For about a month now, big, white billboards that claim “35 officials arrested, 152 suspended” have popped up all around New Delhi as a testament to the beginning of the “battle against corruption” that is being waged by the Delhi government. There have been a few scattered newspaper reports that mentioned a head constable from Sonia Vihar police station in north-east Delhi and some Delhi Jal Board (DJB) engineers among those who were arrested. But apart from that, there has been little information on why or when these arrests and suspensions were carried out and what further action will be taken.
After attempting to contact several people from the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) through the numbers that were listed on the party’s website, I finally reached Gopal Mohan, advisor to the chief minister and a part of the team that is involved in managing the anti-corruption helpline, 1031. On 2 June 2015, I met Mohan—who was immersed in listening to a sting recording on a smartphone with his colleagues—at his office in the Delhi Secretariat. Mohan told me that the numbers adorning the billboards that were strewn across Delhi were indicative of the action that had been taken by the AAP during its current tenure in power. He said that the billboards had been put up on 15 May—a little before the party completed 100 days in power. The cases that were being advertised had come through the corruption helpline, which, according to Mohan, receives around 4000 calls a day. Mohan estimated that the Delhi government had identified approximately 1000 genuine cases from all of these calls.
The intricate procedure to evaluate these calls for their authenticity was not very clear. However, Mohan did explain the basic structure of the process to to me. Once a complaint is verified, the Anti-Corruption Branch (ACB) of the Delhi government collects and analyses the evidence, before deciding upon the right course of action—be it sending reports to the relevant departments for suspensions, or by conducting raids and filing First Information Reports (FIRs) for arrests. He said that this process usually took anywhere between 24 to 72 hours.
According to Mohan, the guilty officials included schoolteachers, government engineers, and officials from the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) and the police force. The bribes that these officials had demanded, he claimed, ranged from Rs 500 to Rs 5 lakhs. This was the extent of the information that Mohan was willing to disclose. My request for context on the individual cases was met with resilient silence as he said that he would not be able to provide me with any additional details given that the cases were still pending in courts.
I ventured to ask Mohan why the government had begun brandishing the statistics around these cases when the guilt of the concerned officers had not yet been proven. My query was brushed aside as a trivial matter, and Mohan reminded me that the main objective of this exercise was to eliminate the roots of systemic corruption. “Currently, we are trying to find the troublesome areas,” Mohan told me. “In the end, instead of simply going after individual offenders, we want to bring in a system that won’t leave any scope for corruption.”
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