Since caste is at the heart of the problems within Hinduism, this is a classic statement of what to do about it.
B.R.Ambedkar Philosophy of Hinduism
A hard-hitting and eminently scholarly masterpiece that is a must read for a Hindu wishing to be a progressive and make Hinduism progressive. This is not a piece for those Hindus who are insecure in their Hinduism and become defensive immediately.
“I have worked on Chhattisgarh, the Gujarat pogrom, Narmada dams.... But it’s all about Kashmir. The official narrative must not be contested.”
Dead Men Talking
The Indian state can silence the living, not the voice of the silent
Arundhati Roy
On September 23, 2011, at about three in the morning, within hours of his arrival at the New Delhi airport, the US radio journalist David Barsamian was deported. This dangerous man, who produces independent, free-to-air programmes for public radio, has been visiting India for 40 years, doing dangerous things like learning Urdu and playing the sitar. He has published book-length interviews with Edward Said, Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Ejaz Ahmed and Tariq Ali. (He even makes an appearance as a young, bellbottom-wearing interviewer in Peter Wintonick’s documentary film on Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman’s Manufacturing Consent.) On his more recent trips to India he has done a series of radio interviews with activists, academics, filmmakers, journalists and writers (including myself). Barsamian’s work has taken him to Turkey, Iran, Syria, Lebanon and Pakistan. He has never been deported from any of these countries.
So why does the world’s largest democracy fear this lone, sitar-playing, Urdu-speaking, left-leaning radio producer? Here is how Barsamian himself explains it: “It’s all about Kashmir. I’ve done work on Jharkand, Chhattisgarh, West Bengal, Narmada dams, farmer suicides, the Gujarat pogrom and the Binayak Sen case. But it’s Kashmir that is at the heart of the Indian state’s concerns. The official narrative must not be contested.”
News reports about his deportation quoted official “sources” as saying that Barsamian had “violated his visa norms during his visit in 2009-10 by indulging in professional work while holding a tourist visa”. Visa norms in India are an interesting peephole into the government’s concerns and predilections. Taking cover under the shabby old banner of the War on Terror, the Union home ministry has decreed that scholars and academics invited for conferences or seminars require security clearance before they will be given visas. Corporate executives and businessmen do not. So somebody who wants to invest in a dam or build a steel plant or buy a bauxite mine is not considered a security hazard, whereas a scholar who might wish to participate in a seminar about, say displacement or communalism or rising malnutrition in a globalised economy, is. Foreign terrorists with bad intentions have probably guessed by now that they are better off wearing Prada suits and pretending they want to buy a mine than wearing old corduroys and saying they want to attend a seminar. (Some would argue that mine-buyers in Prada suits are the real terrorists.)
David Barsamian did not travel to India to buy a mine or to attend a conference. He just came to talk to people. The complaint against him, according to “official sources”, is that he had reported on events in Jammu and Kashmir during his last visit to India and that these reports were “not based on facts”. Remember Barsamian is not a reporter, he’s a man who has conversations with people, mostly dissidents, about the societies in which they live. Is it illegal for tourists to talk to people in the countries they visit? Would it be illegal for me to travel to the US or Europe and write about the people I met, even if my writing was “not based on facts”? Who decides which “facts” are correct and which are not? Would Barsamian have been deported if the conversations he recorded had been in praise of the impressive turnouts in Kashmir’s elections, instead of about what life is like in the densest military occupation in the world? (Six lakh actively deployed armed personnel for a population of 10 million people.) Or if they had been about the army’s rescue operations in the 2005 earthquake instead of about the massive unarmed uprisings that took place on three consecutive summers? (And which received no round-the-clock media attention, and no one thought to call “the Kashmir Spring”).
David Barsamian is not the first person to be deported over the Indian government’s sensitivities over Kashmir. Professor Richard Shapiro, an anthropologist from San Francisco, was deported from Delhi airport in November 2010 without being given any reason. Most of us believe it was the government’s way of punishing his partner, Angana Chatterji, a co-convenor of the International People’s Tribunal on Human Rights and Justice, which first brought international attention to the existence of unmarked mass graves in Kashmir. May Aquino, from the Asian Federation against Involuntary Disappearances (AFAD), Manila, was scheduled to visit Kashmir in September 2011. She was deported from the Delhi airport. Earlier this year, on May 28, the outspoken Indian democratic rights activist Gautam Navlakha was deported to Delhi from Srinagar airport. (Farooq Abdullah, the former chief minister of Kashmir, justified the deportation, saying that writers like Navlakha and myself had no business entering Kashmir, because “Kashmir is not for burning”—whatever that means.) Kashmir is in the process of being isolated, cut off from the outside world by two concentric rings of border patrols—in Delhi as well as Srinagar—as though it’s already a free country with its own visa regime. Within its borders, of course, it’s open season for the government and the army. The art of controlling Kashmiri journalists and ordinary people with a deadly combination of bribes, threats, blackmail and a whole spectrum of unutterable, carefully crafted cruelties has evolved into an art form.
Photograph by Reuters, From Outlook, October 10, 2011
Cacophony of the deceased
It’s insensitive of the unmarked graves to embarrass the Government of India just when India’s record is due for review before the UNHRC.
While the government goes about trying to silence the living, the dead have begun to speak up. It was insensitive of Barsamian to plan a trip to Kashmir just when the state human rights commission was finally shamed into officially acknowledging the existence of 2,700 unmarked graves from three districts in Kashmir. Reports of thousands of other graves are pouring in from other districts. It is insensitive of the unmarked graves to embarrass the Government of India just when India’s record is due for review before the UN Human Rights Council.
Apart from Dangerous David, who else is the world’s largest democracy afraid of? There’s young Lingaram Kodopi, an adivasi from Dantewada, who was arrested on September 9, 2011. The police say they caught him red-handed in a marketplace while he was handing over protection money from Essar, an iron ore mining company, to the banned Communist Party of India (Maoist). His aunt Soni Sori says that he was picked up by plainclothes policemen in a white Bolero from his grandfather’s house in Palnar village. Now she’s on the run too. Interestingly, even by their own account, the police arrested Lingaram but allowed the Maoists to escape. This is only the latest in a series of bizarre, almost hallucinatory accusations they have made against Lingaram and then withdrawn. His real crime is that he’s the only journalist who speaks Gondi, the local language, and who knows how to negotiate the remote forest paths in Dantewada, Chhattisgarh, the other war zone in India from which no news must come.
Having signed over vast tracts of indigenous tribal homelands in central India to multinational mining and infrastructure corporations in a series of secret Memorandums of Understanding—in complete contravention of the law as well as the Constitution—the government has begun to flood the forests with hundreds of thousands of security forces. All resistance, armed as well as unarmed, has been branded ‘Maoist’. (In Kashmir, the preferred phrase is “jehadi elements”). As the civil war grows deadlier, hundreds of villages have been burnt to the ground. Thousands of adivasis have fled as refugees into neighbouring states. Hundreds of thousands are living terrified lives hiding in the forests. Paramilitary forces have laid siege to the forest. A network of police informers patrol village bazaars, making trips for essential provisions and medicines a nightmare for villagers. Untold numbers of nameless people are in jail, charged with sedition and waging war on the state, with no lawyers to defend them. Very little news comes out of those forests, and there are no body counts.
Photograph by Sanjay Rawat
Lingaram Kodopi
He was arrested while apparently handing protection money from Essar. His real crime: he knows Gondi as well as the forest paths in Dantewada.
So it’s not hard to see why young Lingaram Kodopi poses such a threat. Before he trained to become a journalist, he was a driver in Dantewada. In 2009, the police arrested him and confiscated his jeep. He was locked up in a small toilet for 40 days where he was pressurised to become a Special Police Officer (SPO) in the Salwa Judum, the government-sponsored vigilante army that was at the time tasked with forcing people to flee from their villages. (The Salwa Judum has since been declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.) The police released Lingaram after the Gandhian activist Himanshu Kumar filed a habeas corpus petition in court. But then the police arrested Lingaram’s old father and five other members of his family. They attacked his village and warned villagers not to shelter him. Eventually, Lingaram escaped to Delhi where friends and well-wishers got him admission into a journalism school. In April 2010, he travelled to Dantewada and escorted to Delhi the witnesses and victims of the barbarity of the Salwa Judum, the police and paramilitary forces, enabling them to give testimony at the Independent People’s Tribunal. (In his own testimony, Lingaram was sharply critical of the Maoists as well.)
That did not deter the Chhattisgarh police. On July 2, 2010, the senior Maoist leader, Comrade Azad, the official spokesperson for the Maoist Party, was captured and executed by the Andhra Pradesh police. Deputy Inspector General S.R.P. Kalluri of the Chhattisgarh police announced at a press conference that Lingaram Kodopi had been elected by the Maoist Party to take over Comrade Azad’s role. (It was like accusing a young schoolchild in 1936 Yenan of being Zhou-en-Lai.) The charge was met with such derision that the police had to withdraw it. They had also accused Lingaram of being the mastermind of a Maoist attack on a Congress legislator in Dantewada. But perhaps because they had already made themselves look so foolish and vindictive, they decided to bide their time.
Here stands, India’s ‘gravest’ threat
Paramilitary forces have laid siege to the forest. All resistance, armed or unarmed, has been branded ‘Maoist’. Entire villages are being burned.
Lingaram remained in Delhi, completed his course and received his diploma in journalism. In March 2011, paramilitary forces burned down three villages in Dantewada—Tadmetla, Timapuram and Morapalli. The Chhattisgarh government blamed the Maoists. The Supreme Court assigned the investigation to the Central Bureau of Investigation. Lingaram returned to Dantewada with a video camera and trekked from village to village documenting first-hand testimonies of the villagers who indicted the police. (You can see some of these on YouTube.) By doing this, he made himself one of the most wanted men in Dantewada. On September 9, the police finally got to him.
Lingaram has joined an impressive line-up of troublesome news-gatherers and disseminators in Chhattisgarh. Among the earliest to be silenced was the celebrated doctor Binayak Sen who first raised the alarm about the crimes of the Salwa Judum as far back as 2005. He was arrested in 2007, accused of being a Maoist and sentenced to life imprisonment. After years in prison, he is out on bail now. Several people followed Binayak Sen into prison—including Piyush Guha and the filmmaker Ajay T.G. Both have been accused of being Maoists. These arrests put a chill into the activist community in Chhattisgarh, but didn’t stop some of them from continuing to do what they were doing. Kopa Kunjam worked with Himanshu Kumar’s Vanvasi Chetna Ashram, doing exactly what Lingaram tried to do much later—travelling to remote villages, bringing out the news, and carefully documenting the horror that was unfolding. (He was my first guide into the forest villages of Dantewada.) Much of this documentation has made its way into legal cases that are proving to be a source of worry and discomfort to the Chhattisgarh government.
In May 2009, the Vanvasi Chetna Ashram, the last neutral shelter for journalists, writers and academics who were travelling to Dantewada, was demolished by the Chhattisgarh government. In December 2009, on Human Rights Day, Kopa was arrested. He was accused of colluding with the Maoists in the murder of one man and the kidnapping of another. The case against Kopa has begun to fall apart as the police witnesses, including the man who was kidnapped, have disowned the statements they purportedly made to the police. It doesn’t really matter, because in India we all know the process is the punishment. It will take years for Kopa to establish his innocence, by which time the administration hopes the arrest will have served its purpose. Many villagers who were encouraged by Kopa to file complaints against the police have been arrested too. Some are in jail. Others have been made to live in roadside camps manned by SPOs. That includes many women who committed the crime of being raped. Soon after Kopa’s arrest, Himanshu Kumar was hounded out of Dantewada. In September 2010, another adivasi activist, Kartam Joga, was arrested. His offence was to have filed a petition in the Supreme Court in 2007 about the rampant human rights abuses committed by the Salwa Judum. He is being accused of colluding with the Maoists in the April 2010 killing of 76 crpf personnel in Tadmetla. Kartam Joga is a member of the Communist Party of India (CPI) which has a tense, if not hostile relationship with the Maoists. Amnesty International has named him a Prisoner of Conscience.
Meanwhile, the arrests continue at a steady pace. A casual look at the First Information Reports (FIRs) filed by the police give a pretty clear idea of how the deadly business of Due Process works in Dantewada. The texts of many of the FIRs are exactly the same. The name of the accused, the date, the nature of the crime and the names of witnesses are simply inserted into the biscuit mould. There’s nobody to check. Most of those involved, prisoners as well as witnesses, cannot read or write.
A YouTube video grabs in which Kodopi records a villager’s testimony indicting the police in the burning of three Dantewada villages .
One day, in Dantewada too, the dead will begin to speak. And it will not just be dead humans, it will be the dead land, dead rivers, dead mountains and dead creatures in dead forests that will insist on a hearing.
Meanwhile, life goes on. While intrusive surveillance, internet policing and phone-tapping and the clampdown on those who speak up becomes grimmer with every passing day, it’s odd how India is becoming the dream destination of literary festivals. There are about 10 of them scheduled over the next few months. Some are funded by the very corporations on whose behalf the police have unleashed their regime of terror. The Harud Literary festival in Srinagar (postponed for the moment) was slated to be the newest, most exciting one—“As the autumn leaves change colour the valley of Kashmir will resonate with the sound of poetry, literary dialogue, debate and discussions....” Its organisers advertised it as an “apolitical” event, but did not say how either the rulers or the subjects of a brutal military occupation that has claimed tens of thousands of lives, bereaved thousands of women and children and maimed a hundred thousand people in its torture chambers can be “apolitical”. I wonder—will the literary guests come on tourist visas? Will there be separate ones for Srinagar and Delhi? Will they need security clearance? Will a Kashmiri who speaks out go directly from the festival to an interrogation centre, or will she be allowed to go home and change and collect her things? (I’m just being crude here, I know it’s more subtle than that.)
The festive din of this spurious freedom helps to muffle the sound of footsteps in airport corridors as the deported are frog-marched on to departing planes, to mute the click of handcuffs locking around strong, warm wrists and the cold metallic clang of prison doors.
Our lungs are gradually being depleted of oxygen. Perhaps it’s time to use whatever breath remains in our bodies to say: Open the bloody gates.
Before going in to the review of the Jan lokapal bill we must know about the persons involved in drafting this lokpal bill and the hidden agenda behind this bill. Even some of the members in the Anna team have a point to prove on their integrity. This article cannot be seen as a attack on some individuals, i am trying to emphasise the facts surrounding this protests and the true intentions of these corrupt individuals. Since most of the English media (corporate sponsored) and some regional media are portraying this fast by Anna as another freedom struggle. It’s high time we all must stop this kind of news (nonsense), because it directly insults the true freedom fighters of the Indian nation. Here are the serious integrity issues relating to the Anna team:
1. Anna Hazare: Termed as another Gandhi he is accused of misusing his trust money for celebrating his B’day. To add up to these allegations- I request the readers to look in to the following links about Anna`s atrocities in His own village.
I'd rather not be Anna- Arundhati Roy
2. Arvind Kejriwal: This former IIT student is being projected as next youth icon (next to/instead of Rahul!). Soon after getting a capitalists sponsored award he rose to prominence. Later he started a NGO called kabir. He is a key member in the Anna team. His NGO is said to have got donations from Ford foundation and several other unknown persons to the tune of 250,000 $. Till now the identity of the donors are not being disclosed in the organization’s official website. Here is an excerpt of the interview given by Arvind Kejriwal to THE HINDU on the donations received from outsiders. Arvind Kejriwal himself does not follow transparency in his own organization. But he is advocating transparency to the government?
THE HINDU: “Another of your NGOs, Kabir, received grants from the Ford Foundation (FF). According to the FF, Kabir received $172,000 in 2005 and $197,000 in 2008. The FF also sanctioned an “in-principle” grant of $200,000 for 2011, which you have not accepted so far. Why does Kabir not mention the FF and these specific details on its website?
Arvind Kejriwal: We did not give the specific details because we also got some other NRI contributions and these were clubbed together. I will make sure that the website gives the break-up.”
3. Kiran bedi: Abusive use of power is also a corrupt practice. So kiran bedi itself guilty of this corrupt practice. She has been projected as a straight forward IPS officer but her official work record speaks the other way! She has derailed from her duties several times. She has used her power to secure her daughter’s admission at Delhi’s Lady Hardinge College for an MBBS course through the Mizoram quota. I request the readers to read the following links to know more about it.
It’s very clear that the main leaders of the campaign itself corrupt and we are following the wrong person/ group of people and portraying them as crusaders of corruption. So it’s high time that we all must think about their true intentions and the supporting force behind the Anna teams’s protests. Maoists are seen as a terrorist outfit because they don’t believe in the Indian state and they seek to over throw the Indian state by armed struggle. Same is the case in the Anna team and its supporters –They don’t believe in the constitution of India. They seek to control the entire government under a dictatorship kind of bill. So in a way Anna team should also be seen considered as a dangerous outfit. Many of the supporting organization of the Anna team are right wing saffron terrorist’s organization like RSS, VHP and many anti reservation outfits like youth for equality team. Thus one can easily conclude that these short minded persons don’t recognize the “right to equality” clause mentioned in the constitution of India.
Will Jan lokpal bill eradicate corruption?
The answer is NO! because one must keep in mind that there are numerous laws are in place to tackle the corruption practice in India. But the fact is these laws are not being properly implemented and executed by the law enforcing agencies. If we can find a proper way and will to implement this already existing law we can eradicate corruption at the grass root levels. But as far as the big scams involving the corporate companies the government must come with a new law such as “if a company is found to involve in corrupt practices it should be nationalized or banned from any other future business, hefty fine should be imposed on them or one must make it as a non-bailable offence”. The entire lokpal bill is critical in giving punishment to the bribe accepting politicians and government servants but it does not have a mention on the extent of punishment that would be given to bribe giving capitalists and industrialists. A person who induces another to indulge in wrong doings deserves better punishment than the other. Lokpal bill deserves to be in trash it deserves nothing more than that! There are numerous articles written about the flaws in the lokpal bill some are given in the references section do please read it and spread awareness about it.
The root cause of corruption can be understood clearly when we look in to the liberalization policies that are implemented in India after the 1990`s. The primary reason said for its implementation is that it would reduce corruption in India. At that time it was widely believed that the biggest corruption takes place at the government run institutions, hence the role of private institutions is seen as an alternative to combat corruption. But after the liberalization policies were implemented the corruptions and scams grow even bigger. The amount of money associated with each scams accounted for more than thousand crores or lakhs of crores. Although before liberalization India saw some big corruptions, the scams in that period was very few and the money involved in it was very meager when compared to the present cases.
A few notable Scams before liberalization:
Jeep Scandal of 1948-Rs 80 lakh.
Bofors in 1985-86-Rs 64 crore.
Liberal Benefits?
The opening up of the economy post-’91 boosted scam monies into the stratosphere
Total scam money (approx) in Rs crore since 1992:
73000000000000
Source: http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?262842
It must be noted that the above stats does not include the 2G, CWG scam, the KG basin scam and the illegal mining scam etc. If we add up the scam money involved in these scams the total scam money would grow up even bigger. Thus from the above facts we can clearly say that the root cause of the corruption lies in the liberalization policies carried out by the Government of India. The root cause of corruption is privatization policy! A classic example is the health sector. In India hospital business is seen as a great oppurtunity to earn huge amount of profits. In the name of improving the quality of health sector the GOI opened up the health sectors to the private players. But instead of improving the quality of health sector it has driven millions of poor Indian people to debt by indiscriminate collection of fees. The main slogan of private ownership is to “earn profit-no matter how they come by”. So in such a scenario no private involvement is required in key sectors such as agriculture, education, food distribution (PDS), transport, health and other social sectors. Without eliminating corporates from these key sectors we cannot eradicate corruption no matter how many laws/bills are tabled.
With most of the politicians is either coming from a business family or a corporate sponsored person, it’s up to the voters of India to prevent them from winning the elections. Without preventing the corporate-politician nexus it’s difficult to achieve a corruption free society. The Lokpal bill does not highlight the key issue of corruption involving big MNC`s, corporate sectors etc. and it remain silent on corporate scams. Even some of the English media like Times now, CNN-IBN and NDTV 24x7 that supports this Anna Team campaign is also facing serious allegations in various issues such as paid news and Redia tape case etc. When more than 50,000 trible people protested against the wrongful acquisition of their home land for a foreign company POSCO at Orissa, no one from the Anna team or the media highlighted it (this protest also happened at the same time of Anna’s so called protest!). Also till now the villagers of kudumkulam of Tamilnadu are staging a marathon protest against the building up of nuclear power plant but no one highlighted this issue. So, it’s not wise on our part to support the Anna team blindly because their true motives are even more dangerous than the corruption issue. By the time I finish writing this article a new illegal mining scam at Goa to the tune of Rs.4000 cr is being reported!!!! The so called corruption crusader ANNA HAZARE again started to give ultimatum to the union government of India to pass the lokpal bill!
Arundhati Roy on Anna Hazare's campaign:
part one:
part two:
An NGO's view on ANNA HAZARE:
Further reading:
1. I'd rather not be Anna- Arundhati Roy
2. The True Face of Kiran Bedi by Subir Ghosh
3. Liberal benefits The opening up of the economy post-’91
5. Many Avatars of Indian Corruption
6. Lokpal bill of the Anna Team
IMPORTANT NOTE:
India third 'snoopiest' country: Google Transparency Report. The GOI have requested Google to censor the internet contents/opinions of many users who speak against the Indian government. Even dictatorship countries haven't placed such a number of censor requests to the Google. So it’s clear that the government of India is keeping an eye on its internet users and with the help of Google, GOI have acquired the privacy details of the internet users to intimidate them. The important fact is that the Indian government seeks censorship to political views, hate speech, Government Criticism etc. It is clear we the Indians don’t have freedom of speech when it comes to criticizing government in key issues.
DISCLOSURE:
Hence I hereby declare that the above article is my personal opinion and it is not being copied from any other Internet/anti-India websites.
I am pleased to post an opinion article on Lokpal bill by Mr. Sandeep Dongre, 2001 batch alumni of IIM Bangalore.
I wanted to deal with this issue in two parts:
A) The means adopted by Anna Hazare and team to drive their point of view
B) The Actual merit of “Jan Lokpal Bill”- its ability in itself to effectively deal with corruption
A) The means adopted by Anna Hazare and team to drive their point of view:
Law making is the primary function of any legislature. With the formation of the Republic of India on 26 January 1950, things changed profoundly. All Indians have a say in how laws are made and how they are implemented. We can amend or repeal laws that we do not like. There is, of course, a method to do this, which must be followed. These are the constitutional methods that Dr. Ambedkar referred to in his ‘Grammar of Anarchy’ speech.
When constitutional methods are available, there is no case for non-constitutional methods like Satyagraha, hunger strikes or the more extreme ‘Fast unto death’. No matter how good the intention is, Fasts unto the death ultimately undermines the due process. Anna Hazare is a genuine person but he should not adopt undemocratic means to drive home his point. Emotional Blackmail has no place in a parliamentary form of democracy. If two really genuine persons go on fasts until death for two opposing reasons, how are we ever going to resolve? A good example of this came to light when both the two opposing factions of the ‘Separate Telangana State Movement went on fast unto death and as is evident, the whole process came to a standstill.
India has experienced a very effective form of parliamentary democracy and it is best left to it to resolve complex matters like this. Though a very scary picture is getting portrayed, very few will disagree that India is well on its path to the top and a true parliamentary democracy has ensured it smoothly. One cannot invite the death of democracy by allowing such protests.
I will devote next few paragraphs in understanding Anna and his ‘My Way or the Highway’ style of working.
Ralegaon Siddhi has prospered under the leadership of Anna Hazare and it really looks green and fresh in an otherwise dry area. Everybody is aware of the immense hard work put in by Anna and his team and the results are there for everyone to see. Noted Journalist Mukul Sharma who has studied Anna's village community in Ralegaon Siddhi since 1919 says that Anna is a strong follower of a belief system where the people following him consider it their natural duty to obey, and the exercising person thinks it a natural right to rule. No matter what the issue, there is an absolute recognition of authority.
Let me clearly state that the END is absolutely not in question, the MEANS are. Though the intentions might not be doubted, but Anna has been exercising a set of self-made rules which everyone in the village has compulsorily followed. These rules are far removed from what a true democracy means.
a) Getting things done by way of severe punishment is the accepted way in the village to achieve the set goals. So it was decided that anybody who consumes alcohol has to be physically punished. There are instances of drunken people tied to pole outside village’s temple and beaten. Even the villagers now agree that anybody found drunken should be brought in the centre of the village and beaten. A group of 25 youth in the village has been formed who are authorized to give punishment to drunkards (could you strike the resemblance to Jan Lokpal??). They have been dutifully tying drunkards to the pole and beating overnight.
b) Several instances of using force in implementing Family planning measures.
c) Anna’s authority even peeps into making rules for ‘Eating habits’ and trust this is a severe breach of people’s freedom. We can respect people who actively propagate ‘Vegetarianism’ but definitely not by force. There are hardly any people eating non-vegetarian food in the village. Dalits in his village were categorically told that main reason other people stay away from them is because their living is dirty, thinking is dirty and even food habits are dirty. By continuously putting pressure, the Dalits were forcefully turned into vegetarians
d) Anna strongly criticizes electoral and party politics- no wonder that there have been no elections of gram panchayat in the village since the last 24 years. Even for National/State level elections, posters and pamphlets are not allowed in the village
e) Entertainment in the form of film songs or cinema is a strict NO in the village. However, religious films like Sant Tukaram, Sant Gyaneshwar can be played. Even during marriages, only religious songs are allowed. Last year, A villager
Installed a dish antenna at his home and he was severely criticized by Anna himself.
Kailash Pote, a landless Chamar, gives a different meaning to village, family and Hindu religion. “We do not call Ralegan Siddhi a village. We call it a family in which Annajee is the headman and we are the people who provide service to the family. Here Hindus mean Marathas only. We Chamars and Mahars are never called Hindus. How can we claim that everybody is equal here?”
The above explain the use of extreme means by Anna to get things done which he believes is Right.
Lastly, As BG Varghese rightly points out, Due process can be trying at times; but banishing it for quick-fix populist methods is dangerous and could lead to anarchy and counter-violence. It is legitimate to criticize venal politicians but unfair to denigrate all politicians. Without politicians there can be no politics or political process, only dictatorship. We need to secure political and electoral reforms and reform of the police and criminal justice systems to put in place an interlocking mechanism that ensures purity in public life. There is much work to be done and hopefully the government has seen the writing on the wall.
B) The merit of ‘Jan Lokpal Bill’ - its actual ability to effectively deal with corruption:
Mr. Pratap Bhanu says, The Lokpal Bill does not tackle any of the root causes of corruption. The bill amounts to an unparalleled concentration of power in one institution that will literally be able to summon any institution and command any kind of police, judicial and investigative power. In other words, in a situation where the problem is power, we create an entity that has even more power. It has even appointed officials instead of elected ones
There are many loopholes in the Bill which I have discussed below:
a) The three Pillars of Indian Democracy - namely the Legislature, Executive and Judiciary - keep checks and balances on the other, and so they must remain separate, because that’s the only way to ensure that there is no abuse of power. The Jan Lokpal intends to disturb this fine balance by virtually creating a fourth pillar. It intends to create an Executive outside the constitutional framework, answerable to nobody. Chances of such an organization getting corrupted by the sheer lust for power are much greater than the Executive functioning within a constitutional framework, where checks and balances ensure accountability
b) The appointment of the Lokpal will be done by a – Bharat Ratna awardees, Nobel prize winners of Indian origin, Magsaysay award winners, Senior Judges of Supreme and High Courts, the Chairperson of the National Human Rights Commission, the Comptroller and Auditor General of India, the Chief Election Commissioner, and members of the outgoing Lokpal board and the Chairpersons of both houses of Parliament. Only one person, the chairperson of the Lok Sabha, is a democratically elected person. The idea of a Jan Lokpal is modeled on an Ombudsman but there is no example where a country decided that Nobel Prize winners and those awarded with state conferred honors can be given the task of selecting those entrusted with the power to punish people
c) The autonomy and independence of the Judiciary is protected under the Constitution, which allows a member of the higher Judiciary to be removed only through the cumbersome impeachment process. The intent was to ensure that justice is administered without fear or favor. The Jan Lokpal proposal of putting higher judiciary under Lokpal is absurd. The consequences are even worse, when you consider that under it the Jan Lokpal Bill will have independent investigating and prosecuting agencies. Will any judge ever dare differ with the views of a prosecutor of the Jan Lokpal since he might face prosecution himself if his orders are misunderstood? Is it logical that Investigation and Prosecution be done by the same agency?
d) Since this country understands the language of cricket well, just try to imagine Indian captain Dhoni on field. During the course of play, several critical decisions need to be taken and it should be best left to the captain on the field to do that. If we start with the premise that Dhoni is likely to falter and should be under strict scrutiny for each and every decision he takes on field, it will be completely impossible for him to take out-of-box decisions. Most of the audience might not agree with his decision to let the last over of the match bowled by a new bowler but we cannot raise a suspicion every time he does so. If we don’t want the whole functioning of the government come to standstill on petty issues, the Prime Minister may be best kept out of Jan Lokpal.
e) We have to understand, there are enough strong laws available in this country to address literally every issue under the Sun. Implementation of a new bill will require a strong will and huge additional resources and that is where the whole problem lies. Consumer courts were created to give speedy justice but today a large number of cases are pending before it just because of lack of resources. The law was always there to arrest the likes of Mr. Kalmadi or Mr. Raja but it could happen only when it was backed by a strong will to do it. State Lokayukta is there in India in as many as 18 states today but only a Santosh Hegde could make a difference in Karnataka. There are strong laws against illegal construction, land grabbing and even mining, the need of the hour is to implement it and not spend time into making additional laws.
f) The resource crunch will destabilize the Jan Lokpal. If both the Central govt. and State govt. employees are to be brought under its scanner, the number of people it will have to cover will be around 10-12million. Obviously, huge machinery will be needed to deal with this. Also, the same system of corrupted civil servants, politicians, anti-corruption agencies, judges, media, civil society groups and ordinary citizens will work under the Lokpal to deal with corruption and just because they will work for Lokpal, will they become incorruptible? Won’t it mean adding another bunch of bribes to the long list of existing ones?
g) There is NO right to appeal- The right to at least one appeal against an order, which affects someone adversely, is inherent in the Constitution. There is no specific clause regarding appeals in the Jan Lok Pal Bill, and that is unconstitutional, to say the least
Noted political analyst Pratap Bhanu Mehta has nicely summed up the addition of Jan Lokpal as one more law. He says, “To many of us, this proposal seems like the way we approached educational reform: if BA is not good quality, introduce MA; since MA does not work, have MPhil; since we can’t trust our PhDs, have a further NET exam, endlessly deferring to new institutions at the top of the food chain without attending to basics..”
I sincerely feel that Jan Lokpal is a Medicine which has severe side-effects. While there are many ways which can help us effectively fight corruption arising out of political nexus, there is only one way to fight social corruption:
The RTI legislation can be the most effective tool in eradicating corruption. The many government decisions taken on critical issues have to be brought under public scrutiny and it is how the government can be made accountable for its decisions. Another effective way of dealing with corruption arising out of political nexus is with the help of electoral reforms like proportional representation, state funding of elections which will lead to uniform spending of candidates and most importantly the right to recall of elected representatives.
Corruption in day to day life is more of a social issue. It is a value system where when I benefit its desirable, when I am the victim, it’s not. Only a true introspection can get us to its roots. It has to be tackled from inside and only then a Lokpal can be effective.
IMPORTANT NOTE:
India third 'snoopiest' country: Google Transparency Report. The GOI have requested Google to censor the internet contents/opinions of many users who speak against the Indian government. Even dictatorship countries haven't placed such a number of censor requests to the Google. So it’s clear that the government of India is keeping an eye on its internet users and with the help of Google, GOI have acquired the privacy details of the internet users to intimidate them. The important fact is that the Indian government seeks censorship to political views, hate speech, Government Criticism etc. It is clear we the Indians don’t have freedom of speech when it comes to criticizing government in key issues.
DISCLOSURE:
Hence I hereby declare that the above article is the personal opinion of the author and it is not being copied from any other Internet/anti-India websites.
