Malaysia is inflicted with corruption and it has been lit up for us of late by a thousand spotlights, Law Professor Gurdial Singh Nijar said at the 6th Gandhi Memorial Lecture.

Speaking at Royal Selangor Club (Dataran) yesterday evening, he added: “Rulers lose their right to govern, indeed even be in politics, if they breach this fundamental ethical incorruptibility norm.

“Corruption is a cancer that insidiously nibbles established governance systems and ultimately destroys them irreparably,” he said in his lecture, Gandhi: Walking with us today.

Citing Gandhi, “There is sufficiency in the world for man’s need but not for man’s greed,” and therefore, the functioning democracy requires clean, uncorrupted governance.

Addressing more than 200 judges, civil service leaders, lawyers, CEOs and others who attended the memorial lecture, Gurdial said that corruption can reach such a proportion whereby of those in power, there are kleptocrats solely bent on their own enrichment.

Perhaps we should pause to reflect whether corruption is just a matter of legality, or financial irregularity and bribery.

“As Arundhati Roy, of 'The God of Small Things' Booker Prize winner asserts - it is the currency of a social transaction in an egregiously unequal society in which power continues to be concentrated in the hands of a smaller and smaller authority,” Gurdial added.

Learning from Gandhi, Gurdial said: “Perhaps the best we can do is to listen to him; and imbue his values in our own life and interaction.

“Gandhi talks to us. And in a sense, he certainly walks with us; his guiding hand outstretched to carry us across seemingly insurmountable barriers.”

Gurdial narrated that many in Malaysia “despair of the gloomy times we are faced with in this blessed country of ours; corruption, racial discord, religious acrimony, and much more. To many - no end, no resolution, seems to be in sight.”

Well-heeled friends, he said, think of migrating to greener pastures”.

“We learn from Gandhi that he migrated to South Africa, and then after two decades re-migrated back to India in 1915, to fight the good cause and rid his country of the colonial yoke.

“He traded his lawyer’s bib and gown for a “naked fakir’s” garb - in the unsolicited words of Winston Churchill,” Gurdial added.