Forty days before anti-Mubarak slogans rented the air at Cairo’s Tahrir Square on January 25, India’s Supreme Court passed a stricture against a cabinet minister. The court slammed Vilasrao Deshmukh for abusing his power as Maharashtra chief minister by shielding a Congress MLA, doubling as dubious money lender and accused of squeezing debt-ridden Vidarbha farmers dry, against criminal action.

Six days before the Cairo uprising the Indian government rewarded Deshmukh’s loyalty for the Congress by shifting him from the heavy industries ministry to the rural development ministry, seen as an upgrade because the ministry is close to the hearts of both Sonia Gandhi and Rahul. During his tenure as chief minister (2004 -08) Deshmukh logged a dubious distinction of lording over the state when the maximum number of farmers in Vidarbha region committed suicide.

Autocratic regimes of Hosni Mubarak and his erstwhile Tunisian counterpart Zine El Abidine were accused of squandering the nation’s wealth for personal gains and holding public welfare to ransom. The public in both countries were fed up with escalating inflation and spiraling corruption. A vegetable vendor suicide by self-immolation was the trigger for uprising against Abdeen in Tunisia, it was the social networking sites like the Facebook that mobilised people against Mubarak on the streets of Egypt. The Jasmine revolution provoked immediate results back in Tunisia as Abidine fled the country even as Tahrir Square holds hope for a spectacular change in that land of the pharaohs and wondrous pyramids.

In an era where social networking sites are becoming platforms for cataclysmic change brought in not by the incumbent administrative regimes but by the might and ingenuity of a people wronged by the system, it is hard to imagine that in India a near lull (or is it the proverbial lull before the storm) has enveloped those upon whom the idea of a colour revolution is most desired. Not even the students who mobilised against corruption in 1974 against the then Congress regime before allowing themselves to be led by Jayaprakash Narayan to participate in his call for Total Revolution.

Consider this: The per capita gross domestic product in Egypt is $6,200 compared to $3,400 in India. Egypt’s per capita income is naturally higher at $130. According to the latest CIA Fact Book data, Egypt’s unemployment rate is 9.7 percent whereas India’s stands at 10.8 percent despite those clutch of Nehru-Gandhi development schemes and the much-touted NREGA. No wonder then that 25 percent of Indians are still poor – now considered a low-grade euphemism for economically correct ‘those living below poverty line’ - (That line again is an imaginary median of economic yo-yo fudging of  unimaginable proportion) compared to 20 percent poor in Egypt.

The country’s main opposition party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, has launched a crusade against the corrupt UPA regime when its own house is leaking heavily through chinks of corruption. Karnatata chief minister B S Yeddyurappa is the BJP’s mascot in the southern states. Everyone watched the graphic changeover of Yeddyurappa from chief minister of Karnataka to a minister–in-chief of land and mine mafias. If A Raja, former telecom minister in UPA, has been accused of underpricing 2G airwaves sold to telecom operators and causing a loss to the exchequer to the tune of Rs 1.75 lakh crore, the Reddy brothers of Karnataka have duped the exchequer of more than Rs 60,000 crores.

Yeddyurappa himself has a soft corner for nepotism. He bent every rule in the book to get over Rs 500 crore worth of land allotted to his two sons the eldest of whom, Raghvendra, is a member of parliament.  The opposition estimates his personal worth at more than Rs 1,000 crores.  For an elected representative and a chief minister, Yedyurappa’s ill-gotten gains and his ability to straddle a corrupt regime puts to shame the Mubarak family’s loot. Since Yeddyurappa belongs to a party ‘with a difference,’ president Nitin Gadkari terms his misdemeanours as purely ‘legal’ though ‘immoral.’ In BJP’s vision immorality seems to be a perfect foil for democracy.

Just as loyalty to the dynasty serves as the veritable kick to the Congress’s vision of sustaining intra-party democracy.  Therefore a Deshmukh is put on an even higher pedestal despite the supreme court rap on his knuckles. “It is sad and shocking to see how the government allows and appreciates such ministers. Not only that, it also gives them a cabinet post. It is not a dignified act and I would call it a shameless act.” These were the words of supreme court judge A K Ganguly at a seminar in Mumbai recently.

These are but different colours of a wave of corrupt (r)evolution sweeping India. The Indian urban streets are filled with vulgar display of life borrowed on plastic money. Everyone seems to be outstripping the other in the race for pretending to be happy in an otherwise lo(a)nely life. Every alternate fortnight a new sedan or a 4x4 SUV teases readers from front page advertorials and tempts TV viewers with smart promotionals. There is an average of five short messages delivered on mobiles by real estate agents luring prospective buyers with apartments and villas on ‘easy instalments.’ All this lopsided economic collage is not without its ‘most-visited’ page.

The national capital, for instance, has to come face to face with shame, with such conscience churning tags like crime/rape/scam capital of India. A poor woman delivers a child by the roadside along the most happening square in Delhi because the five-star hospitals in the vicinity only deliver life in lieu of money. And from Delhi to Mumbai not a brick is laid without the ‘ideal’ (adarsh in Hindustani ) mix of gamesmanship cementing corruption.
The picture across the countryside is even more abysmal. The farmers are either in debt or committing suicides because they cannot afford to pay off those debts, their lands increasingly under threat from the evil eyes of land eal estate mafias and now, often, by a kind of Mafioso that operates in the garb of special economic zones (SEZs) where the government itself takes the ‘supari’ on behalf of moneyed class.

Like that proverbial Indian bridegroom who presents himself as a commodity in the sick, old dowry bazaar before he ties the nuptial knot, everything is up for sale – from kidney to morality - waiting for its right bidder. This is corruption a la India in its throbbing, naked glory removed only in texture from Cairo style corruption which vertically split the society into haves and have-nots.

A common Egyptian waged a non-violent war against the well-entrenched despotic rule of Mubarak and succeeded in his objective in less than three weeks. Wrote David Michael Green, a political science professor at New York’s Hofstra University, after the Egyption uprising: Cowardice is talking about democracy for others while actually undermining it when you don't like the results. Courage is walking like an Egyptian.
Will the average Indian, the ubiquitous aam aadmi, ever dare to walk like an Egyptian?