The term “banality of evil” was coined originally by Hannah Arendt, a famous political scientist who went to Jerusalem to cover the trial of Adolf Eichmann. Eichmann initially took the stand wearing a deadpan expression, which made most people imagine how hopelessly dark and bureaucratic was the core of the Nazi mass-murder machine. That led most people to believe that there was a legal dysfunction behind the Holocaust. Hannah Arendt also fell for it, which made the reaction to her theory more significant than her own hypothesis.
The article, which was published in the New Yorker titled Eichmann in Jerusalem: A report on the banality of evil, was the subject of a seminar held in Presidency College, Calcutta, during my years there. Its memory suddenly returned this week. I admit to be emotionally swamped by the great hospital fire in my home city which took 92 lives. It struck me
subsequently that unless we rise above the language of televised talk shows, the discourse on corruption will only benefit the corrupt and the corrupter — never the affected party. Consider:
- The fire at the Advanced Medical Research Institute (AMRI) last Friday was entirely man-made and avoidable, given the obvious imprint of corruption on it. But politicians, journalists and various experts are already engaged in covering up the real cause of the fire by focusing on the fluff.
- Before the week was out, more than 160 penurious villagers perished consuming hooch which shouldn’t have been brewed. The blame is going to the hospital system of Bengal whose flops led to the galloping of the death toll. The real culprit, a rural elite which thrives on hooch, making it Bengal’s biggest cottage industry, walks away laughing. In May 2009 a similar tragedy in the same state killed more than 40. An “inquiry” was held, with no palpable result.
- In New Delhi, the country’s Home Minister — or cronies of the grandee — defended his failure to strike a balance between his lawyer and minister halves when he cleared the withdrawal of a forgery case pending against an ex-client. The intellectual examination was most shallow: it’s as if a “little corruption” can easily to be tolerated.
The sea of corruption with all its littorals flowed through the three stories. AMRI had its basis in crony capitalism. Post-1991 Indian history could someday be interpreted as the story of crony communism because it led to unprecedented expansion of the country’s economy, generating in the process a clutch of largely illusory benefits which at any rate were offset by the huge flipside which Mr Montek Singh Ahluwalia tries so valiantly to deny. But my point is that before the benefits of cronyism go up in smoke, quite a lot of people make money out of it. I know of doctors in Kolkata whose personal riches have gone up 500 fold thanks to AMRI and its clones. Many hospital entrepreneurs flourished because the State hospital system was deliberately emasculated, nay strangulated.
Arendt’s article got noticed not because of what she wrote, but because of what she missed out. She attended the Eichmann trial in its early days and what made a deep impression on her was the mechanical genius of Eichmann in mobilising, in war time at that, awesome logistics to murder upwards of 6 million innocent people. Her hypothesis, however powerful, failed to take note of what Eichmann admitted to later during the trial when she was no longer around. It fell upon latter day political scientists to point this out — and indirectly enrich the “banality of evil” theory.
Eichmann’s defense, that ordinary Germans like himself simply “followed orders” rings familiar with ordinary Bengalis — and by extension Indians’ — “what can we do?” excuse about corruption. Actually, not doing anything is by itself “doing something”. Eichmann was the quintessential German middle class go-getter who participated whole-heartedly in the Holocaust, even improved upon his superiors’ tactical directions. The majority of Germans drew pecuniary benefits from Hitler’s evil empire even though only a few hundred thousand actually witnessed it.
I don’t say that Indian corruption and Nazi Holocaust are parallels. The similarity is with the resemblance of today’s Indians’ attitude to corruption with the ordinary Germans' secretive collusion with the Holocaust. Corruption in India, which has assumed the same scale with the politico-socio-economic fabric of life as the Holocaust did with murdering people on an industrial scale, has attracted masses of Indians who, though not necessarily corrupt themselves, participate, indeed identify with its evil ideology, because it helps them lead “normal lives.” Few Indians are willing to fight corruption by denying themselves the “good things of life.” In Nazi Germany, only a few thousand non-Jewish “Aryans” risked doom by defying Nazism. The Protestant preacher Martin Niemoller famously remarked:
First they came for the communists, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me.
Many Germans perished opposing Hitler. But few post-1991 Indians preferred career damage to refusing to compromise with corruption. In 1997, the Calcutta office of the CAG sent an inspection notice to the West Bengal government questioning the legality of transferring Niramoy Polyclinic at a ridiculously low annual lease rent to the Tody empire. But not a single newspaper wrote about it. Reason: newspaper owners all over India benefited from cronyism. But after the horrendous fire and 92 deaths, the same newspapers are bringing out the truth.
Arendt’s writing formed the inspiration for some great books which subsequently presented firm psychological and historical evidence that the Germans actively, rather than passively, participated in the Holocaust. Danile Jonah Goldhagen’s 1996 book, Hitler’s willing executioners shattered the last defense of naysayers when he convincingly argued that Nazism appealed to great numbers of Germans because it jelled well with “eliminationist anti-Semitism” which was unique to the German identity.
Goldhagen was not banned in Germany even though his theory was short on empirical evidence. He was, in fact, treated as a national hero and given many prestigious national awards. The German people have travelled so far since 1945 that today they are willing to accept any stirring discussion which would steel their national resolve to “never again”.
Corruption has had a wonderful career in India. Why? Just as the Holocaust touched a chord in the 1930s Germans’ suppressed destructiveness, so too has corruption exploited the Indian people’s innate lusting for materialism which our spiritual ethos with all its eulogies to Maya failed to suppress.
Today Germany is one of the least corrupt nations in the world. Racism still exists, but there is no hypocrisy in the discourse on it. Corruption and hypocrisy are conjoined twins who cannot be separated by any form of surgery. No society can get a “little corrupt” because forked vocabulary on racism implies the institutionalisation of hypocrisy: and history repeats itself. Also, the Germans have realised that the best weapon against racism is education. Persecution through draconian laws only leads to martyrdom for neo-Nazis.
Today Germany has bounced back as the intellectual nerve centre of Europe. The Germans are making the most advanced scientific products, are exporting more than the Chinese — not cheap stuff but products of solid engineering; teaching their neighbours the benefits of transparent economics — without compromising on their democracy.
On the other hand, Indians, even though eminently successful in identifying corruption as the great shark that consumes everything, have failed to even begin on identifying the origins of their corruption. It’s as if the diagnosis has been completed, the problem pinned out to a narrow channel of malignant cells, but the doctors have gone on extended holiday. The problem with India’s intellectuals is that they prefer to spend their evenings participating in banal TV debates rather than contemplating this age of ferment.
(The writer is Senior Editor, The Pioneer)
