THE ONLY SOLUTION TO CORRUPTION A Spiritual Solution

E VERY Indian complains about corruption, but no one tries to get to the root cause of this phenomenon. The Gandhian movement in the first half of the twentieth century was, in a sense, an anticorruption movement. In the mid-1970s, Jayprakash Narayan’s ‘total revolution’ was a strong movement against corruption. Then followed V.P. Singh’s movement in the late 1980s and the fourth in this sequence was Anna Hazare’s movement in August 2011. The criterion to judge the success of these movements is not the crowds they draw, but the result. It is an undeniable fact that in terms of results, all the three previous movements completely failed to achieve their declared goal. It is yet to be seen if the fourth will achieve what it has set out to achieve. All these anti-corruption movements made their demands from the system. But it is not the system that is responsible for corruption; it is the human mind. At the 25th session of the UNESCO General Conference, the Seville Statement on Violence was adopted. The Statement says, among other things, that “wars begin in the minds of men”. So it is in the case of corruption; corruption also begins in the mind. Any movement that intends to achieve its goal must target individual minds, rather than the system. To eradicate the corruption we see today, we need to re-engineer individual minds. This requires a spiritual campaign. We need to replace the money-oriented mind with a values-oriented mind. We need to make people believe that money is a need, and not a goal. People’s concern of self needs to be replaced with concern for the nation. THE ONLY SOLUTION TO CORRUPTION It is not the system that is responsible for corruption; it is the human mind.