Disparaging the Anna Hazare Campaign
(This appeared in ET on 20 April 2011)

The campaign against corruption, which assumed a concrete sense when Anna Hazare and his team introduced the draft Jan Lokpal Bill, is now sought to be debilitated. The political class that could wax eloquent in and outside Parliament on the need to cleanse the system and funded NGOs, that sustain themselves by running advocacy programmes to have systems in place to ensure probity in public life, are desperate to throw stones even while a process that shows some promise -the joint committee to draft a Bill to set up a Lokpal - has just begun its work. An audio CD that sprang up last week, purportedly establishing that Shanti Bhushan too was among those who fixed judges and judgments in return for hefty sums of money , was the cheapest of the tricks.

Those behind that dirty game could have paused for a moment and wondered as to whether someone indulging in such subversive acts against the judicial system would have mustered courage to declare that many of those who were Chief Justices of India in the past couple of decades were corrupt and stand by what he said even while hauled for contempt before the Supreme Court . It now emerges that the audio-CD was a construction , using technology that is commonly used in studios for benign purposes in the normal course, and circulated as a work of investigative journalism . One is reminded of the infamous attempt, some time in 1989, when the Bofors scandal knocked the bottom of Rajiv Gandhi's claim to be a Mr Clean. At that time, P V Narasimha Rao was shown to have organised documents to show V P Singh's son, Ajaya Singh, holding an account in a bank in St Kitts Islands. A pliable journalist who played ball in that game lost his job in the process. It was established that the whole story was concocted .

It is another matter that the journalist who played along was accommodated in the Planning Commission subsequently! It is in this context that the noises coming from a section of the civil society leaders raise concern. Aruna Roy certainly deserves the credit for foregrounding the RTI in its present form. The campaign by the MKSS achieved that. But then, she is now distancing from the process that has begun. And the worst that could happen was that she allowed Digvijaya Singh to speak on her behalf. The Congress leader sought to discredit the five-member team of civil society representatives and held that Aruna Roy and Harsh Mander must have been there. Since Roy has not distanced herself yet from that remark, it is fair to presume that she has acquiesced. She has the right, no doubt. But then, she must now clarify her differences and her apprehensions.

She cannot quarrel with the process. A joint committee to draft the Bill is still a more democratic and constitutional system than the NAC with the Congress president as chairperson (and the status of a Cabinet minister) and a large number of civil society activists, including Roy herself , and former bureaucrats as members. In other words, if the NAC can draft Bills and determine the government's policies and draft Bills for Parliament to pass, a joint committee is no less democratic. Roy may also specify the aspects from the draft that Anna Hazare and the four others with him are canvassing for in the joint committee; or also the draft Bill prepared by the government that is there. She may argue that section 8(2)( b) of the draft Bill that provides for a Lokpal with prosecutorial power is "authoritarian' ' or that section 8(6) that provides for scrapping section 19 of the Prevention of Corruption Act as unwarranted.

These are some of the differences between the two Bills that have been placed on the table. There may be other points, too. If someone from the civil society there argues that section 30 of the draft Bill, prepared by the Hazare team, that stipulates a timeframe for the various stages between a complaint is taken cognisance of and prosecution launched is draconian, it may be stated in the open. By not doing anything, it will be held that the noises against the process that is on since April 16, 2011 and billed to be completed before June 30, 2011, are only attempts to stall the job and not too different from the dirty game that was attempted by way of circulating doctored audio CDs. As for Harsh Mander , another member of the NAC, and for whom Digvijaya Singh spoke, it was only expected .

His enthusiasm to campaign against communalism does not take him to speak against the perpetrators of the 1984 carnage in Delhi and elsewhere . He has even argued that the principle of Truth and Reconciliation (that the people of South Africa resorted to after winning the battle against apartheid) be applied to the anti-Sikh riots of 1984 and not in the case of Gujarat 2002. Well. The principle of Truth and Reconciliation must not apply to either of the two! Be that as it may, it is imperative for the civil society and the government to let the process now on go through the task in real earnest rather than let the opportunity, wrested as it was, to be wasted.