India’s romance with Anna’s Lokpal is over

There was a magic moment about a year ago when Anna Hazare symbolised the wishes of millions in his resolve to slay the hydra-headed monster of corruption as revelations of scams multiplied and petty graft in a citizen’s dealings with authority proliferated. The fast at Delhi’s Ramlila Grounds was the culmination of a charged protest movement. The government scrambled for a compromise. Lokpal was the designated wand that would banish all wrongs and all hands weighed in.

The rest, as they say, is history. After one year, we are living in a startlingly different world. Mr Hazare is struggling to be relevant, concentrating for the present on the more familiar home territory of Maharashtra. He has not given up his countrywide campaign and promises to put up a one-day jamboree at Jantar Mantar with another campaigner, yoga guru Baba Ramdev. But the fizz has gone out of the movement.
What happened? In a sense, there was a poetic willing suspension of disbelief as the crowds first rallied to Mr Hazare’s call. Over time, more and more people became disillusioned with the campaigner’s rustic beliefs such as tying a man to a tree and giving him a hiding to reform him. And Team Anna took on a life of its own: deriding and clowning politicians and members of Parliament became de rigueur.
Lokpal became the only game in town and the government panicked, giving Mr Hazare and his team the honour of conversing with a team of senior ministers in an official format. Under threats, a Lokpal Bill was brought before the Lok Sabha and failed passage in the Rajya Sabha by a sleight of hand. There were lone voices raised against the logic of the Lokpal, but the government was on a fire-fighting mission to stave off a seeming gale force wind.
Two aspects of this phenomenon need to be analysed: the medium of the campaign and the logic of the proposal. There is no gainsaying the fact that Mr Hazare did good deeds in his home village, but the wider national stage and the adulation of the masses unsettled him and his team. His simple remedies were appropriate for a village setting but were hopelessly out of place in a growing technological nation state.
Second, while the Lokayukta at the state level has relevance, creating a parallel administration of the Lokpal at the Central level is both illogical and foolish. To begin with, it would distort India’s system of parliamentary democracy, creating in the process a parallel army of bureaucrats walking all over the mechanism of a democratic state. In other words, Mr Hazare’s Lokpal concept and parliamentary democracy are as distinct as chalk is from cheese.
An elected government must be responsive to public sentiment. Corruption did not suddenly emerge on the Indian firmament, but grew exponentially, as in China, due to new liberalisation policies and the growing size of the cake. The pie got bigger and there were larger pickings. But the cure was surely not in creating a new czar who would supersede elected representatives and have his own army of officials answerable to no one, all of them remaining pure as snow. It was the mood of the times that lent romance to the idea of a Lokpal, a single answer to the country’s ills.
Now that the scales have fallen from the eyes of many people who were carried away by the euphoria of the occasion, where do we go from here? The UPA-2 government is under pressure as the shadow of the 2014 general election is already looming large. It is well recognised that despite its bigger majority, the Congress-led coalition in its second avatar has fared less than splendidly. The two-horse arrangement has worked less well the second time round. Congress allies are more ambitious and less
disciplined.
Although the government has promised to pass the Lokpal Bill, the only sensible course would be to go back to the drawing board to look at the complexities of grafting an alien concept on to the system of parliamentary democracy. If we have fallen out of love with the system we have adopted, it would be more honest to constitute a new constitution-making body than to make a hybrid of our parliamentary democracy, which has served us well. We cannot blame the system for our own faults and greed.
Perhaps such an enormous task can best be performed after the next general election when the political picture becomes clearer. We need to remember the consequences of Indira Gandhi converting the parliamentary system into a virtual presidential dispensation in practice leading to the imposition of the internal Emergency. Given India’s diversity of the ethnic, religious and tribal varieties, a highly centralised system is less suited to the country’s needs.
Despite the sharpness of divisions among political parties, it should not be beyond the wisdom and vision of the political establishment to agree on red lines beyond which they will not go. To go the Lokpal route, as envisaged by Mr Hazare, would be suicidal. Inevitably, the trend today is towards greater regionalism as diverse political parties rule states. Healthy regional growth is all to the good and will propel the country towards prosperity faster.
The Congress-led UPA will need the help of the Opposition parties to resolve this dilemma at a time of increased animosities. Quiet lobbying, rather than grand gestures of an all-party meeting, is the key to success. First, the Congress must recognise that it was entrapped by the mood of the Anna movement, and, with Opposition parties baying for its blood, felt it had few options left. None of the major Opposition parties wants an early general election. The time to strike is now. The BJP, preoccupied with its own travails, should show statesmanship in helping to put the Lokpal foolishness behind the country. There are other ways of encouraging honesty in public life than through a crazy scheme that would create a parallel army of bureaucrats and supervisors coming in the way of institutions of parliamentary democracy.