03 July, 2007

“A fortress of people”

The International Herald Tribune reports:

Four years ago, India was rocked by the murder of Satyendra Dubey, a government engineer who exposed corruption in the national highway building program. Two years later, Shanmughan Manjunath, a manager at a state-owned oil company, laid bare a scheme to sell impure gasoline. His body was found riddled with bullets in the back seat of his car.

To [JN] Jayashree, her husband, MN Vijayakumar, appeared to be trailing in their footsteps. Vijayakumar, 51, is a bureaucrat in the southern state of Karnataka, and he has a penchant for chastising colleagues who supplement their modest salaries with bribes, kickbacks and garden-variety pilferage. In recent months, his chastising ruffled feathers at high levels, and he began seeing the signs often directed at whistle-blowers in India: He was flicked around the civil service like a hockey puck, switching jobs seven times in the past nine months, most recently on June 26.

As her husband made powerful enemies, Jayashree began to fear for his life. And so she devised an unusual ploy to protect him: She blogged.

Here’s Jayashree’s blog; her reason for starting it, she told IHT reporter Anand Giridharadas, was to “[create] a fortress around him - a fortress of people.” Well, I wish her all the best, and certainly the visibility that the blog gives Vijaykumar should make his enemies wary of attacking him. But I’m skeptical of the concept of a “fortress of people”, because of this, illustrated most recently by this. Voyeurism comes naturally to us, but beyond that…

(Link via email from Arjun Swarup.)