Talking of whistleblowing in ‘age of fraud’, & much more

Keki Daruwalla

IT is too early to predict what this year, our cough-racked, lung-chewing 2020 will get known as. It could even be known as “The Year of the Drone” (the MQ 9 Reaper which knocked out Soleimani?), even as President Trump tries to mimic our BJP’s Balakot triumphs at the hustings. Here some prankster could change the scene to our universities and dub 2020 as “The Year of Disrobed Police and Masked Goons”. I would have put it more respectfully as “The Year of the Somnolent Police and Active Nationalists”. No one can deny that the goons were nationalists. We can wait for some Nostradamus to tell us what the year will be called. Common sense dictates that the drone-hit on January 4 at the Baghdad airport could vie for the honours. It may incidentally raise Trump’s chances in the next elections. And what a fine speech Trump delivered, as he talked about billions given away to Iran by his predecessor, and how Iran used it to attack Americans. Capital stuff. Reminds me of fiery speeches by another orator nearer home. Forty years after Raza Shah Pahlavi, the US has not been able to reconcile to a changed Iran.

Life being what it is, success and destiny go with the powerful. Victims are left wringing their hands, going to court for compensation. They face the mafia, syndicates — authority in one word. It could be the army brass in a country like Pakistan, or the state itself. Whistleblowing involves someone who has the guts and competence to stand up against an organisation he or she belongs to. Whistleblowers observe misuse of authority, corruption and how it is leading to injustice, and speak. In America, if an attorney stands up and gives evidence against a corrupt judge, he or she is known as a whistleblower. Their popularity is short-lived. Other lawyers wouldn’t like to be seen too often with them. In the field of foreign intelligence, a person who exposes the organisation could be endangering lives of sources and agents.

India’s protection programme for whistleblowers has been poor and many have been murdered. Whistleblowers side with victims and become victims themselves. The two well-known ones, of course, are Julian Assange and Edward Snowden. While working for a defence contractor, Snowden managed to smuggle top secret files from government and eventually handed these over to reporters of Washington Post and Guardian. The stash is estimated at 1.7 million classified documents. He studied each document and only handed these over if he thought it was for public good. Then he flew out to Hong Kong and later to Russia, where his asylum visa expires this year, 2020. Books have been written on him like Crisis of Conscience: Whistleblowing in an Age of Fraud. On this yardstick, there is no possibility of whistleblowing in India. Under the present regime, there is no fraud.

The greed of agencies and the American state was enormous. Jill Lepore, a Professor of History at Harvard, shows that the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1966 reported that the federal government held “in separate agencies, computer files containing more than three billion records on individuals, including 27.2 billion names, 2.3 billion addresses, 264 million criminal histories, 280 million mental health records, 916 million profiles on alcoholism…”

Were they mad to collect all this junk? You need another government to go through these records and put the information to good use. We need to be on our guard. In this digital age, someone in power may want to collect details of every citizen who physically (not metaphorically) scratches his backside. To please his master, an officer may open a bureau to collect and classify such vital information!

Whistleblowers have to work hard, disguise their intentions. It is dangerous business. It needs dedication. Snowden took disability leave in 2012, moved to Hawaii to work in a defence facility, took lower-paying jobs to get at more classified stuff. In his own words, he wanted to “bring to light a single, all-encompassing fact: that my government had developed and deployed a global system of mass surveillance without the knowledge or consent of its citizenry”. In his own words, he worked against “the federation of secret law, unequal pardon and irresistible executive powers that rule the world that I love”.

He is in Russia, not taking up the offers of asylum from four South American countries. He probably got suspicious when the plane of Bolivian President Evo Morales was searched at Vienna airport under US pressure. The CIA may have wanted to get hold of Snowden if he was in the aircraft.

We have had our own whistleblower, Dinesh Thakur, a US-educated engineer who blew the lid off Ranbaxy, exposing fraud by the famous pharmaceutical company accused of faking test results of medical drugs.

Now, of course, we must go from the sublime to the ridiculous. A Superintendent of Police exposes five others for involvement in a racket after a sex video involving him goes viral, says the press. Bravo Uttar Pradesh. The five are transferred, the SP is suspended for leaking this document.