A Lokpal law has eluded the country for around 40 years. As the records attest, this was not for want of trying on the part of political parties, regardless of what Anna Hazare and his cohorts might believe. Genuine differences of perception among parties prevented a clearcut, unanimously acceptable formulation of the ombudsman law.
This time around the bill proposed by the government has cleared the stage of the parliamentary standing committee.
But it is hard to see what shape the debate might take when the modified form of the original bill comes up in Parliament on December 19. The plethora of dissenting notes to the main report, including from members of the ruling Congress and virtually every party represented on the committee, tells us exactly how difficult the discussions might have been in the standing committee. As in the past, sharp differences remain — between parties and individuals within parties — on what makes a good Lokpal.
Lest some get carried away, it is necessary to point out that such differences do not mean that politicians have hatched a conspiracy to not bring a so-called “strong” Lokpal, or that the Congress has any reluctance to initiate measures to fight corruption, which is the plank Mr Hazare says he would campaign on from December 27 in states where Assembly polls are shortly to be held. Such a campaign is his political business, but it has little to do with complexities surrounding the Lokpal issue.
The Maharashtra social activist has threatened that all hell will break loose if a “strong” Lokpal law was not in place by the Winter Session of Parliament. Acting under such pressure, the standing committee rushed through its work in a few weeks. The political class as a whole caved in before what has come to be called “civil society”, and has probably done the country a disservice by reducing a difficult issue to some formulaic mumbo-jumbo, tick-marking broad categories as it went along. A complex subject required acute debate and discussion that might throw up a clean report, not hasty presentation to appease unrepresentative elements. Any way one looks, a bad precedent has been set.
The details can be gone over. But fundamentally, in the name of fighting corruption, the Hazare movement posits a Lokpal that would virtually stare down the sitting Prime Minister, making a mockery of our parliamentary system, as eminent jurists have pointed out. It also envisages the creation of a parallel bureaucracy of lakhs of people that would be investigator, prosecutor and judge rolled in one. All of this is not too distant from the “Animal Farm” that worried George Orwell. Our parties need to take a deep look at issues.