The just available results to elections to 133 civic bodies elections across Maharashtra should serve as an eye-opener to political parties that have positioned themselves on the Lokpal issue in a certain way only to appease the Anna Hazare campaign, believing this will yield them an electoral dividend.
The polls were held last Sunday in Mr Hazare’s backyard, and after the social activist had virtually endorsed the recent slapping in public of NCP stalwart Sharad Pawar.
In the election, NCP walked away with control over as many as 47 civic bodies, followed by Congress (32), BJP (seven), and Shiv Sena and MNS (two each). In another electoral repudiation of the “strong Lokpal” proponents, only a few days earlier, the Congress won by-elections to two Assembly seats in Haryana. Quite apart from the speculation about the Hazare campaign emerging as an election factor, other developments suggest that certain specifics the Hazare group insists on as being critical to the proposed Lokpal law may in fact be hyperbole. Take the case of the Citizens’ Charter and Grievance Redress mechanism. While the Lokpal issue is still in the discussion stage, the state governments of Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, Punjab and Delhi have already put such a mechanism in place. It concerns time-bound delivery of public services to ordinary people, and institutes penalties for erring or corrupt officials. On the evidence of what BJP chief spokesman Ravi Shankar Prasad said at a televised debate at the Calcutta Club recently, the mechanism in Bihar is working very well. This would suggest that the Hazare proposition, that the Citizens’ Charter must necessarily be a part of the Lokpal law, simply does not hold. At the Centre, the government was ready with the Citizens’ Charter and Public Grievances Redress Bill to be presented in the Winter Session of Parliament in 2010, but political wrangling on the JPC issue washed away the session. The Bill is due to come up shortly again. But the Hazare lobbyists are already accusing the political class of foul play.
At the all-party meeting on the Lokpal issue on Wednesday, NDA parties ranged against the government advised that the Lokpal Bill should not be rushed through the Winter Session of Parliament in the absence of a suitable consensus. This does not make them or the government a party to corrupt practices, although the “strong Lokpal” lobby spreads this allegation.
This is the basis of the campaign that in 40 years the parliament did not muster the will to enact a Lokpal law. The facts discount such a claim.
According to a 2001 collation of the Reference Division of the Lok Sabha Secretariat, seven separate Bills-with varying features- to have a Lokpal were introduced between May 1968 and August 1998. On six of these occasions, the Lok Sabha was dissolved (actuated by political considerations unconnected with the Lokpal matter) before the issue could be clinched. The bill introduced by the eighth Lok Sabha in 1985 lay at the committee level for 40 months and was then withdrawn by the government for want of consensus.
A reason for this also was that the Prevention of Corruption Act (taking in the Prime Minister) had come into effect in September 1988.