Anna’s battle is every
Indian’s battle
Anna Hazare’s battle against
corruption isn’t just his battle. It’s every Indian’s battle. If Anna fails,
we fail. Politicians across party lines stand to lose most if the movement
succeeds in getting a strong Lokpal Bill legislated in parliament.
Anna is a catalyst in
the fight to mitigate corruption in public life. He has no personal motive,
no personal gain, no financial interest. Instead of criticising his methods,
help him improve them. No one is perfect – certainly not Anna and his team
members.
But most of them are a
lot better than the 162 MPs in the Lok Sabha and 39 MPs in the Rajya Sabha
(www.adrindia.org) who have criminal charges against them. Some of these
charges are politically motivated. But many are not.
|
For example, 75 Lok Sabha
MPs, again cutting across party lines, face court-framed charges of murder,
rape, extortion, kidnapping and dacoity. No wonder many parliamentarians
are dead set against Anna and his anti-corruption crusade. They will do
anything to discredit his movement.
And in this task they
have found witting and unwitting abettors in sections of the media and
the intelligentsia. All have one trait: they mock Anna but have no alternative
to offer in India’s battle against corruption. Some are so witless they
don’t even realise how wrong they’ve got it.
Anna is not the problem.
The system is. Anna’s prescription may not be perfect. But it’s every citizen’s
job to help improve it. The government, as a beneficiary of institutionalised
corruption, isn’t going to go out of its way to do so. |
Take just one example to
illustrate the serious nature of the court-framed charges many Lok Sabha
MPs face. Kameshwar Baitha of the JMM has 11 charges related to murder
and 17 charges related to attempt to murder filed against him.
As many at 28 ministers
in Akhilesh Yadav’s UP cabinet have criminal cases pending against them.
The most notorious is Raja Bhaiya who has 45 criminal cases against him.
He spent three years in jail on POTA charges and is today UP’s Food and
Civil Supplies Minister.
It is such politicians
who threaten our democracy and our institutions – not Team Anna members
with their inflated travel vouchers and income-tax arrears due to a technical
interpretation of paid study leave for a then-IRS officer.
It has been obvious since
Indira Gandhi’s government first introduced – but did not legislate – the
Lokpal Bill in 1968 that politicians fear a strong, independent Lokpal.
Their argument, parroted by their media handmaidens, is that the Lokpal
will be a monstrous bureaucracy accountable to no one.
This of course is nonsense.
The Lokpal would be accountable in five ways as I wrote in The Times of
India this February (New grid of governance). First, through an internal
complaints redressal authority; second, via an annual performance and financial
audit by CAG; third, through a Lokpal appellate bench; fourth, from overall
jurisdiction of the Lokpal bench by the High Courts and the Supreme Court;
and fifth, through a special parliamentary committee.
The Lokpal is obviously
not a panacea as some Congress spokesmen say sotto voce to deliberately
obfuscate the issue. It would be just one of five powerful instruments
in the integrated, interlocked grid of governance that would include the
EC, CAG, the new proposed National Judicial Commission (NJC) and an independent
CBI as analysed in detail in The Times piece cited above.
An independent CBI is
central to this interlocked governance grid. With the Lokpal excercising
jurisdictional oversight, the CBI would thus be accountable to an independent
statutory authority which itself would be subject not only to the five
internal checks and balances outlined above but to the discipline of being
part of an integrated, interlocked governance grid.
Some critics warn that
40,000 extra staff will be needed to man the Lokpal body. This is a deliberate
falsehood. In the interlocked grid model, no more than 1,000 new staff
will be needed to investigate and allow prosecution of complaints against
60 lakh central government employees (including 78 Union Ministers and
Ministers of State).
The reason? An independent
CBI will, under the Lokpal body’s supervision, investigate cases forwarded
by the Lokpal bench. Special fast-track courts will prosecute them. State
Lokayuktas, with similar mechanisms, will supervise the investigation and
prosecution of state-level public servants through local CIDs and courts.
These institutions already have adequate personnel which the Lokpal will
deploy.
Remember too that police
autonomy has been mandated by the Supreme Court in September 2006 under
a seven-directive order. When it is implemented by the government – a contempt
of court petition against non-compliance is pending in the Supreme Court
– not only will the CBI be freed of political control, so will state CIDs.
The Mumbai and Delhi police
forces alone have over 40,000 personnel each so a central Lokpal body with
1,000 staff and a 7-member bench (not one individual “Lokpal” as some motivated
reports misleadingly claim) hardly constitutes a bureaucratic monstrosity.
The so-called elite –
intellectual, media, business – disparage Anna because he is not “people
like us”. This wannabe-elite is comfortable with the status quo with its
cosy nepotism, clubbiness and rich pickings.
A red herring is meanwhile
used by the government: “Team Anna members are themselves corrupt – people
in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones”. That unthinking logic would disqualify
90% of the police force from arresting criminals because the police themselves
take bribes. Only the corrupt use this spurious argument to deflect the
accusations they have no real answers for.
Those who castigate Team
Anna for denigrating our institutions are falling into the trap set by
politicians: discredit the largely honest whistleblower and therefore by
default exonerate the largely dishonest politician.
MPs are lawmakers. They
are elected to uphold standards of public life not lower them. As public
servants, they exist to serve citizens. “In a democracy,” as US Supreme
Court Justice Felix Frankfurter declared, “the highest office is the office
of the citizen.”
Indian public servants
– including the Prime Minister and his cabinet – are subordinate to every
Indian citizen. The poorest, most destitute Indian is more important than
the President of India. That is the way real democracy operates. It is
a principle leaders in democracies with long histories like US President
Barack Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron uphold every working
day.
In contrast, some of the
comments made by government ministers against Anna’s anti-corruption movement
border on the infantile. The MoS in the PMO, V. Narayanasamy, said of Anna’s
fast: “It is an attempt fool the people.” He added: “It is good they told
very openly today they are forming a political party. Their intentions
are exposed.”
Fasting as a protest against
corruption and forming a political party are both entirely legitimate.
That a government minister can categorise either in the way he did says
more about Narayanasamy than Anna.
And yet there are those
in the chattering classes who support this unhinged government reaction
rather than encouraging a movement against corruption which, if put on
the right track, could improve all our lives.
Then there are those,
in the government and the media, who insouciantly challenge Anna’s team
members to stand for election. But if fighting an election were a criterion
for fighting corruption, every activist and – yes – every journalist who
exposed corruption would need to first get elected. Such is the thoughtlessness
– deliberate and inadvertent – that has lowered the standard of argument
over the anti-corruption movement.
Whose side are we on?
An imperfect Anna fighting our battle? Or a corruption-riddled political
system? If Anna is not doing the job of fighting corruption well enough,
help him do it better. Don’t help the corrupt by denigrating a movement’s
methods when the end is just.
Since April 2011, the
UPA government has dealt with Anna's movement with deception and bad faith.
Corruption is the leitmotif of the political ecosystem. That is why politicians
have tried continuously to splinter this citizen’s movement. United, citizens
would win. Divided, a corrupt government will win.
source From anis
mirza mirza_anis@hotmail.com |