Anna Hazare’s cause may have been noble but the methods adopted by him and his band of civil society activists to try and force the Government to capitulate and accept his version of the Lokpal Bill — or the so-called Jan Lokpal Bill — were far from being democratic. They went against every canon of parliamentary democracy and amounted to blackmailing the executive and legislature
The ‘Fast’ is over. Now, the simple Gandhian who once lived in a temple is recuperating at one of India’s most expensive hospitals. He and his aides have seemingly made up with the big bad Government, their erstwhile arch enemy. Ms Kiran Bedi has claimed that Mr LK Advani had addressed her as beti, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has sent the 74-year-old a bouquet of flowers and a ‘Get Well Soon’ note. All versions of the Lokpal Bill (as many as four at the time of writing) will be scrutinised by the parliamentary standing committee dealing with the Bill. Everybody is happy. Well almost everybody, except for Protest TV which is clearly in withdrawal and hence chasing a very reluctant Dr Naresh Trehan, still unaware that while hundreds were feasting at Ramlila Maidan, thousands were being swept away by floods in other parts of the country. But that is another matter.
For now is a good time to look back on the fortnight that was; what it meant and how it played itself out. I go back to one of my most striking memories from that time.
It was Day 09 of ‘The Fast’. Negotiations with the Government which had reportedly reached a point of breakthrough in the first round of talks had collapsed by the third. When Team Anna members returned to Ramlila Maidan that evening, they voiced their fears of a police crackdown. In response, there was adequate public uproar. Then, the diminutive Gandhian who had captured the nation’s imagination with his deceptively simple demand to eradicate corruption from the country took centre-stage. Standing against a giant backdrop of Mahatma Gandhi, Anna Hazare spoke in simple Hindi: “If the authorities come to get me, I’ll go with them. Mere peeche bhagwan ki shakti hai. Jao Parliament ka gherao karo. Jail bharo.” As the several thousand strong crowd responded to his comments by cheering in unison and wildly waving the Tricolour, I was left with a niggling sense of unease. My mind went back to Nirad C Chaudhuri’s infamous comment that Mahatma Gandhi was a ‘worse dictator’ than Adolf Hitler.
And then I heard veteran police officer Kiran Bedi suggest, just for good measure I believe, that police should defy the orders of their political masters just in case they ordered that the nation’s latest messiah-on-fast be force-fed or taken away. That sent a chill down my spine. By next day morning Ms Bedi and her colleagues’ fears were proven to be unfounded — the police never intervened on Wednesday night — but I felt mine take shape when on my way to work on Thursday morning I saw khaki-clad men block all roads leading to the Prime Minister’s official residence. Four metro stations that were in the vicinity were also shut until further orders. Anna Hazare had goaded his supporters to gherao 7 Race Course Road and it seemed like there was a good chance that they might be coming soon.
By Friday, the security situation seemed to have simmered down. As my auto passed by a group of young men sporting ‘I-am-Anna’ topis, waving the Tricolour and yelling Vande Mataram at the crossing that led to Ramlila Maidan, I thought of the many twenty-somethings I had seen jostling to be on camera, screaming on national television, “We are here to support the corruption.” In recent weeks, led by the new-age Gandhi, 21st century Indians had proudly proclaimed, “Annatum sangharsh karo, hum tumhare saath hain.” I could not help but wonder about the prospects of this ‘freedom struggle’ if the sangharsh had to be carried out instead by these supporters. Would they do more than just sloganeering and feasting at Ramlila Maidan? This was after all their second freedom struggle.
The freedom rhetoric has always been a fine one that has rarely, if ever, failed to motivate crowds. Moreover, it also makes for excellent ‘breaking news’ material that 24/7 news channels clearly can’t ever get enough of. But I don’t begrudge the TV-wallahs their TRPs. I am far more concerned about the masses’ inability to distinguish between a country’s battle for sovereign independence versus a popular demand to bring about certain systemic changes within the established framework of parliamentary democracy.
What happened at Ramlila Maidan this past fortnight, or what happened at Jantar Mantar in April, is absolutely not the same as what happened at August Kranti Maidan in 1942 when Mahatma Gandhi called on the British to ‘Quit India’, or even remotely similar to what happened in Tahrir Square this February when popular pro-democracy protests led to the ouster of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. India’s current political leadership, for all its moral depravity and its endless ability for corruption, is neither a foreign coloniser nor a despot. It is a popularly elected leadership and India a functioning democracy, warts and all.
This is of course not to wholly favour the Government’s argument that only parliamentarians have the right to make policy. That is just technical bunk that has only served to alienate the masses even further from the UPA’s agenda. There are several examples from India and abroad, and over a long period of time, wherein historic legislation was introduced only after the public put pressure on Government to bring about changes that were in consonance with the needs of an evolving society. Think women’s rights and labour laws.
In India, the Right to Information Act is the most recent example of how civil society has been crucial to introducing social reforms throughout history. But not once were they allowed to usurp the authority of Parliament. The Right to Information Act went through the appropriate channels of policy-making before it was approved by Parliament, without anybody whipping up the kind of mass hysteria that now surrounds the Lokpal Bill. Besides, it is wholly unrealistic to expect that Parliament will approve just about any piece of legislation that is imposed upon it by anybody and everybody. This is a sure shot path to anarchy.
And it somewhere on this path that Anna Hazare and his team have crossed the thin line that differentiates between legitimate protest and dispirited blackmail. Anna Hazare had all the right to protest against the Government’s version of the Lokpal Bill, be it through anashan or dharna or sit-ins or whatever other non-violent means that he fancies. He is also wholly entitled to mobilise public support for an alternate version that he believes is much superior. But when he threatens the Government with large-scale civil disobedience — as he repeatedly did in recent days — that is when he crossed that thin, unmarked line; that is when his completely legitimate form of protest became an unacceptable exercise in blackmail, plain and simple.
But this, I believe, is something that Anna Hazare is well aware of since he had already said that he had no qualms about blackmailing the democratically-elected Government of his country. He insisted that this was the only way that the morally corrupt Government of the day could be forced to introduce the kind of reforms that India desperately needs; that left to its own devices, it will never bring about the any worthwhile changes and surely not one that will plug the loopholes of a faulty system from which they have profited tremendously.
Anna Hazare’s demands stem from a deep and abiding distrust of politicians, from his belief that they can do no right, that none of them have an honest bone in their body. And it is somewhere here that his anti-corruption movement begins to resemble a Bollywood film where it is a clear-cut case of the good guy versus the bad guy. Here, Team Anna comprises the good guys and all politicians are the bad guys. At the core of their fight lies the institution of the Lokpal.
As envisioned by Team Anna, and defined in its Jan Lokpal Bill, the Lokpal will essentially have sweeping powers over all organs of the Government including the power to investigate and prosecute. This is hugely problematic. Even a layman should realise that investing absolute powers in any one institution that is not even elected by the people and hence not accountable to Parliament is a frightening proposition. This is of course not to say that the Government’s version of the Lokpal Bill would have been the solution to the problem. That version has its own flaws. In their original forms, neither draft was worth any serious consideration at all. But thankfully, both have evolved and mostly for the better. Clearly, the need of the hour is to have a reasoned and calm debate on the matter, away from the recent din at Ramlila Maidan.
(This article was published in the op-ed section of The Pioneer on August 31, 2011.)
The ‘Fast’ is over. Now, the simple Gandhian who once lived in a temple is recuperating at one of India’s most expensive hospitals. He and his aides have seemingly made up with the big bad Government, their erstwhile arch enemy. Ms Kiran Bedi has claimed that Mr LK Advani had addressed her as beti, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has sent the 74-year-old a bouquet of flowers and a ‘Get Well Soon’ note. All versions of the Lokpal Bill (as many as four at the time of writing) will be scrutinised by the parliamentary standing committee dealing with the Bill. Everybody is happy. Well almost everybody, except for Protest TV which is clearly in withdrawal and hence chasing a very reluctant Dr Naresh Trehan, still unaware that while hundreds were feasting at Ramlila Maidan, thousands were being swept away by floods in other parts of the country. But that is another matter.
For now is a good time to look back on the fortnight that was; what it meant and how it played itself out. I go back to one of my most striking memories from that time.
It was Day 09 of ‘The Fast’. Negotiations with the Government which had reportedly reached a point of breakthrough in the first round of talks had collapsed by the third. When Team Anna members returned to Ramlila Maidan that evening, they voiced their fears of a police crackdown. In response, there was adequate public uproar. Then, the diminutive Gandhian who had captured the nation’s imagination with his deceptively simple demand to eradicate corruption from the country took centre-stage. Standing against a giant backdrop of Mahatma Gandhi, Anna Hazare spoke in simple Hindi: “If the authorities come to get me, I’ll go with them. Mere peeche bhagwan ki shakti hai. Jao Parliament ka gherao karo. Jail bharo.” As the several thousand strong crowd responded to his comments by cheering in unison and wildly waving the Tricolour, I was left with a niggling sense of unease. My mind went back to Nirad C Chaudhuri’s infamous comment that Mahatma Gandhi was a ‘worse dictator’ than Adolf Hitler.
And then I heard veteran police officer Kiran Bedi suggest, just for good measure I believe, that police should defy the orders of their political masters just in case they ordered that the nation’s latest messiah-on-fast be force-fed or taken away. That sent a chill down my spine. By next day morning Ms Bedi and her colleagues’ fears were proven to be unfounded — the police never intervened on Wednesday night — but I felt mine take shape when on my way to work on Thursday morning I saw khaki-clad men block all roads leading to the Prime Minister’s official residence. Four metro stations that were in the vicinity were also shut until further orders. Anna Hazare had goaded his supporters to gherao 7 Race Course Road and it seemed like there was a good chance that they might be coming soon.
By Friday, the security situation seemed to have simmered down. As my auto passed by a group of young men sporting ‘I-am-Anna’ topis, waving the Tricolour and yelling Vande Mataram at the crossing that led to Ramlila Maidan, I thought of the many twenty-somethings I had seen jostling to be on camera, screaming on national television, “We are here to support the corruption.” In recent weeks, led by the new-age Gandhi, 21st century Indians had proudly proclaimed, “Annatum sangharsh karo, hum tumhare saath hain.” I could not help but wonder about the prospects of this ‘freedom struggle’ if the sangharsh had to be carried out instead by these supporters. Would they do more than just sloganeering and feasting at Ramlila Maidan? This was after all their second freedom struggle.
The freedom rhetoric has always been a fine one that has rarely, if ever, failed to motivate crowds. Moreover, it also makes for excellent ‘breaking news’ material that 24/7 news channels clearly can’t ever get enough of. But I don’t begrudge the TV-wallahs their TRPs. I am far more concerned about the masses’ inability to distinguish between a country’s battle for sovereign independence versus a popular demand to bring about certain systemic changes within the established framework of parliamentary democracy.
What happened at Ramlila Maidan this past fortnight, or what happened at Jantar Mantar in April, is absolutely not the same as what happened at August Kranti Maidan in 1942 when Mahatma Gandhi called on the British to ‘Quit India’, or even remotely similar to what happened in Tahrir Square this February when popular pro-democracy protests led to the ouster of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. India’s current political leadership, for all its moral depravity and its endless ability for corruption, is neither a foreign coloniser nor a despot. It is a popularly elected leadership and India a functioning democracy, warts and all.
This is of course not to wholly favour the Government’s argument that only parliamentarians have the right to make policy. That is just technical bunk that has only served to alienate the masses even further from the UPA’s agenda. There are several examples from India and abroad, and over a long period of time, wherein historic legislation was introduced only after the public put pressure on Government to bring about changes that were in consonance with the needs of an evolving society. Think women’s rights and labour laws.
In India, the Right to Information Act is the most recent example of how civil society has been crucial to introducing social reforms throughout history. But not once were they allowed to usurp the authority of Parliament. The Right to Information Act went through the appropriate channels of policy-making before it was approved by Parliament, without anybody whipping up the kind of mass hysteria that now surrounds the Lokpal Bill. Besides, it is wholly unrealistic to expect that Parliament will approve just about any piece of legislation that is imposed upon it by anybody and everybody. This is a sure shot path to anarchy.
And it somewhere on this path that Anna Hazare and his team have crossed the thin line that differentiates between legitimate protest and dispirited blackmail. Anna Hazare had all the right to protest against the Government’s version of the Lokpal Bill, be it through anashan or dharna or sit-ins or whatever other non-violent means that he fancies. He is also wholly entitled to mobilise public support for an alternate version that he believes is much superior. But when he threatens the Government with large-scale civil disobedience — as he repeatedly did in recent days — that is when he crossed that thin, unmarked line; that is when his completely legitimate form of protest became an unacceptable exercise in blackmail, plain and simple.
But this, I believe, is something that Anna Hazare is well aware of since he had already said that he had no qualms about blackmailing the democratically-elected Government of his country. He insisted that this was the only way that the morally corrupt Government of the day could be forced to introduce the kind of reforms that India desperately needs; that left to its own devices, it will never bring about the any worthwhile changes and surely not one that will plug the loopholes of a faulty system from which they have profited tremendously.
Anna Hazare’s demands stem from a deep and abiding distrust of politicians, from his belief that they can do no right, that none of them have an honest bone in their body. And it is somewhere here that his anti-corruption movement begins to resemble a Bollywood film where it is a clear-cut case of the good guy versus the bad guy. Here, Team Anna comprises the good guys and all politicians are the bad guys. At the core of their fight lies the institution of the Lokpal.
As envisioned by Team Anna, and defined in its Jan Lokpal Bill, the Lokpal will essentially have sweeping powers over all organs of the Government including the power to investigate and prosecute. This is hugely problematic. Even a layman should realise that investing absolute powers in any one institution that is not even elected by the people and hence not accountable to Parliament is a frightening proposition. This is of course not to say that the Government’s version of the Lokpal Bill would have been the solution to the problem. That version has its own flaws. In their original forms, neither draft was worth any serious consideration at all. But thankfully, both have evolved and mostly for the better. Clearly, the need of the hour is to have a reasoned and calm debate on the matter, away from the recent din at Ramlila Maidan.
(This article was published in the op-ed section of The Pioneer on August 31, 2011.)
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