It is hard to find anyone in the country who does not believe that corruption is not hitting us in the gut. Some like Justice J.S. Narang, formerly of the Punjab and Haryana high court, however wonder just how many institutions would we go on creating to deal with a malady.
The implication is that it might suffice if we made our existing laws and rules work better — that the solution really lies with enforcement, not creating another thicket of legislation.
Justice Narang’s reflections — clearly in the context of the Lokpal debate pushed by the Anna Hazare group — have been conveyed to Union finance minister Pranab Mukherjee, the chairman of the joint drafting committee comprising government and civil society members to produce the basic outline of the Lokpal Bill, in a letter of June 6, 2011. Justice Narang believes that remedy lies in Article 311 in dealing with corruption in the executive branch of the state, and civil and criminal processes are both available.
“Do we need to create another authority?” he asks. He says the founding fathers gave us “the golden book”, the Constitution of India. Should this be allowed to be converted into a “paper-weight”? he asks. “Nothing is wrong with the system”, asserts Justice Narang.
Instead of creating another institution, he believes that we need to fortify procedures and “simplify” them in order to make them effective. “We should not escape from our responsibility,” he adds.
A retired industry secretary in the Union government, Dr. Chandra Pal, who has been writing to the Prime Minister on matters concerning corruption since April 2011, says in a more recent communication that the Prime Minister and the higher judiciary ought to be kept out of the purview of the proposed Lokpal legislation.
Bringing the PM within the scope of the Lopal’s scrutiny will make the Prime Minister “dysfunctional”, and will send a “wrong message” to the international community that India doesn’t have even one person of integrity to lead the nation, says Mr Chandra Pal who now also heads a political party to advance the cause of dalits. While expressing deep concern about corruption and public morality, in an interview to this newspaper (June 12, 2011), the constitutional law seer Fali S. Nariman noted that the Prime Minister “may as well resign” if he came under scrutiny by the proposed Lokpal. And he felt that in our system of parliamentary democracy, only the Parliament must have the power to eject the Prime Minister.
If a Prime Minister was thought to have engaged in corruption, the answer was political mobilization within Parliament leading to his resignation. In the matter of suspected judicial corruption, Mr Nariman has called for a judicial ombudsman who would enquire into a given case in a confidential manner and would have the power to recommend even removal. He was quite clear that members of the higher judiciary interpret the Constitution and must not be subjected to scrutiny by a Lokpal.
The nub of Mr Nariman’s thinking in the Lokpal debate is summed up when he asks, “Who will guard the guardians?”