-opacity over crores and crores for electoral bonds?

I always saw it as a slow-motion film of a public institution. But now, I feel its purported incompetence, inefficiency, inadequacy are deliberate and reserved only for common Indians. Topping that, the ongoing quagmire betrays an utter absence of ethical banking in the widest sense, although in 2018 the RBI raised red flags over the Electoral Bonds scheme, and later cleared them with provisos. The events concerning Electoral Bonds retrieve from my memory 25 years of annoyance and maltreatment that visiting an SBI branch or office usually entailed. Of course, there are times I’ve gone there and it has felt like being in a comical Shashi Deshpande or R K Narayan story.

Dealing with nationalised banks is like going through the mill of justice; its wheels will sap you. But not so for our power elites. The Electoral Bonds rolled out in 2017 and 2018 very fast from an institution that gathers pace usually like a tortoise. Moreover, even when the Electoral Bonds scheme was mooted, didn’t the SBI even consider not going through with it? Why couldn’t it refuse, even if it was then perfectly legal? How come the SBI had such a narrow, technical view of ethics? Isn’t ethics more than just mere rules?

As in personal relationships and friendships, there are events in the life of a nation that unwittingly show one the mirror and shatter carefully cultivated self-estimations. They serve too like multi-layered epiphanies, which one keeps returning to for fresher insights. Here are some.

For starters, the rich in India are so rich, it’s incredible that we are a poor country. Or a nation which ranks 134 out of 193 countries in the recent UN HDI report.

There is so much wealth in this country, and yet so much inequity, and our public institutions work to sustain that divide. It’s such an obvious ethical disaster, and yet our public institutions in their subservience to the Union government will sign on hyper-profitable business propositions like Electoral Bonds. If the SBI hadn’t gone ahead, it’s likely that some other institution may have got the opportunity. What bank would deny such a windfall? What bank would even think ‘the rules say it’s right, but our heart and mind say it’s wrong’. Wishful thinking.

What’s the worst feeling? That none of this in future shall affect SBI’s standing, even if currently the Supreme Court is collaring it in ways few public financial institutions have been since Independence. It’s not a nice thought; and yet perfectly possible.