The Third Flight Path.

Tehelkahindi.com; Friday, August 05, 2011.
The Lokpal Bill is in danger of skidding off the rails. As it is introduced in Parliament, eminent activist Aruna Roy tells Shoma Chaudhury why we should not rush into it.

THE LOKPAL BILL is now being debated in Parliament, almost 40 years after the idea was first mooted. Unfortunately, parented on one side by decades of wilful government inertia and, on the other, by the panicked hustle of ‘Team Anna’, it is not a glorious document.

The Team Anna document tried for too much, over-reaching itself; the government one does too little. The former seemed to have been put together in a cleansing rage: it wants to set up a super-structure of high-integrity individuals to curb and prosecute corruption among MPs, higher bureaucracy, lower bureaucracy, clerks, peons, police, every government department and project, the judiciary, and the prime minister. It wants to protect whistleblowers and fix every governance grouse of every Indian citizen all through the same magic wand: the Lokpal.

The latter seems to have been put together not as an act of visionary statesmanship but a defensive feint: doing just enough to get by. It allows for the setting up of a Lokpal and frees it up to investigate and prosecute MPs and higher bureaucracy without being shackled by official sanctions, but it does not give it complete autonomy either in its selection process or its administrative and financial control. It also excludes the prime minister from its purview and just hives off all the rest: no protection for whistleblowers, no state Lokayuktas, no mechanism for checking corruption in the judiciary and middle bureaucracy, and a seriously ill-thought out grievance redressal mechanism. The government had some fair critiques of the Jan Lokpal Bill Team Anna was insisting on. But clearly, they could not exert themselves to come up with acceptable alternative answers.

Over the past few months, in fact, as Team Anna and the government have tussled theatrically over the shape of the Lokpal Bill sizzling television channels with their dharnas, crackdowns, airport receptions, escapades, and colourful charges and counter-charges there’s been a huge opportunity for disturbing reflections about the nature of corruption and the fight against it.

Strangely, the toughest piece to swallow in all of it has been some of Team Anna’s own actions. In the battle for good, governments everywhere in the world have classically been the inferior partner, pushed, cajoled, threatened onto the right path by pressure lobbies: the electorate, civil rights activists, media, judiciary, the opposition, and sometimes, just genuinely good leadership. But for the longest time, at least in India, no one has ever quite outlawed government and the political class as dangerously and in such essentialist terms as Team Anna’s rhetoric managed to do.

To raise this concern is itself difficult business. The government and political class across the board do very little to deserve defence: they are pervasively corrupt, they are brazen, selfish and timid at the same time. You keep hoping Parliamentarians will redeem themselves with a display of statesmanship, but they almost never do. This season, in particular, with poor leadership and scams spilling simultaneously like a twin can of worms, it has been especially difficult to keep the faith. There is a huge temptation to say: let’s crack it all open. Let’s experiment wildly with the magic wand.

But, you never expect civil society to miss a step in its own basic principles. Team Anna’s mistake was not in ratcheting up a street-storm over the Lokpal Bill, it was in demanding not that the Lokpal Bill be debated in a robust and time-bound manner, but that their particular version of the Bill be rammed through by a certain date.

Even the contentious Joint Drafting Committee was a charade on both sides, because one side really did not want to listen and the other was only gauging the government by the “percentages” it was giving in to the Jan Lokpal draft. Had they even arrived at a common goal? It was impossible to decipher.

This peculiar rush and mutual intolerance has trapped Team Anna in a situation unprecedented for civil society. Today, Team Anna’s strident public stances and its inner impulses and selfimage do not match. Having acquired a huge and angry constituency through its India Against Corruption forum, it feels beholden to keep the temperature going.

To make matters more complicated, no matter what the detractions, this raised temperature has been a triumph. To bring old and seething frustrations against corruption to whitehot boil is no mean achievement. Events of the past few months have shown that one does not really need a Lokpal or supercop, if existing institutions would just do their primary jobs in the correct proportion: a functioning Comptroller and Auditor General, a vigilant media, an upright judicial bench, and an executive that is at least decent and shame-faced enough to let matters take its course. There are more powerful leaders and corporate heads in jail now than in the past many decades. Even the supposedly toothless Karnataka Lokayukta report unarmed with the power to prosecute has taken a scalp. But would all of this have clicked into place if the anti-corruption movement had not created a climate of no-tolerance?

The trouble is, Team Anna is trapped in the trapeze act of hard positions necessary to keep the issue hot and theatre of interest alive (in an electronic era, the challenge is not just to grab attention but to sustain it). Yet, it also wishes to seem open and receptive to suggestions on changing its draft law. These are untenable positions: how can they deride the government for not accepting the Jan Lokpal draft exactly as they have conceived it and yet keep changing and improving it themselves at the same time? How can it urge other civil society stakeholders to send in suggestions for improvement yet insist they will not change the basic structure of their draft or consider any alternatives no matter what the rationale? What kind of corralled debate is this? And why take to the streets before all the finer deliberations were done and a satisfactory draft Bill was ready? Why shoot before you have picked the best cannon?

Far from being an exhilarating journey, or even confrontation with power, the Team Anna-led Lokpal debate and anti-corruption crusade has left many would-be fellow travellers strangely disturbed and wary. Into this vexed situation this Lokpal Bill being imperfectly hustled in different ways by both government and Team Anna there has now come a third voice.

ARUNA ROY of the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS) is a widely reputed civil society activist and one of the key catalysts behind the paradigm-shifting RTI Act. At first, Roy and her colleagues stayed away from the Lokpal debate, caught in a peculiar dilemma: how do you challenge long-cherished co-travellers publicly without dismantling or discrediting their cause?

But eventually, the larger ethical demand prevailed. The basic goals and intention of Team Anna’s Bill are unimpeachable. The MKSS has now come up with a “basket of measures” that addresses all these concerns but in a decentralised, and perhaps more sustainable, way (See TEHELKA Lokpal: An option without a fast or fuss by Revati Laul, 23 July).

In this conversation, Roy details the many complex issues that underlie the corruption debate, their implications for democracy, and why it is important not to rush through with the Bill, even as one continues to keep up the pressure on it.

In the first sign of good faith, the government has circulated not just its own imperfect draft Bill, but a detailed analysis of the Team Anna Bill to all Parliamentarians ahead of its introduction in the House. Perhaps, the tide will yet turn, and there will be a more nuanced debate on the merits of an effective anti-corruption Bill. If so, it is time to start discussing a newer, better shape.