by Rohini Hensman
Many people including members of Team Anna have
expressed reservations about the way in which their campaign has been
developing, and some have even resigned. This raises questions about the
real aim of the leadership around Anna. Is it really what it is
proclaimed to be?
Is the aim to get the Jan Lokpal Bill passed by parliament?
Team Anna has repeatedly stated that they have just a
one-point agenda: to get the Jan Lokpal Bill (JLB) passed. According to a
detailed report, [1] the bill is actually the brain-child of Arvind
Kejriwal, who joined the National Campaign for People’s Right to
Information (NCPRI) when it was working on the Right to Information
(RTI) Bill, and was later delegated, along with others, to draft a
Lokpal Bill. However, he parted company with the rest of the team when
they did not agree with him that the judiciary should come under the
scrutiny of the Lokpal. As Justice A.P. Shah explains, the NCPRI feels
that corruption in the judiciary should be dealt with by a strengthened
Judicial Standards and Accountability Bill. [2] Kejriwal was
unconvinced, and went on to draft the bill with inputs from Prashant and
Shanti Bhushan. He also succeeded in getting the full support of
anti-corruption campaigner Anna Hazare.
Since the bill is so crucial to the campaign, it is
worth asking: what are the chances that it could actually become law?
Most people who support the bill have not read it, and those who have
taken the trouble to do so find it deeply flawed. One legal expert who
attended consultations about the bill and, along with others, made
criticisms of it that were apparently not heeded, felt the flaws were so
glaring that the movement could not possibly be about the bill. The
Lokpal takes over functions of the legislature (parliament) and
judiciary, thus violating the basic structure of the separation of
powers which is fundamental to the constitution of a liberal democracy.
This structure cannot completely prevent the abuse of power, but it does
put in place certain checks and balances, and thus creates obstacles to
the seizure of absolute power by any state institution. Abuse of power
by the Jan Lokpal would be almost inevitable, given that it would have
the power to determine, arbitrarily, a punishment for corruption between
6 months and life imprisonment. Thus even if the JLB were to be passed
by parliament, it would almost certainly be struck down as
unconstitutional because it violates the principle of the separation of
powers. Even if it were not struck down, it would by no means end
corruption, because ’You are creating an institution that becomes
impervious to being challenged for corruption or for abuse of power.’[3]
In other places, the drafting is extremely vague. For
example, the establishment of Lokayuktas is mentioned only in the last
two-and-a-half lines, where the bill merely says that the provisions
would be same as for the setting up of the Lokpal! But the main
criticism of the bill, according to Usha Ramanathan, is the nature of
the power it would establish: ’RTI said every one of us can take our
destiny into our hands to the extent that we are able to find the
energies. Lokpal says, "You become a subject of mine, I will protect you
from corruption." So if the Lokpal doesn’t succeed, I can’t do anything
for myself. That’s the fundamental difference. If you do not
democratise control over corruption, you cannot control corruption.’
(see[3]).
The demand that the JLB should be passed by parliament
unchanged cannot, then, be a serious one, given the draconian nature of
the bill and its lack of constitutionality on one hand, and its sloppy
drafting on the other. It could gain so much traction at least in part
because the vast majority of its supporters did not read it. If the real
goal had been to pass the bill in parliament, it would have been
drafted with greater care.
Is the goal a broader democratic transformation?
The fact that electoral reform, with the incorporation
of the right to reject and recall candidates, was proposed by Team Anna
soon after Hazare called off his fast at the end of August suggested
that the team might be planning to campaign on a range of democratic
rights issues. Promising to send representatives to Manipur to find out
whether it was worthwhile for the team to support Irom Sharmila’s
struggle strengthened this impression.
One of the first indications that this would be an
illusion came in NDTV’s ’We the People’ edition on ’Gandhigiri in the
Age of Violence’ on 2 October. During the discussion, ex-police officer
Kiran Bedi said categorically, ’I can’t believe the Indian army would
kill an Indian for the sake of killing.’ Coming in the wake of
revelations in the mass media that this is precisely what has been
taking place, and has resulted in thousands of unmarked graves in
Kashmir, [4] Bedi’s public defence of the impunity granted by the Armed
Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) brings into question her commitment to
fundamental rights. When Sajjad Lone commented that ’All the killings
that the army has done are not of militants,’ she conceded, ’Could be!
I’ve done encounters too. When I go for an encounter, I have to take it
on, and I can go wrong and I can go right.’ The issue of human rights is
nowhere on her radar, nor the idea that the root cause of corruption is
excessive power and the freedom to abuse it with impunity.
However, the most dramatic proof that the team could not
work together on broader issues surfaced on 12 October, when Prashant
Bhushan was assaulted by members of the Bhagat Singh Kranti Sena (BSKS)
and Sri Ram Sene in his chambers at the Supreme Court, in the full glare
of TV cameras that had come to film an interview with him. [5] A
visibly shocked and shaken Bhushan afterwards told reporters that they
attacked him because he had advocated a plebiscite in Kashmir, and said
that if the majority wanted to separate from India, they should be
allowed to do so. The organisations too claimed the attack, and
explained it in the same way. Everyone condemned the assault, but Anna’s
condemnation was curiously lukewarm, because he added that the
attackers ‘should not have taken the law into their own hands. They
should have taken recourse to the law.’ The implication - that he agreed
with the politics of the attackers but not with their methods, and that
possibly the sedition law should have been used against Bhushan - was
made clearer subsequently, when he proclaimed that Kashmir was an
integral part of India, and he was ready to die or go to war with
Pakistan to keep it so. His suggestion that the core group would have to
discuss whether Bhushan would be allowed to stay on in the group [6]
was quickly withdrawn, but not quickly enough to avoid giving the
impression that he considered airing such views a serious offence.
Shanti Bhushan stood by his son, but other members of
the team hastened to distance themselves from Prashant Bhushan’s views
on Kashmir. Once again, despite the backdrop of revelations about
ghastly human rights violations in Kashmir, they did not mention state
atrocities. One may disagree with Bhushan that a plebiscite would
guarantee the democratic rights of all Kashmiris - if 51 percent want to
join Pakistan and 49 percent do not, what happens to the democratic
rights of the 49 percent? - but at least he recognises that the people
of Kashmir have democratic rights. Yet with the exception of Shanti
Bhushan, no one else in Team Anna spoke up in his defence. Even more
disturbing was the fact that it was he, the victim of violence, whose
continued membership in the campaign was questioned, whereas there was
no suggestion that the perpetrators of the violence - who were also part
of India Against Corruption and had put up pictures of themselves at
Tihar jail demonstrating for Anna Hazare - should not be part of the
campaign. Indeed, no one else in Team Anna acknowledged that photographs
of BSKS leader Tejinder Pal Singh Bagga with Sri Sri Ravi Shankar and
L.K.Advani can be found on the internet, showing clearly where his
political affiliation lies. [7]
With such serious differences on the issue of
fundamental rights, it is clear that the Anna movement could not
campaign on a broader democratic transformation without falling apart.
This cannot therefore be its goal.
Is the aim to curb corruption?
Curbing corruption was certainly the goal of a large
part of the movement, including members of its leadership. This section
would consider the campaign of August 2011 a success if it resulted in
the government passing a strong Lokpal Bill (not necessarily the JLB) in
the winter session of parliament, along with supplementary
anti-corruption legislation. However, the decision by Kejriwal, Hazare
and others to campaign against Congress in the parliamentary by-election
in Hisar in September - before the government had had a chance to pass a
Lokpal Bill - made it clear that another section of the leadership had a
different goal. As Hartosh Singh Bal comments, according to Kejriwal, ’
"Except the Congress, give your vote to any of the
other 44 candidates in the fray. Do not worry excessively that there are
corrupt individuals among the candidates. If they win, the Lokpal Bill
will send them to jail" 10 October 2011. Let us try and understand
Kejriwal’s logic (if it can be termed that)—as long as the Congress is
kept out, it does not matter that corrupt politicians are elected to
Parliament. In fact, to take this argument to its logical conclusion,
Kejriwal seems to suggest that if enough corrupt non-Congress
politicians are elected, they will pass a Lokpal Bill that will ensure
they are sent to jail.’ [8]
Justice Santosh Hegde immediately condemned the move,
pointing out that Congress had not been given time to pass the Lokpal
Bill, that the other two candidates in the fray were not above board,
and that if Kejriwal and Anna felt compelled to campaign in elections,
they should simply campaign for the best candidate and not against any
particular party. [9] Two more prominent activists, P.V. Rajagopal and
Rajinder Singh, decided to quit the core committee, objecting to the
political turn taken by the campaign and complaining that they had not
been consulted about it. [10] Indeed, given that the main beneficiary of
a campaign against Congress would be the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP),
which had as many or more corruption-tainted ministers as Congress, it
would be correct to say that this was a party political campaign rather
than a campaign against corruption.
However, the most persuasive evidence that the aim of
the campaign is not to curb corruption comes from what might be called
’the inflated travel bill scam’. On 20 October, the Indian Express broke
the story that Kiran Bedi had routinely been travelling on discount
airfares but charging her hosts full fare or even business class fares.
[11] Her first line of defence was that she was doing this with the
knowledge and consent of her hosts, thus ’saving’ money and passing it
on to her NGO, India Vision Foundation (IVF). [12] But it subsequently
emerged that not only did her hosts not consent to her inflated travel
bills, but some were indignant when they discovered, for example, that
she was trying to get them to pay twice over for the same journey, and
charging business class fares on a flight that did not have business
class. [13] Former Chief Justice S.J.Verma commented that claiming
reimbursement of money you have not spent is unacceptable, but Bedi’s
justification for doing so was even more upsetting: if you pick a
person’s pocket and give the money to someone else, does that mean you
haven’t committed the offence of pickpocketing? [14]
Apparently sensing that passing off profits as
reimbursement was not merely unethical but might be illegal, the
trustees of IVF instructed her to return the extra money and refrain
from inflating her travel bills in future. Bedi made this announcement,
but botched it by saying that her travel agent Anil Bal, who was also a
founder-member of IVF, would return the money. Bal objected strongly to
the insinuation that he was responsible for the inflated bills, and to
the ’bizarre’ order that he return the excess money, saying that he had
no transactions with Bedi’s hosts. He said he was returning the money in
the IVF account forthwith, and resigned both from being a trustee of
IVF and from being their travel agent. [15] Meanwhile Kejriwal, who had
taken two years’ paid study leave from his job in the Income Tax
Department on the strength of a Rs 9-lakh bond that he would return and
work for them for three years, but had instead gone on to work for his
NGO Parivartan, (see [1]), was trying (unsuccessfully) to evade payment
of the bond. [16]
If Bedi’s and Kejriwal’s rants against ’the corrupt’ had
not been so strident, if the JLB had concentrated on big-ticket
corruption instead of aiming to prosecute every clerk or linesman who
took Rs 50 extra to do the work they were required to do, these
deviations from the straight and narrow path might have been considered
trivial, but in the circumstances, they made Bedi and Kejriwal appear
hypocritical. To make matters worse, instead of distancing himself from
Bedi, as he had from Bhushan, Anna defended her and instead blamed a
’gang of four’ in the government for the debacle! [17] It was clear from
the start that the real root of corruption - unaccountable power and
impunity - were not the target of the campaign, but these recent
developments demonstrate that for some of its leaders, it is not even
about curbing corruption in the narrower sense of financial
irregularities. If that were the aim, the first requirement would be to
ensure that members of Anna’s own team had nothing to hide.
Is the goal regime change?
All the evidence suggests that the real goal of these
members of Team Anna is regime change, and that, too, not in the weak
sense of a change of government, but in the much stronger sense of
constitutional change.
The campaign in Hisar was only one of many instances in
which Congress was targeted; Anna blamed the government for the story of
Bedi’s inflated travel bills instead of giving credit to the Indian
Express for its exposé; and Kejriwal insinuated that Congress was
responsible even for the assault on Prashant Bhushan, despite manifest
evidence that it was launched by right-wing activists close to the BJP.
Meanwhile, the BJP has escaped criticism despite the fact that one of
its chief ministers (Karnataka) was in jail for corruption, a second
(Uttarakhand) had to be dismissed due to corruption charges, and a third
(Gujarat) failed to appoint a Lokayukta for seven years and then
opposed the Lokayukta chosen by the Chief Justice, wanting instead to
appoint a person who was subservient to him. Kejriwal and Bedi said that
’RSS people’ were welcome to join their movement as Indians, [18] even
as it emerged that Yedyurappa allocated about Rs 50 crore worth of land
that had been reserved for other purposes to six RSS-affiliated
organisations and seven leaders from an RSS background at throwaway
prices while 350,000 genuine applicants waited in the queue! [19] It is
hard to escape the impression that the campaign is aimed at bringing
down the UPA government and installing a BJP-led government, which is
precisely why Rajinder Singh resigned, saying that Team Anna had
departed from its original objective and had become involved in ’power
brokering’. [20]
However, it is not just Congress that is cast as the
enemy, but also constitutional democracy. Interviewed about why he was
insisting that his own bill be passed without discussion or debate in
parliament, Anna was simply unable to grasp why discussion or debate was
needed; so far as he was concerned, he wanted the bill passed, and
therefore it should be passed. This was how he ruled his village, and
this was how he wanted to rule the country. Put beside his contempt for
the electorate and elections, one gets a strong impression of hostility
towards parliamentary democracy. When Kejriwal was asked by Karan Thapar
(in ’Devil’s Advocate’, CNN-IBN on 9 October), whether Anna was above
parliament, Kejriwal replied immediately that he was. Then, for good
measure, he added, ’Every citizen is above parliament.’ But if every
citizen is above parliament, why have parliament at all?
Add to all this the fact that the JLB makes parliament
subservient to an unelected panel of guardians, and the relentless
targeting of MPs by Bedi in her ghunghat act at the Ramlila grounds, and
the sentiments expressed by these members of Team Anna are not so
different from Mussolini’s statement that parliament ’is a plague-boil
that poisons the blood of the country.’ In an essay on ‘Ur-fascism’,
Umberto Eco had predicted that "In our future there looms qualitative TV
or Internet populism, in which a selected group of citizens can be
presented and accepted as the ’voice of the people’ . . . As a result of
its qualitative populism, Ur-Fascism has to oppose ‘rotten’
parliamentary governments…Every time a politician casts doubt on the
legitimacy of a parliament because it no longer represents the ’voices
of the people’, there is a suspicion of Ur-fascism." [21] In this
context, demands for the right to reject and recall candidates, which
Chief Election Commissioner S.Y. Qureshi has said would destabilise the
country, [22] appear to be an attempt to make parliamentary democracy so
expensive and unstable that it collapses.
The Sangh Parivar has always wanted to overthrow the
present constitution, and would also cheer on Anna’s declaration that he
would be willing to go to war with Pakistan and fight to the death to
ensure that Kashmir remains an integral part of India (regardless of
what Kashmiris might want). Anna’s vision of a society ordered by caste
hierarchy coincides with theirs. As Jyotirmaya Sharma observes
perceptively, ’Hazare is the leader of "banal Hindutva" . . . What
Hazare is knowingly or unknowingly doing is to become the informal
recruitment centre for the harder versions of Hindutva. By making "banal
Hindutva" honourable, Hazare has begun the process of making the harder
versions of Hindutva more acceptable and legitimate. The collateral
damage . . . will be Indian democracy.’ [23]
This does not mean that there is no rivalry between Anna
and the Sangh Parivar. Hazare has been unhappy with the RSS for trying
to steal his thunder with their claims to have mobilised people for his
movement, while the RSS has objected to the involvement of minorities in
the anti-corruption movement. But they need each other. It is clear to
the RSS that the issue of a Ram temple no longer has popular resonance,
and Advani’s yatra has fallen flat because everybody knows that the BJP
is mired in corruption; they need Anna’s clean image to win them votes.
On the other side, Anna does not have the cadre to mobilise crowds, nor
does he have a party machine that can win elections and instal him as
the head of a Jan Lokpal. They have to work together, and they do. It
was clear from the beginning that their agendas converged, and we can
now identify the precise point at which their goals meet: the Indian
version of a fascist state, a Hindu Rashtra, with a Jan Lokpal that will
incorporate members of Team Anna: ’the viewpoint that Anna and by
extension Kejriwal represent is the same simplistic and ill-thought-out
rightwing nationalism of the Sangh which has no space for the
Constitution or the liberal values it embodies…Through the twentieth
century, this combination—a claim to efficient governance, a mythic
father or motherland, a contempt for a certain section of people—has
been the mark of fascism.’ [24]
Averting the danger of fascism
In this situation, the government has the primary
responsibility to counteract the danger represented by both the Anna
movement and the Sangh Parivar. If it enacts a strong Lokpal Bill and
supplementary legislation, people like Justice Hegde, whose only
interest in the movement is to curb corruption, would be satisfied. But
not Hazare, Kejriwal, Bedi and others, whose agenda is regime change and
might campaign against Congress on the pretext that the bill that has
been passed is not their Jan Lokpal Bill.
Counteracting this would require Congress spokespersons involved in
public debates on the issue to come out with a critique of the JLB,
drawing on what has been said by members of the NCPRI, legal scholars
like Usha Ramanathan, and others.
However, even this is not enough. Any government
committed to secularism has to act far more decisively to clamp down on
the perpetrators of communal pogroms and Hindutva terrorist attacks, and
especially to root out elements in the police, intelligence agencies,
investigative agencies, bureaucracy, and army (Lt. Col. Purohit cannot
be an exception) who are complicit in these attacks. Both terrorist
violence and infiltration of the state apparatus are typical of the ways
in which fascism ensconces itself, and unless action is taken now, it
could be too late. In this context, the passing of the Prevention of
Communal and Targeted Violence Bill is a priority that the UPA simply
has not taken seriously enough. If certain groups in society do not
enjoy equal protection of the law, special measures are required to
ensure that they do so. Of course the BJP will cry foul, but surely
those within Congress who have been pushing for the bill have enough
intellectual resources at their disposal to distinguish between Hinduism
and Hindutva, and to point out that this is not the first time that
legislation to protect vulnerable sections of the population has been
passed?
However, the struggle against fascism cannot possibly be
won if it is left to the government alone; members of civil society too
have to be involved, and those on the Left have a special
responsibility in this regard. This brings us to a disturbing question:
what are people like Prashant Bhushan and Medha Patkar doing in a team
that includes such right-wing elements? Conventional wisdom would have
it that they are there to push the movement to the Left, but it does not
seem to have moved an inch in that direction. Part of the answer lies
in the authoritarianism that is an integral part of the politics of a
large part of the Left. For example, Bhushan advocates plebiscites as a
means of achieving a ‘participatory democracy’ that is more advanced
than the representative democracy embodied in parliament, but does he
know that Hitler carried out six plebiscites between 1933 and 1938? A
plebiscite on the Lokpal Bill would in fact be less democratic than the process of public consultation that has taken place and a debate in parliament.
This is only one instance of a more general malady
afflicting a section of the Left: a kind of political dyslexia that
renders them incapable of distinguishing left from right. Thus instead
of pushing the government to present and enact the Prevention of
Communal and Targeted Violence Bill speedily, the Communist Party of
India (Marxist) effectively gangs up with the Right to sabotage it by
raising spurious objections; insisting, for example, that it should
cover only victims of communal violence and not victims of other forms
of targeted violence. How would victims of communal violence lose if the
bill covers other victims of targeted violence? And who but the
perpetrators of violence would gain if the bill fails to be passed?
Which side are they on? Prashant Bhushan is even more confused. In an
interview with Rajdeep Sardesai, he referred to the ‘fascist mindset’ of
the people who had assaulted him, and suggested that ‘the leaders of
such organisations who propagate violence, who propagate this kind of
fascist thinking,’ should be booked, and their organisations banned; yet
when Sardesai asked him if such people could be part of his
anti-corruption campaign, he replied, ‘Yeah, they can be part of the
anti-corruption campaign,’ but should not be allowed to share the
platform. [25] It does not occur to him to ask why fascist elements who
are by no means uncorrupt should be joining his campaign in large
numbers. In both these cases, the CPI(M) and Bhushan are so intent on
opposing the centre that they end up in a position that is right of
centre.
If the campaign for the JLB is genuinely opposing
corruption, it will end if and when the government passes a strong
Lokpal Bill and supplementary anti-corruption legislation. One can only
wait and see.
References
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