Foul Play speaks of the fish who have grown big in the sea of corruption. Reading the book takes you back in time, to the hot-house origins which in time have incubated such a frankenstein monster that seems to have almost everybody in its grasp. For this very reason, the book also fosters a sense of disassociation: Corruption is what other people do, the 'they' people, somewhere on the top, manipulating the system and growing rich beyond the wildest expectation.
It is a false view. I have always believed that it is a favourite alibi of the Indian middle class to believe that corruption is the preserve of the rich and the influential. The dramatic cases of corruption at the highest levels enables the middle class to believe that its own culpability is minor, if forgivable, a consequence of the sins other people commit. The truth is that in the context of corruption the middle class—the segment that will provide the largest readership to this book—is three things rolled into one: victim, critic and colluder. The book admits that it does not cover this aspect. It says right in the beginning that "the greatest lacunas (in the book) is that life in the ordinary, the prosaic is not covered. We insisted on looking at the rot at the top".
Foul Play begins by examining the early, classic reports on corruption—the Kripalani Report on the railways, the Gorwala and Appleby reports on administration. It then focuses on the evolution of corruption: from 'honest party bosses' never using tainted money for personal gain to blatant instances of personal aggrandizement. There is a particularly horrific account of the goings-on during the emergency period. The book contains insightful pieces on corruption and the growth of underworld dons like Dawood Ibrahim. It also—probably for the first time—examines in some detail, corruption in the corporate sector through the career of public sector legend V. Krishnamurthi and the recent travails of the mammoth ITC conglomerate.
The book does not claim to be a comprehensive chronicle of corruption in the last 50 years. It admits that it does not cover (perhaps wisely) the intricacies of the Bofors episode, nor the allegations in the fodder scam. However, it succeeds in giving a fairly comprehensive picture of the disease. The book succeeds in profiling the rasa of corruption, and almost uncannily evokes the image of the successfully corrupt: unctuous, expansive, insecure and aggressive. The research is comprehensive. The style is both analytical and anecdotal. The prose, particularly that of Shiv Visvanathan, is scintillating. The book makes compulsory reading because it stresses the importance of recall. The 'folklore' of corruption in India makes every story about corruption a 24-hour wonder. The book is important because we need to be jolted from this insulating amnesia.
And yet the book offers no solutions. It admits that this is not its intention. Perhaps the pervasiveness of corruption described by it, and the flavour it provides of its scale and operation may facilitate the first step towards the much more difficult task of finding a solution.
