Is taking Yingluck to court the way to go?

This is not to say that Yingluck is guilty or should go to jail. This is saying that every government leader should be subject to the same. If you risked being thrown behind bars just because your subordinates embezzled money or property or took bribes, you wouldn’t sit and watch. You would be on guard around the clock. You would punish a minister at the first hint of a scandal. You wouldn’t just transfer him or her to another ministry before the opposition could launch a censure motion.

Yingluck is being charged with negligence that allowed corruption to fester in the rice pledging scheme. That means her accusers don’t need to prove that she was corrupt. All they need to do is prove that corruption plagued the rice programme and, as prime minister and chairperson of the national rice committee, Yingluck knowingly let it happen. If she is found guilty, she will be imprisoned.

Is that harsh? No, not at all. If a prime minister allows his or her subordinates to cheat, he or she deserves to be punished, too. It’s a cover-up of a crime, pure and simple. If you cover up for a criminal, you are an accessory to the crime.

People are saying it’s harsh because what’s happening to Yingluck is an exception and not the rule. It’s a pity that it took a vicious political divide, threats of civil war and a military intervention for us to have a semblance of what should have been a normal way of tackling corruption. In politics, great power should come with great responsibility, and threats of imprisonment should come with the territory.

Thailand’s prime ministers have always been overprotective of their Cabinet members or those associated with them. The worst that ever happened to corrupt ministers was to be transferred out of the hot seat. There has never been genuine punishment or public condemnation from the prime ministers. On the one hand, that’s understandable: it’s bad public relations to admit that you picked a crook (or many crooks) to sit in your Cabinet. On the other hand, you endorse a system in which everybody protects everybody who is on the same side, and the rest is history.

The late Lee Kuan Yew advocated a system in which corrupt ministers were hunted down by graft-busters, and not moved around or shielded by the prime minister. Singapore’s politics may have made it easy for that to happen, as its weak opposition was unlikely to significantly capitalise on corruption scandals. In Thailand, admitting that you handpicked a fraudster to serve as a minister can be equivalent to signing your own resignation.

But that should be the case, shouldn’t it? First, it makes you choose your team wisely and carefully. Then it makes you act swiftly and justly at the first sniff of graft. Of course, you have the other option of sweeping it under the rug, but you will know you do that at your own peril.

Now, the big question. How can we, in a normal democratic system, put a prime minister on trial for crimes committed by others? This may be an integral part of Yingluck’s defence, too. Her lawyers will first try to portray the rice pledging scheme as noble and clean, but if the prosecution can establish that the programme was marred by massive corruption, the lawyers will simply say she didn’t know about it.

Repeated warnings against the scheme by economics experts may come into play at the Yingluck trial, but her lawyers can say that the warnings were not necessarily “evidence” that corruption had taken place. In other words, she may have been warned, but didn’t know for certain that dirty money was going into the accounts of people in charge of the scheme. And without clear-cut evidence, how could she terminate a social programme that voters mandated her government to carry out? Most importantly perhaps, if nobody has been charged with “murder”, how could someone be found guilty of being an accessory to the murder?

The proof and rebuttal regarding the “evidence” and her “knowledge” will be the highlight of the trial. The prosecution will face a major challenge, though, of explaining why no small fry were caught if the evidence of corruption was so damning. Yingluck’s accusers can say that because of her negligence, the fraud got out of control and those involved managed to escape, but the prosecution will need strong evidence to back this claim. The accusers will have to prove that although the “murderer” has got away, the murder weapon has been found at the home of the “accessory”.

Should Yingluck be put through all this? Yes, but on condition that what’s happening becomes the standard for Thailand’s fight against corruption. Without that condition, we don’t stand a chance.