Why is a Pakistan passport a source of trouble at a foreign airport? Why a Pakistan has to show so many document to cash a hundred dollar cheque at Hong Kong, Bangkok or Singapore airport? It is not that Pakistanis are taken as first class swindlers but because they are known to get forged documents through corrupt functionaries and fraudulent organizations.
Economically advanced countries also have corrupt practices but it is not rampant to start with. And it does not hurt the common men so much. When it is discovered, governments fall, heads roll and political fortunes are reduced to ashes. But in Pakistan, no real efforts have been made to curb the practice which has hurt the society so badly and has brought a bad name to the nation.
While we all tend to give ever simplest reasons for the prevalence of corruption: the lust for money, power, achievement of illegal objectives, mutilation of justice -- the real problem is a drastic deterioration in our value system. Honesty and dishonesty are both contiguous but dishonesty is more so. If something can be secured more easily through illegal means why follow the more difficult path? In this regard, our administrative practices are to be blamed equally. The procedures even for simple transactions are so cumbersome that one is tempted to use influence or acquire the services of somebody who has specialized himself in by passing every law, national and international.
Perhaps the deadliest of maladies encouraging the tendency to obtain money and goods is the explosion in our needs, most of which are non-essential if not un-necessary. Everybody wants to have what his neighbours or acquaintances have managed to acquire. Ideas have been fuelled further by international magazines, TV programmes, the dish antenna and travels abroad: This race has to be won irrespective of the sources. They do not have to be legal. honest or morally correct. The only objective is to beat your neighbour so that your family feels on top of the world.
A class has been born for which snobbery is the hallmark of life. It shows it in its homes, offices, and social functions. In this process very strange things have happened. For example, a very comfortable four wheel drive vehicle has become a status symbol and every person in the status race is prepared to sell his soul to own one.
This is not being cynical on criticizing the private lives of the people. The point is that their contribution towards the welfare of the masses is practically nil, or is confined to a few acts of benevolence which benefit their business, or save them the income tax. It is time they come out of their shells and realise that with education and awareness, the common men will act on what so far he has only seen and felt.
In no country of the world are the leaders and the led judged by the same code. The most lowly may stand by the roadside and urinate away to his heart’s content, but the Queen of England may not blow her nose in public. The basic premise of any law is that a person is innocent unless proven guilty, but the code to which the top leadership is subject to is the exact opposite of this. They are guilty unless proven innocent.
An immediate solution to our most serious problems is one that squarely identifies corruption as public enemy number one and seeks to scotch it before redemption goes beyond the haze of our dreams. Even the democratic societies are confronted with this phenomenon (i.e. corruption) the world over.
One example of unbridled democratic freedom is the working of the Pakistan’s trade unions who try to enforce their rules upon their members. In doing so they often come in conflict with the law of the land as even though these rules may be beneficial to the labour or even the trade unions but their exercise often interferes with the right on individual liberty. This leads to corruption.
In America the rising election expenses have created a strange situation. The Jewish business magnates have turned into kingmakers because of their money, and the entire American nation is being held hostage to their ability to provide enormous amount of money for the election of key contenders. The corruption of the system has been widely exposed in the Watergate scandal case.The position in the East is worse because the democratic system has not been institutionalized and so that level of corruption is much higher while the level-of discipline much lower. India, the self proclaimed largest democracy, had been shaken by a corruption scandal in which the Indian Prime Minister, Norseman Rao, was reported to had taken ten million rupees from Harsaht Mehta, a stock broker, as election expenses. The previous Prime Minister namely Rajeev Gandhi was also involved in the Bofors arms scandal and the Nehru family had to face serious criticism on Marti Motors business, Japan, the most prosperous Asian country .