Once again a crusader against corruption among officials and politicians has been defeated by the forces he so resolutely took on. The very popular Lok Ayukta of Karnataka was forced to throw in the towel, admitting defeat against the troika of corrupt politicians, dishonest bureaucrats and vested interests.

Justice Hegde handed in his resignation to the Karnataka governor citing how his work was being subverted by the government and how the corrupt officials, backed by their political patrons, were abusing official machinery to harass him and his staff. The final straw came when in his fight with the politically powerful ‘mining mafia’ — active in Karnataka — he was frustrated and humiliated. The nexus between the mining mafia, their political patrons and corrupt bureaucrats thwarted every move the Lok Ayukta made. This not only thwarted his crusade, but systematically sabotaged his work. In a significant coincidence, the announcement of the Lok Ayukta’s resignation appeared alongside a story stating that the Karnataka CM had named the infamous Reddy brothers in his best ministers’ list.

Honest crusaders have always suffered a similar fate in our system. Take the instance of Mumbai’s ‘Demolition Man’ GR Khairnar. In the 1980s, when Mumbai was ruled by a coalition of the mafia, builders, corrupt politicians and officials, Khairnar, who was then the deputy municipal commissioner, fearlessly took on the evil clique. Immediately he was put on their hit list and the campaign against him began. Cases were filed against him, accusations were made, he faced suspensions and his sanity was questioned, too. Finally they broke him and forced him out.

Chandrashekhar, another honest and efficient officer, faced a similar campaign when he cleaned up Thane. He suffered innumerable transfers and similar harassment. Even in the police force, ‘pliable’ officers get appointed to ‘lucrative’ and ‘comfortable’ postings. In places like Mumbai, the police commissionair is not someone who is most able or eligible, but someone who is the CM’s man or the home minister’s man. What that means is very obvious to understand. The politicians want someone who will do their dirty work for them, not someone who will stand up to them and tell them to get lost when they make their illegal demands.

Corrupt bureaucracy is another curse on our democracy. The curse is not as much the fact that they are corrupt, but in how expertly they subvert and sabotage honest officials. As soon as the bureaucracy perceives someone to be a threat to their way of life, they use all the rules and laws in the book to make life miserable for the official and target members of his team. That’s the way they defeated the Lok Ayukta in Karnataka. When the nexus, threatened by his crusade, saw that they could not deter him with threats nor buy him off, they went to work against his officers, and took the route of publicly humiliating him.

Officials he had caught red-handed and suspended were strangely absolved by the government and reinstated — an obvious public slap on the Lok Ayukta’s face. The government knew that the Lok Ayukta would finally give up when he saw his team suffer the consequences of his crusade. Justice Hegde, Khairnar and Chandrashekhar are just a few names, in the history of independent India. There were many others who took on the corrupt, but some were murdered by the same criminals they courageously took on.

The reason I write this is not to acquaint readers with the sordid details of how the Karnataka Lok Ayukta was frustrated and forced out. What I am getting at is the public apathy. We, as a people, have abdicated our responsibility towards our nation. We have taken our democratic system for granted. We want all our rights and more, but don’t want to perform any of our responsibilities.

What frustrates and demoralises the crusaders is not as much their adversaries from within the system, it is the lack of support from the people, for whose benefit they are fighting in the first place. When it comes to being proactive citizens safeguarding our democracy, we emulate Kumbhakrana and his deep sleep or Nero playing the fiddle while Rome burnt. We express our shock, we participate in animated discussions about the rotten system and we sing paeans to the fallen crusader, but do we act when we are frustrated and hounded out by the corrupt forces? No. We have become like Bapu’s three monkeys who, ‘Hear no evil. See no evil. Speak no evil.’ What we have failed to understand is that the three monkeys are symbols, which remind us not to ‘Shut our ears to evil, become blind to evil acts and mutely allow evil to take place’. The three monkeys remind us that when we shut our eyes, ears and mouth, we become one with the forces of evil.