Tell us the ways that dishonesty and greed undermine the proper workings of organizations, from Congress to corporations, from regulations to relationships. Is corruption an inevitable human tendency or a curable condition?
In The Fray Magazine | Call for Submissions | June 2012: Corruption
Corruption is an inevitable part of political life, in countries rich and poor. In India, a Transparency International study finds that 55 percent of citizens have had firsthand experience with bribing government officials. In Buenos Aires, Argentina, storeowners pay police officers protection money to “watch over” their shops. And in the United States, corruption has become a high, if hidden, art, with politicians and lobbyists conspiring to rewrite the rules to grant special interest groups an unfair advantage in the marketplace.
But in recent years, advancing technology and increased public awareness have changed the ways that corruption is tackled, exposed, and ultimately punished. In India, almost a quarter of the country’s members of parliament were recently facing criminal corruption charges, and a strong case can be made that the evolving digital news environment is responsible for their undoing. Websites like Wikileaks have made it easier for whistleblowers to bring misdeeds to light — while also weakening the secrecy that governments argue is necessary for their diplomacy and strategizing.
This month, In The Fray wants your stories of corruption — political and otherwise. Tell us the ways that dishonesty and greed undermine the proper workings of organizations, from Congress to corporations, from regulations to relationships. Is corruption an inevitable human tendency or a curable condition? As usual, we are open to stories that deal with the topic broadly construed, and in a variety of approaches: profiles, interviews, reportage, personal essays, op-eds, travel writing, photo essays, artwork, videos, multimedia projects, and review essays of books, film, music, and art.
If interested, please email submissions@inthefray.org with a well-developed, one-paragraph pitch for your proposed piece as soon as possible — along with three links to your previous work — NO LATER THAN JULY 1, 2012. All contributors are urged to review our submissions guidelines at http://inthefray.org/submit.
We are also looking for artists, photographers, and writers, who can take care of specific assignments, including interviews, book and film reviews, and accompanying photos and artwork. If interested, please follow the instructions at the bottom of http://inthefray.org/submit to join our contributors’ mailing list.
Conservative inflexibility and liberal apathy have endangered the dream of a democratic, secure Jewish state, a prominent American Zionist argues in a new book. But for all his ideas to salvage the two-state solution, Peter Beinart seems really to be documenting its demise.
The Crisis of Zionism By Peter Beinart
Times Books. 304 pages.
What do Palestinian activists and a Jewish Zionist in Manhattan have in common? The opposition of Israeli hard-line conservatives, as it turns out. Peter Beinart, a former editor of The New Republic who now teaches at the City University of New York, argues that the future of Israel is in grave danger — not from the enemies that have long surrounded it, but from its growing extremism internally and the growing apathy of liberal American Jews toward Israel.
In his new book, The Crisis of Zionism, Beinart makes the case that the dream of a democratic Israel is dying, undermined by West Bank settlements and the marginalization of Palestinians. Within the United States, Israel’s longtime ally, Zionist organizations reflexively support Israel’s policies, while liberal Jews have a fading interest in Israeli issues. In both countries, there has been no significant opposition from liberal Zionists to the bellicose policies that endanger Israel’s founding principles of democracy.
Beinart fears the end of the two-state solution that would grant Palestinians and Jews their own nations, believing that the two groups could not live together harmoniously in one state after decades of acrimony. Breaking with many of his fellow Zionists, however, he identifies Jewish settlements in the proposed Palestinian nation as the greatest threat to this goal. “There are, to be sure, many Palestinians who don’t want two states and seek Israel’s destruction,” he writes. “But the best way to ensure their triumph is to keep eating away at the land on which a Palestinian state may be born.”
Home to one-third of the world’s poor, India attracts hundreds of Christian humanitarian groups seeking to do God’s work in its slums and hinterlands. But while these groups make up in vital ways for the failings of government and markets, their work comes with a consequence: conversion.
On a sun-kissed Saturday morning in March, Rahul Kumar whips through a squalid Delhi neighborhood, his ashen buttoned-down shirt tucked into his dress pants and thick black hair gelled back from his forehead. He is headed to the Sanskar Centre, a bare, one-room school run by a Christian nonprofit in the city’s Shahbad Dairy slum. Every day, Rahul walks to the schoolhouse for his lessons, the best education to be had for many of the district’s poor migrant families.
Just twelve years old, Rahul is already a leader among the neighborhood children, who flock to his side as he walks, eager to embrace him. Though short for his age, he has an outsized ambition: one day, he says confidently, he will dance in Bollywood’s biggest productions. But first, Rahul says through a translator, “I need to get a job to help my family. I need to study hard.”
Rahul’s family moved to Delhi from northern India several years ago, lured by the prospect of a better life. But the situation for Shahbad Dairy’s 100,000 residents is overwhelmingly grim, their opportunities circumscribed by severe, endemic poverty. While some parts of the district enjoy government support—a public school, a maintained latrine, a health care center—most of the slum’s inhabitants live in jhuggis, or slum dwellings, without running water or proper sanitation. A thick expanse of garbage and sewage surrounds the slum and is patrolled by scavenging children and feral pigs alike.
“[Shahbad Dairy] has the dynamics seen in every ghetto or slum,” says Alfred Gnanaolivu, special projects director for Cooperative Outreach of India (COI), the Christian group that runs Rahul’s school. “You have turf warfare. You have the influence of drugs and alcohol … Unfortunately, the main victims are the children.”
A nongovernmental organization, COI works extensively in Shahbad Dairy’s slum blocks, offering clean water, food, and education to local families. Children account for 50 percent of the district’s population, Gnanaolivu notes. That’s where COI—along with the hundreds of other faith-based NGOs operating in India—can have an impact: educating the children of impoverished families that are neglected by the Indian government.
But like many NGOs working in India, COI has a slant. It provides the 500 children enrolled in its schoolhouse an education—but with evangelical undertones. Young boys and girls recite Christian hymns during class, not conscious that they are being indoctrinated. Their faith-driven education is reinforced by COI’s pastoral care workers, or religious counselors, who help the slum’s families with their economic and personal problems using a Christian form of therapy. COI says this “results in transformation of the communities.”
Rahul Kumar, twelve, outside his home in the Shahbad Dairy slum in Delhi, India.
While Shahbad Dairy’s families—most of which are Hindu and from India’s lower or scheduled castes—are aware of the Christian sculpting, they believe that COI is giving their children a better chance at life. And as their relationship with their Christian benefactors deepens, some families are even converting.
“Very often, children are lured in the name of providing [a] good education,” says Chandan Mitra, a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) representative in India’s upper house of Parliament. “They don’t understand very often why they have become Christians until they are older.” Religious conversion is banned in many Indian states, but the laws are “violated frequently,” Mitra adds. (In Delhi, conversion is legal.)
Of course, proselytizing Indians is not a new phenomenon. Christianity has existed in India for centuries, and Protestant missionaries have been working in Delhi since the early eighteenth century. Today, Christianity is India’s third-largest religion, with approximately twenty-four million followers.
What is different today is the growth of a politically independent, economically powerful India, a rising nation of a billion-plus people that has become more comfortable asserting its culture. In India (and Indian America) today, there is a willingness now to question the outside influences that for many years were tolerated as the price of doing business. Meanwhile, India has become home to roughly a third of the world’s poor, according to World Bank data. As a result, the country is a magnet for humanitarian aid organizations, many of them Christian.
The conversion of destitute Indian families to Christianity enrages many Indians, and on blogs wild accusations fly that Christian NGOs are committing “culture murder” in India. Mitra—whose Hindu nationalist party is one of India’s two major political forces—takes a more evenhanded stance. Christian NGOs may be indoctrinating children with Christianity, he says, but they are also educating and feeding an entire community that would otherwise remain overlooked.
For its part, COI believes that its religious message helps break down some of the barriers that keep Shahbad Dairy’s residents in poverty. “The caste system has dehumanized human beings,” says Ramesh Landge, COI’s executive director. “We need to help these children, give them a reason to live, and provide them with a childhood.” Among “the few hundred families that have adopted our changes, our teachings,” Landge adds, “we’ve seen success.” He notes that before COI began working in the slum, none of the children had birth certificates, making it nearly impossible for them to enroll in government schools.
Donald Miller, a professor of religion and sociology at the University of Southern California, points out that the evangelical Christian organizations working in India today tend not to fit the colonial-era stereotypes: brazen missionaries coming over to save souls by any means necessary. “Conversion by these groups is more often a side effect as opposed to a direct, manipulative attempt to indoctrinate people,” says Miller, who studies the social ethics of religion. It’s not that they don’t want to see conversions take place. But today’s faith-based humanitarian work, particularly by evangelical organizations, “has much more language about partnership and shared goals,” he says.
Before it was a slum, Shahbad Dairy was cattle country, settled by a Hindu Haryana community of dairy farmers. In 1987, the Indian government ceded a small parcel of land to the local inhabitants to build slum dwellings. Today, most of the shanties in Shahbad Dairy are illegal. Their occupants are immigrants from across India, who left their villages to find work in the sprawling city of Delhi, India’s second largest.
Rahul’s family is originally from Uttar Pradesh, a state about 500 miles to the north. His mother, Reena Kumar, supports the family by extracting the iron from automobile tires to sell as scrap metal. Asked why she moved to the slum, far from her ancestral homeland, Kumar’s response is simple: “To survive.”
The Kumar home in Shahbad Dairy amounts to four scantily constructed shacks, which house Rahul, his mother, and five siblings. A lone television is mounted in the master bedroom, powered by stolen electricity patched in from a nearby power line.
Back from school, Rahul navigates the Indian airways to his favorite Bollywood channel. His brothers, sisters, and friends pack the tiny room, waiting to watch him perform the dance steps.
Gnanaolivu watches the children with a smile. The work that his Christian group is doing, he says, will give children like Rahul much-needed opportunities, so that one day they can achieve their dreams—in Bollywood and beyond. “If they can be given that direction and sustained love … then we can save them.” In the end, it still comes down to saving souls.
Reading the recent remembrances of legendary broadcaster Mike Wallace, I was struck by a quote from his son, Fox News anchor Chris Wallace. Shortly before his father’s death, Chris Wallace talked about his father’s failing condition.
He’s in a facility in Connecticut. Physically, he’s okay. Mentally, he’s not. He still recognizes me and knows who I am, but he’s uneven. The interesting thing is, he never mentions 60 Minutes. It’s as if it didn’t exist. It’s as if that part of his memory is completely gone. The only thing he really talks about is family — me, my kids, my grandkids, his great-grandchildren. There’s a lesson there. This is a man who had a fabulous career and for whom work always came first. Now he can’t even remember it.
The stories we’re featuring on the site now touch upon the impact that fathers have — even in their absence. In Learned at My Father’s Feet, Kae Dickson remembers her experience caring for her “Daddy” at the end of his life, as dementia robbed him of his memories and independence. In A Circle, Broken, Amy O’Loughlin reviews a family memoir by CNN journalist Mark Whitaker, who describes his complicated relationship with his absentee father, an African American scholar who blazed trails only to see his career burn out amid his struggles with alcoholism.
For Mike Wallace, work came before family. After his first divorce, Wallace left his sons behind in Chicago to pursue a broadcast career on the East Coast. He had a famously cold relationship with his son Chris early on, though they reconciled and became close near the end of his life. “Part of it is, he was chasing fame and making it big and proving himself, and that was the motivating force,” Chris Wallace said. “Because I can see where it has taken him, I hope I’ve learned from his mistakes. I spend more time with my family and the relationships with my children.”
Many people would say that the tradeoff was worthwhile in Wallace’s case: his hard-nosed journalism helped usher in a golden age for broadcast journalism. But it’s telling that Wallace himself seemed not to care much for his success at the end of his life. And for the rest of us mortals, who lack Wallace’s once-in-a-generation talents, perhaps there’s all the more reason to question whether the ways that we prioritize career over family and friends are really, in the long run, worthwhile. That’s especially true for those of us who are parents, as the stories in the magazine remind me.
It’s hard to think of another role with as much impact as being a mother or father. For almost every other position, we are replaceable in the long term. Someone else will do our job, for better or worse, if we’re not there to do it. Someone else will eventually start our company or make our invention or sketch out our idea. Maybe it won’t happen for a long time; maybe it would have happened earlier, if we weren’t around to slow things down. But eventually, society makes progress, and the niches of innovation — in business or technology, art or politics — are filled.
It’s harder to say that about the gaps in our private lives. Steve Jobs by all accounts had loving adoptive parents, but even that was not enough, some say, to fill a void he felt because he was abandoned as a child. Civilization marches onward toward a predictable and rational future, but the trajectories of individual lives vary wildly, thanks to the influence, or absence, of family and friends.
I say this as a far-from-perfect parent, husband, son, and friend myself: how easy it is to forget the impact we have on those close to us, with all the incentives to see our worth in the job we have and the house we live in. Yet in our private lives we have more power than we may realize. Paradoxically, the real movers and shakers of the world, as Tolstoy once said, are perhaps the most constrained in what they can do, pushed and pulled by the forces of implacable history.
May is a time for college commencement speeches, and uplifting talk of making a difference and achieving success. Certainly our work defines us in many ways, and can be a vital source of meaning. Still, it’s worth considering whether the greatest difference we will ever make is one closer to home.
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