Anna Hazare, Civil Society and the State
By: Sumanta Banerjee
Vol XLVI No.36 September 03, 2011
The Jan Lokpal Bill epitomises the ultimate faith of the ordinary citizens, born out of utter despair, in an omnipotent authority – the Lokpal. But mere legislation cannot bring about reforms, without accompanying mass struggles to get them implemented by the executive agencies and grass roots movements to change social habits. The forces of corruption which are deeply embedded in our society will not give up easily, and are powerful enough to frustrate and resist the provisions of any Lokpal Bill. At the end, the fight against corruption has to be situated in the wider strategy of changing both the economic model of development and the social culture, which carry the seeds of corruption.
Sumanta Banerjee (suman5ban@yahoo.com) is a political commentator who is best known for his book In the Wake of Naxalbari: A History of the Naxalite Movement in India
With the compromise worked out between Anna Hazare and the government, the anti-corruption movement led by him is likely to go into a state of suspended animation for a while. But from amidst the plethora of news and views that poured forth from hysterically sounding newspaper and TV reporters, commentaries and interviews and Twitter and Facebook exchanges during his hunger strike, one can make a fairly objective assessment of the public mood and come to certain conclusions about the nature and future of the movement.
Significantly enough, the politically organised sections of the Other Backward Classes (OBCs), dalits and Muslims, came out openly against the movement. But the Anna Hazare group’s success in mobilising other sections of the urban and rural population – ranging from the upper and middle classes of Delhi to the dabba-wallas of Mumbai, and farmers of Haryana and Punjab – as well as its ability to harness the powerful media behind its cause, indicates a new configuration of classes under the aegis of a leader whose ideology and practice combine populism with authoritarianism. Let us remember how Indira Gandhi followed the announcement of her populist 20-point programme with the declaration of Emergency. This is not to suggest that Anna Hazare is aspiring to become a prime minister and implement all over India the kangaroo-court style punishments that he is fond of imposing in his fiefdom in Ralegan Siddhi. But he and his disciples are encouraging a popular faith in a single powerful personality to deliver the goods. The slogan shouted at Ramlila Maidan – “Anna is India , India is Anna” – harks back to the cry of “Indira is India , India
The twin trends of a popular demand for an end to corruption and the belief that one honest individual – the Lokpal – can solve all problems are being encapsulated by Anna Hazare and his followers in the framework of Gandhism.
The Public Mood
A scam-riddled United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government, driven to the wall but swollen with arrogance, underestimated the public mood whipped up by the Anna Hazare-led campaign. The mood, articulated by a vociferous middle class, is one of impotent rage at the daily experience of having to pay bribes to petty officials and functionaries to secure timely delivery of any service (e g, obtaining a ration card, installation or restoration of a telephone line in cities, and water from canals, credit from banks and other inputs needed by farmers in villages), which is a basic right of every citizen. Added to this accumulated anger at being cheated in their quotidian living was their discovery of the loot in the upper echelons of governance, by top politicians, senior bureaucrats, and the judges in the higher courts, which came cascading in a series of scams exposed by the media.
The mood had reached the exact boiling point to respond to the call given by Anna Hazare, who chose that moment to rally them around his Jan Lokpal Bill. The measures of redress suggested in his bill reflected the spirit of impatience of these ordinary citizens with bureaucratic red tapism, addressed their demand for immediate relief and justice, met their desire for maximum punishment for the corrupt politicians and officials, and satisfied their sense of schadenfreude at the penalisation of the latter. The bill epitomised their ultimate faith, born out of utter despair, in an omnipotent authority – the Lokpal.
These various segments of the urban and rural middle classes did not challenge the basic socio-economic structure and reject the administrative institutions that hold up that structure. In fact, their leader Anna Hazare approached the same Parliament – which according to him was filled with corrupt legislators – for the enactment of his bill. He wanted the establishment of yet another institution – a supra-agency of the Lokpal that was expected to control the behaviour of the other three institutions: the legislature, executive and judiciary. His followers were led to believe that a powerful individual with a reputation of honesty and heading an ombudsman body of equally honest individuals would eradicate corruption, without the need for changing the prevailing system.
Leaving aside the legal wrangles over the fear of extra-constitutional usurpation of powers, and misgivings about the dictatorial nature of the Jan Lokpal Bill, let us look at the other possibility. Suppose, tomorrow Team Anna’s demands are incorporated in a new Lokpal Bill that is turned into an Act, can anyone believe that their spirit will be implemented in practice? What has been the fate of past altruistic legal acts like the rural employment scheme or the public distribution system (where funds and food meant for the beneficiaries are siphoned off by local functionaries appointed by political parties, and subordinate officials)? A Jan Lokpal Act, with all its pompous promises of punishing corrupt government officials, can always be subverted by the more powerful politician-bureaucrat-mafia nexus that rules over our daily life. It is this nexus that kills activists who try to assert their rights under another progressive law – the Right to Information Act. The Indian state which enacted the law chooses to remain a passive witness to such killings.
Besides, to stop corruption at the various levels of the bureaucracy – which the Jan Lokpal Bill mainly addresses – there are enough provisions in Chapter IX of the Indian Penal Code, which deal exclusively with “offences by or relating to public servants”, to punish the offenders for taking gratification. It is the lack of political will among the ruling powers to implement those provisions that has led to the flourishing of corrupt practices among the functionaries in government departments.
This does not mean that we should give up campaigning for laws to make the system more accountable. But mere legislations cannot bring about reforms, without accompanying mass struggles to get them implemented by the executive agencies, and without grass roots movements to change social habits. The forces of corruption which are deeply embedded in our society will not give up easily and are powerful enough to frustrate and resist the provisions of any Lokpal Bill.
Social Base of Corruption
These forces are not confined to the upper echelons of society like bureaucrats and politicians, or only among government officers at the lower level – as often made out to be by social activists in their well-meaning efforts to fight corruption. A symbiotic relationship between collective bribe giving (by common citizens seeking civic facilities, or in urgent need of immediate relief) and individual bribe taking (by petty government functionaries, private school management, property dealers, touts thronging in front of railway ticket counters or hospitals among others) has developed at the bottom level in India, involving small cash transactions. According to one survey, 77% of all reported bribe demands in India
But bribery in India New Delhi
It is quite obvious that bribery (in the sense of receiving unauthorised sums of money or substitutes) cuts across all classes in India West Bengal for instance, the erstwhile Left Front government increased the salaries of its employees to an enormous extent (inviting the criticism of financial profligacy). Yet, the well-heeled babus in Kolkata’s Writers’ Building (the centre of the state administration) and district offices, as also the well-paid policemen in the cities and villages, continue on their spree of extorting bribes from the common citizens who seek assistance from them.
It is important to note that at this bottom level of corruption, both those taking and giving bribes come from the same segment – the urban middle and lower middle classes and the rural farming community. It is these people who flocked to Anna Hazare’s demonstration. They are a divided lot, torn by self-conflict as bribe takers and bribe givers. The same electrician or telephone linesman who demands bribe from his neighbour to restore the service, or the three-wheeler driver who cheats his passenger, has to pay a bribe to the local petty official to gain a no-objection certificate to get his house registered! The same grocer who is cheating his customer has to pay a regular hafta or protection money to the beat constable. There is thus a tacit mental collaboration between individual bribe-taking and collective bribe-giving.
Corporate Sector
There is a tendency among some circles to blame these elements at the bottom level for generating the black money which is supposed to travel upwards. But such an argument ignores the role of the corporate sector in accumulating profits, turning them into black money, and creating a model of upward mobility for the aspirants at the lower rungs of the ladder. The institutionalisation of corruption begins from the top, with the norms of bribery and nepotism percolating down. The recent revelations about the involvement of certain major business houses in scams show how the corporate sector had been greasing up the gravy train of both the earlier National Democratic Alliance and the present UPA governments.
Anna Hazare as a Mini-Gandhi
It is significant that Anna Hazare has left out this major source of corruption – the corporate sector – from his ambit of campaign. This is not surprising. In this respect he is following the political strategy of his guru, Gandhi. While leading satyagrahas, Gandhi had no scruples in enjoying the hospitality of the Birla business house, in spite of being tainted with charges of profiteering through corruption. Anna Hazare’s silence on allegations of corruption against corporate houses may be attracting the latter to lend their voice in support of his campaign against corruption in only the administration.
Although some critics of Anna Hazare are at pains to prove that he is not a true Gandhian and is using satyagraha as a duragraha, his mode of behaviour indicates that he is quite faithfully following Gandhi’s twin strategy of using collective satyagraha and the individual hunger strike as tools to test the waters and push the administration to the edge – and then strike a deal. Like Gandhi again, he is publicity conscious, timing his actions and statements to ensure that the media keep his performance at the top of the daily news. Like Anna Hazare’s demonstration in Ramlila Maidan, Gandhi’s spectacular Dandi March in March 1930 attracted the mass media, including Indian and foreign correspondents from Indian, European and American newspapers, together with at least three film companies. Through regular announcements from his prayer meetings, Gandhi created a general atmosphere of suspense (by repeatedly warning his followers that he could be arrested any moment) and an impending fight through rhetorical statements like: “This is a battle to the finish. The Divine Hand is guiding it…” Hazare succeeded in staging his performance through the same canny combination of keeping his audience in suspense while assuring them at the same time that the battle will be fought to the finish!
Like Gandhi’s public demonstrations of austerity, Hazare’s performance at the Ramlila Maidan was also indirectly subsidised to a large extent by the government. Let me recall in this connection the snide remark reportedly made by Gandhi’s own disciple, Sarojini Naidu, regarding his much publicised style of travelling in third class in railway trains, and the protection that the authorities had to provide him: “No one knows how much is being paid to keep Bapuji poor!” A similar façade was re-enacted in Ramlila Maidan. How much was spent by the Delhi
The Absent Left
In this scenario of the anti-corruption movement, like the other parliamentary parties, the Left also was caught unawares by the demonstrations of support for Anna Hazare. It belatedly jumped into the scene, divided between the need to echo the public anger against corruption and the fear that the Jan Lokpal would encroach on the rights of its parliamentarians. The repeated assertion by its leaders that the Constitution is above everything and that the rights of Parliament are non-negotiable, reflects a mindset that ignores the people’s supreme right to make decisions even to change the Constitution and reform parliamentary rules in the direction of a more morally accountable and participatory politics.
The Parliament-centric approach of the Left parties results from their long absence from civil society where ordinary citizens face daily problems, and distance from extra-parliamentary mass struggles. While they surely take up economic issues like price rise and unemployment among other things in their demonstrations, corruption had not been a top priority in their list of concerns. Yet, the fight against a social evil like corruption is part and parcel of the struggle to change the political and economic system. From the 1940s till the 1960s, activists of the united Communist Party of India, although numerically small, made their presence felt in civil society through organised attempts to fight social evils like casteism, communalism, gender discrimination, and corruption in the daily existence of peasants, workers, and middle class urban citizens among whom they worked. They recognised the importance of civil society as a soft underbelly of the capitalist system (in the Gramscian sense) which offered them an opportunity to change social attitudes in the realm of ideas, values and culture, as a basis for the ultimate goal of transformation of the capitalist property relations and the state.
It is necessary to revive this Leftist intervention in civil society to mould the social environment which influences – among other collective propensities – the willingness of people to take or give bribes. The environment can act as either an encouragement to bribery, or as a coercive milieu to prevent it. The propagation of a strong ethical culture to change the environment, along with a robust governance with stiff punitive measures against the offenders, can deter corruption. But at the end, the fight against corruption has to be situated in the wider strategy of changing both the economic model of development and the social culture, which carry the seeds of corruption.
Indian Media’s Anna Moment
Vol XLVI No.36 September 03, 2011
Is the media’s job to support or to report?
The cameras have been switched off. The microphones have fallen silent. But the cacophony generated by the saturation media coverage accorded to the agitation led by Anna Hazare for a Jan Lokpal Bill continues to ricochet. Questions are being asked, as well they should, not just about the extent of media coverage, especially by the electronic media, but on the content of the coverage. Given the profuse expressions of appreciation by the Anna Hazare group at the end of the protests to the media for its “support”, a key question that the media needs to ask is whether its role in such a situation is to support or to report. By becoming participants in this particular campaign against corruption, has the electronic media forfeited any semblance of professionalism that had survived previous occasions where it had gone overboard? Or will it take the time to pause now and analyse why it decided that the saturation coverage of the campaign, at the cost of scores of other important news developments across India
From the coverage of the April fast by Anna Hazare at Jantar Mantar, where television anchors were waxing eloquent about how this was India’s Tahrir Square, to August when a leading anchor announced that this was “an inflexion point” in India’s history, it was apparent that the electronic media had bought into the protest, setting aside scepticism or distance essential in the interests of accuracy and balance. The story had been reduced to good and evil – with “civil society” of the Anna brand as good and the government as evil. Even if one argues that some of the coverage was justified, particularly after Hazare’s arrest and the drama of his release that followed, when and how did the media decide to accord the protests non-stop uncritical coverage? One reason could be that the response in April to the fast had alerted news media that this was a story their largely middle class urban viewers would follow. Television revenue is based on viewership. Over the two weeks in August that all news channels, with the exception of Doordarshan, focused exclusively on Ramlila Maidan, news viewership increased while that of sports as well as Hindi movies dropped.
A second factor could be that the people who staff our media come from the same class as those leading the anti-corruption
protests. The Anna Hazare group included journalists and technology savvy young people. They knew how to talk to journalists; journalists knew how to relate to them. Such a cosy relationship is not possible with adivasis fighting for their lands, dalits agitating against exclusion, north-easterners and Kashmiris demanding repeal of oppressive laws or anti-nuclear agitators who resist the imposition of a dangerous technology. On the other hand, corruption, particularly someone else’s corruption, is a comfortable cause to support alongside “people like us”. For the electronic media, this story was tailor-made – a fixed location, colourful crowds, a 74-year-old Gandhian-type figure on fast, and a campaign against something as generic as “corruption” that had universal appeal. “Team Anna” provided quotable quotes, considerable drama, and full access at all times. Plus, the protests were concentrated in Delhi and a few large cities, with rural India
It is how the media converted a protest into a “movement”, a few cities and a village into “the nation” and a compromise into a “victory” that is even more worrying than the extent of the coverage. Almost from the start, the protests had been dubbed “a second freedom movement”, “August Kranti”, etc, placing them in a historical context with which they bore little resemblance. Second, the size of the gatherings at various places was vastly exaggerated by media treatment. Close camera shots hid the actual size of the crowds while reporters used terms like “sea of humanity” rather than approximate numbers. As a result, viewers were led to believe that the numbers had grown from thousands to tens of thousands to millions. Anchors were constantly telling viewers that “never before” had so many people gathered for a protest, a blatant inaccuracy that slipped by unquestioned.
The constant repetition of terms like “nation”, “freedom struggle”, “victory” by the media enhanced the size and significance of the protest. As a result, in popular imagination, the Anna-led agitation will be remembered as one consisting of “millions” of people across the “nation” fighting “a second freedom struggle” when in fact it was a popular, largely urban upsurge against corruption and for a law to curb it. None of this should matter if indeed the media helped push an insecure and indecisive government into moving on a law that was long overdue. The danger lies in the precedent it has set. It suggests that as long as a group, regardless of its agenda, knows how to handle the media, brings in viewership, and confines protests to logistically convenient locations, it can get coverage which, given the power of 24 × 7 news television, can be leveraged to negotiate with the government. In a democracy, where media should act as a check on all power – not just government power – such a scenario is worrying in the extreme.
Corruption and Representative Democracy
By: Amit Bhaduri
Vol XLVI No.36 September 03, 2011
The anti-corruption campaign has shown that a desperate public demands an immediate solution. Citizens have got a taste of direct democracy which is frightening for the privileged manipulators of the system, but liberating for the poor who are usually manipulated. While what the future holds cannot be predicted, the prize at this juncture of the history of Indian democracy is indeed so great that the compulsion in favour of the Jan Lokpal Bill is overwhelming.
Amit Bhaduri (abhaduri40@hotmail.com) is professor emeritus at theJawaharlal Nehru University , New Delhi
It is the theme of great many literary works. The hero is caught in a raging plague, like the doctor in Albert Camus’ novel of the same name, and knows fully well that he has no chance of winning. Yet he stays on to treat patients until he falls a victim himself. In Henrik Ibsen’s play, An Enemy of the People, the fight takes a curious turn when the hero understands that the epidemic is waterborne and preventable only if the community realises. The drama begins when the hero feels he cannot forgive himself unless he acts, and also realises that he would become an enemy of the people if he acts against popular prejudice. “A society that needs heroes is unfortunate”, is how Galileo sums it up in Bertolt Brecht’s play, Life of Galileo.
Most of us are not meant to be heroes. This also would have been the natural thing under more fortunate circumstances. Indeed a main attraction of representative political democracy is to let ordinary citizens carry on with their lives, restricting political participation to choosing representatives in elections. A functioning representative democracy is in effect a call to political inaction rather than action by ordinary citizens. However, this is something which the politicians have to earn by keeping democracy functional and legitimate in the eyes of its people. It is by no means their natural right for five years because they somehow managed to get elected.
Direct Action
The pressure for direct popular action that goes beyond the confines of representative democracy gathers momentum and ultimately erupts when elected representatives in Parliament lose all legitimacy in the eyes of the people. However, when and under what leadership the eruption takes place is the unknown variable in this equation. All political parties with a stake in a system that requires representation exclusively through Parliament begin to feel uncomfortable. After all representation is their business!
Yet the rules of the game of representation begin to change. Men and women, little known before, emerge as leaders in circumstances in which people are desperate for some immediate remedy. One could reiterate Plekhanov: “Men make history but not under circumstances of their own making”. Our feeling as individuals paralysed by isolation begins to evaporate and a new collective energy is generated. Nevertheless, this collective power born out of rage that seems capable of moving mountains is like an unpredictable earthquake, raising hope that it can change the bleak political landscape. And, yet, the fault lines remain unpredictable.
Paradoxically, the force that led to vast participation of the poor in our parliamentary democracy in recent years today drives one of the largest popular upsurges witnessed in independent India
Extensive poverty, corruption on an ever increasing scale, corporate plunder of natural resources aided by state terror for acquiring land could continue under platitudinous moralising about the supremacy of Parliament and the essentiality of time-consuming legislative “processes”. Exceptions were made whenever convenient and important laws like the Special Economic Zone Act or decisions like increasing the monthly salaries of Members of Parliament (MPs) were passed in more or less a day without recourse to lengthy processes. At the same time, the government in power considered it had discharged its responsibility adequately by declaring that it had no “magic wand” to solve problems like inflation or corruption. The leader of a majority party in the government and her closest confidants can maintain a regal silence as if their nominated civil society representatives are good enough to represent the people’s mood.
“Corruption”, “civil society”, “people” or, for that matter “democracy” or “supremacy of Parliament” are ambiguous catch words. They mean different things to different people and like empty vessels they have to be given content. Every mass movement in which a vast number of people coalesce around an issue requires formulating the issue in those terms, both to inspire and to leave enough room for differences in interpretation of the issue according to their class, caste, religious or social positions. Those speaking English and those without English, those for whom religion is all important and those for whom religion is unimportant, those who maintain legality is sufficient and those who profess scepticism about it. However, when so many people at least temporarily join the ranks to fight for a cause which each might even interpret differently they deserve our understanding and not dismissal as “unlawful blackmail”.
Procedural Rationality and Rationality of Outcomes
We must learn to distinguish between “procedural rationality” (or, the correct way of doing things) and “rationality of outcomes” (arriving at the correct solution). The Constitution, the legal system, the bureaucracy and other institutions as well as political democracy itself are the products of procedural rationality. Procedures have to be taken seriously in any functioning society, but the respect for procedures is also conditional. Procedures are respected by the people when they provide good solutions. They are tolerated when they provide tolerable solutions. They are resented when they lead to bad solutions. They are jettisoned when they are constantly manipulated to benefit a few in full view of the public.
“Fight corruption” could become such a powerful rallying slogan only when the public was convinced that the purpose of procedural rationality and the stated need to follow time-consuming “processes” was just another round of manipulation. The impatience, the “now or never” mood of the movement is propelled not merely by a history of more than 40 years of deliberate inaction, but open manipulation of procedures to protect the corrupt. The “cash for vote” scandal, 2G or Common Wealth Games scam, the manipulation in the appointment of the chief of the Central Vigilance Commission, all of them now in full public view, have left little for this government to hide. The latest is a desperate attempt by the government, again in the name of procedures, to stop a Supreme Court-sponsored investigation by a special investigation team into black money.
The public has drawn the obvious inference that this government is paralysed, not by its adherence to procedures because it violates them whenever it suits it but because the government itself is neck-deep in corruption. The movement has also helped ordinary people, urban and now increasingly rural to connect corruption they face in their daily life to this corruption in high places.
Procedural quibbles apart, the achievement of the Jan Lokpal Bill movement was to complete this circle of popular understanding of corruption. Ironically, corruption is also a double-edged sword. We wield it to hurt others and, in the process wound ourselves. The patwari in the village who takes bribes also gives bribes to get his children admitted in school or his wife into hospital. The corrupt peon in a government office makes a little money through corruption, and pays bribes for getting his work done elsewhere. This is how a corrupt system catches us all, and yet the extent of vested interest is not the same for all. As a general rule, the poor are at the receiving end and this is why increasingly they rather than the middle class are participating and providing the backbone as the anti-corruption struggle spreads from cities to smaller towns to villages, particularly those affected by forcible land acquisition. Anna Hazare realises this better than anyone else in his team, and has insisted all along that the lower bureaucracy must be included in the legislation.
Corruption in the provision and delivery of social services like basic education, health or the public distribution system confronts ordinary supporters of the movement in the most visible way. However, in a different way the land question is lurking in the background and will become prominent if the movement gathers momentum outside cities to make it an irresistible force. The land question has always been important, land rights and land reforms have never ceased to be a crucial issue in Indian politics. Nevertheless, earlier it was primarily a question of inequality and class stratification in agriculture. Now it has become a question of destroying agriculture-based livelihoods on a massive scale. Using the prerogative of acquiring land under the “eminent domain” clause, the State has arrogantly gone about dispossessing its own citizens. The law of land acquisition was meant for public purpose, in actuality it has become private purpose almost invariably through corrupt practices. Enhancing the interests of private corporations became public purpose for a government driven by the ideology of corporate-led growth. Over the last couple of decades India
At the end of some two decades of corporate-led growth that promoted massive scams, the corporate sector is now rich and powerful enough to manipulate at will the political class. The Radia tapes gave a glimpse of the close link between big money and high politics. While Ratan Tata tries to hide behind some privacy law, Mukesh Ambani is reported to have said, “Congress to apni dukan hai” (Congress is our own shop). Allowing Warren Anderson of Union Carbide to flee the country after the Bhopalgas tragedy under government protection, another Congress prime minister more than a quarter century ago established the unwritten unconstitutional bottom line for this democracy which placed corporate profits way above citizens’ lives, all for a better foreign investment climate.
Politicians and their economic experts expounding old slogans of liberalisation, privatisation and globalisation have under the cloud of massive scams clearly lost their ability to fool even the middle class, as the one-time sagacious economic gurus are fast losing their audience. It is gradually sinking in that the mother of all scams is an ideological scam perpetrated by the neo-liberal policies of this government. High sounding speeches from the rooftop (more exactly Red Fort) about India
The Asian Centre for Human Rights provided recently some useful statistics collated from the annual reports of the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI). Despite a sharp increase in corruption, the CBI reported a steady decline in the number of cases registered from around the time of economic liberalisation. The number of cases registered during 1991-93 was an average of 1,231, and then 892 (1994-96), 885 (1997-99), 845 (2000-02), 763 (2003-05), and 694 (2006-08) and thereafter increased slightly as scams began to draw the Supreme Court’s attention (731 in 2010, the year of the Common Wealth Games and 2G scams). Despite the Supreme Court’s numerous judgments that prior sanction is not necessary, less than 2% of the cases registered by the Central Vigilance Commission were sanctioned for prosecution by the central government. The complete collapse of confidence in the government’s intention and ability to contain corruption should not be surprising, and procedural wrangles hardly hide what this government and more generally the political class wants.
As the movement spreads, many arerightly concerned that it leaves out the media, large corporations, caste, religious leaders and minority issues. Is there a method in this madness of targeting only the lawmakers, law enforcers and government servants? Are the others less corrupt? The logic needs spelling out. With its economic and social policies, the government in power like most of the media has become the main instrument for pushing corporate friendly and people unfriendly policies. In that sense it is not the source, but the instrumentality essential for spreading corruption.
The prime minister might be quite right when he said he should not be seen as the fountainhead of corruption. He is right, and this applies to some but not many politicians. And yet the central issue is not personal integrity, but the policies they pursue for a fee either for themselves or for the party’s fund, usually both. It cuts across the political parties. The Congress in the centre and in Andhra Pradesh, Mulayam Singh and Mayawati in Uttar Pradesh, Lalu Prasad in Bihar, the Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) in Chhattisgarh and Karnataka, and even the Communist Party of India (Marxist) over Nandigram and Singur showed how they promote corporate interest in the name of governance. They have to be corrupt if they play this high stake monetary game of elections. People find it difficult to accept the supremacy of Parliament precisely because this movement is making clear every day for whom governments in the centre and in the states are supposed to govern (the people) and for whom they actually govern (the corporations). Not surprisingly, people find this unacceptable, and are also beginning to see the connection between government policies induced by corruption and corporate loot of land and natural resources of forests, rivers, mountains, coast lines, and minerals, all in the name of development, national interest and prestige. This is what the thunder of the public voice is saying and it will get louder if these policies continue.
Principles of Jan Lokpal Bill
Details apart, the main principles of the Jan Lokpal Bill need reiterating in this context: (1) It should treat all citizens (including the prime minister, MPs and other elected representatives) as equal before law, irrespective of the place (Parliament) where the corrupt act is committed. (2) Conflict of interest must be avoided. So the Lokpal has to be independent, chosen by a group where government nominated politicians are not in a majority and, in particular, the anti-corruption investigative wing of the CBI has to be under the independent Lokpal. (3) Jan Lokpal must be able to reach the lower levels of bureaucracy, elected representatives, police, etc, through a citizen’s charter, and state-level Lokayuktas along similar lines.
A desperate public demands an immediate solution. But it has unleashed a more sweeping force. Our citizens have got a taste of direct democracy. This is frightening for the privileged manipulators of the system, but it is liberating for the poor who are usually manipulated. What the future holds cannot be predicted. However, we can evoke the reasoning of the great 17th century mathematician Pascal who co-founded probability theory with his contemporary great mathematician Fermat. He justified his deep religiosity with the logic that the prize of infinite bliss is so great that even a small positive probability justifies faith. The prize at this juncture of the history of Indian democracy is indeed so great that the compulsion in favour of the Jan Lokpal Bill is overwhelming.
Or, to put in the words of a Civil Rights song of the 1960s, “Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on”.
The Anti-Corruption Crusade
By: Ritvik Chaturvedi
Vol XLVI No.36 September 03, 2011
This is regarding the editorial “The Anti-Corruption Crusade” (EPW, Vol XLVI, 20 August 2011). The editorial was timely and rightly noted that no matter how much support Anna Hazare has been able to muster, nothing places him above the Constitution. Apart from this, when Hazare’s version of the bill is wrought with impractical provisions and cannot be accepted without extensive debate, his method of indefinite fasting to get it passed is very undemocratic, despite the government’s bill being weak. It should also be kept in mind that those chanting anti-corruption slogans are not totally without blemish. Can it be said with any certainty that those assembled in the crowds would not pay a bribe to get work done and, worse, would not accept it when offered? To me the crowds supporting Hazare appeared frivolous, who neither know anything about the Lokpal nor about democracy.
One major aspect of the Jan Lokpal Bill which is deeply disturbing is the dependence on eminent persons for selecting the Lokpal. If the selection committee for the chief vigilance commissioner could commit a disaster, then how can one trust such a selection committee for the Lokpal? Also, as a noted columnist recently pointed out, the bill places deadlines over deliberative consultations, forcing the government to enact the law as soon as possible, even if it amounts to hasty and faulty inferences.
It is no news that the government’s draft of the bill is an eyewash. The fact that the government is still not ready to include the prime minister in the ambit of the Lokpal Bill is not lost on anyone, nor is the fact that it is rather unwilling to make concessions regarding immunity to bribe-givers, powers of contempt and protection to whistle- blowers. The government’s intentions have been badly exposed. It agreed to make truce with the civil society just to keep the public temper down and subvert steps that are taken to weed out corruption. It is hoped that the bill which is finally passed by Parliament will be based on civil society proposals and does the work which the public wants it to do, and for whichthere have been a spate of movements recently.
நன்றி: EPW
protests. The Anna Hazare group included journalists and technology savvy young people. They knew how to talk to journalists; journalists knew how to relate to them. Such a cosy relationship is not possible with adivasis fighting for their lands, dalits agitating against exclusion, north-easterners and Kashmiris demanding repeal of oppressive laws or anti-nuclear agitators who resist the imposition of a dangerous technology. On the other hand, corruption, particularly someone else’s corruption, is a comfortable cause to support alongside “people like us”. For the electronic media, this story was tailor-made – a fixed location, colourful crowds, a 74-year-old Gandhian-type figure on fast, and a campaign against something as generic as “corruption” that had universal appeal. “Team Anna” provided quotable quotes, considerable drama, and full access at all times. Plus, the protests were concentrated in
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