Corruption is custom

Corruption is custom

It is unnerving enough that for the first time in the nation's history, its top customs official has been raided, and then arrested by the CBI in a corruption case. But what is even more disturbing in the aftermath of the CBI's nationwide swoop on the Customs Department on Friday and Saturday last is the unabashed pervasiveness of corruption the CBI operation has suggested, the sheer enormity of the problem it points to. Even in these post-Tehelka times, when corruption has become that repetitive, almost sanitised, visual of currency notes offered and accepted flashed on television screens in homes across the country, the case against Central Board of Excise and Customs chief B.P. Verma and the preliminary results of the extensive searches at residential and office premises of as many as 48 Customs officials, raise uncomfortable questions.

The CBI raids are a grim pointer to the rot that obviously runs deep and one that travels all the way to the top. Verma's may not be just a story of individual greed. By all accounts, he was merely a link, though a crucial one, in the chain forged by unholy alliances between powerful lobbies of exporters, customs officials and politicians, facilitated by middlemen. Verma is charged with receiving bribes worth crores of rupees for favours shown to a Chennai-based export house. The company claimed it was exporting garments while it was actually sending rags; this was done to get duty drawback benefits. But the question is why Verma, whose role as a senior customs officer was always controversial, was rewarded by the system with plum postings one after the other. Why was the man against whom the Vigilance Directorate had earlier recommended a chargesheet elevated to the post of chairman of CBEC in the first place? The raids on other Customs officials are further indictment of a system rendered shamefully porousby graft. They follow from the arrest and subsequent disclosures made by one Olga Kozireva, an Uzbek national caught while trying to smuggle in 81,000 yards of Chinese silk. Customs officials at New Delhi's Indira Gandhi International airport allegedly connived with Kozireva over a period of three years to allow her to run a well-oiled smuggling network. She has chronicled how `helpful' customs officials were making fictitious bills with fictitious items and these were just signed by her when she left the airport. As this newspaper has reported, it is now well established that customs officers at the Indira Gandhi International airport, silenced by generous bribes, were allowing at least one Uzbek gang to operate freely under their noses. And that Chinese silk may well have been the more innocuous of the goods smuggled in.

The massive raids by the CBI last week will be useful if they do more than merely confirm the general public perception of the Revenue Department as being one of the most corrupt in the country. To make a real difference, these raids must mark the beginning of a larger, longer crackdown on corrupt officials. While netting the big fish is a significant achievement, a genuine crusade against corruption can only sustain itself by casting the net wider and wider still.