Mirror, mirror, who’s to be master of all?

“If Papa say ‘no!’
And Mama say ‘yes!’
What a mess, what a mess, what a mess.

If less is more
And more is less
With every aphorism we regress

Why every sneeze
Must draw a ‘bless’
Only God can guess.”
From Jelleybe Verses by Bachchoo

Anna Hazare had a dream, like Martin Luther King before him. It began with an idea of suffering. Did Martin free the blacks of the US? Will the Lokpal Bill end Indian corruption?
Chou En-lai was once asked for his opinion on the effects of the French Revolution on Europe. “Too early to tell,” he said. We may now ask whether King, the militant Black Panthers, the liberal Kennedys and President Lyndon Johnson and their legislation were responsible for the progress of Afro-Americans. The answer has to be “all of these”.
King’s movement divided the US into whites and blacks, with some whites on the black side. Master Hazare’s movement has divided the population into those who take bribes and those who give them — perhaps a 50-50 divide?
There were constitutionalists in the “nay” camp who maintain that a democracy has means to heal itself and calling Master Hazare a blackmailer.
The “yea” camp adopted Malcolm X’s slogan “By Any Means Necessary”, then settled for the legislative inclusions of Parliament in the Lokpal Bill and went home.
“The question is”, as Alice might have asked Humpty Dumpty in Through the Looking Glass, “can you make one law mean so many different things?”
“The question”, answered Humpty Dumpty “is who is to be Master, that is all!”
And that really is the question: Can those who give bribes stop or bring to justice those who take them?
The Hazare movement posed the classic dilemma to the Indian legislators. It’s like the “Have you stopped beating your wife?” question. If the legislators voted against anti-corruption law they could be seen as corrupt or at least pro-corruption. They had to vote for the broom that would sweep clean.
We onlookers can only welcome the legislation even if we doubt its ability to bring about change, or, in some instances, even the wisdom of its sweeping measures.
Take an example from real life: I am being driven late one night by a friend through the crowded streets of Mumbai. His mobile phone rings and he answers it while driving. As we approach the traffic lights and slow down, with my friend still holding the phone to his ear and chatting away, a police constable steps out from a hiding place at the crossing and flags the car down.
My friend doesn’t put his phone away. With his free right hand he gestures “cash” to me. I take my wallet out and he peers in and extracts a `100 note from my wallet. His window is wound down and the constable is hovering outside. Still talking on the phone, my friend hands him the note, salutes him by touching his forehead and says, “Hang on, just moving off” into the phone.
“You gave it with pleasure, sir. I didn’t ask for it, did I?” the constable asks in Marathi.
“Buy your wife a saree,” my cynical friend says as he drives off.
(No judgments yet)
The next day I am in a rickshaw. A police squad car is parked around a corner and two police officers are waiting for vehicles that violate road traffic regulations. My rickshaw driver may or may not have gone through a traffic light as it turned from yellow to red. He is stopped and gets out to show some papers to the cop who is crisply uniformed and crisply rude.
The rickshaw man comes back shaking his head.
“It’s gone up,” he says.
“What has?” I ask as we drive off with the policeman looking stern in his semi-shaded glasses.
“Yellow-jumping used to be `30, he took 40,” the rickshaw driver says.
And so to judgment. It is commonplace that policemen are paid paltry wages and subsidise their income through bribes. In the case of my mobile-toting friend to whom a hundred rupees is, as we say, haath ka kachra (especially if it’s from my wallet), the subsidy the policeman took may not buy his wife a saree, but perhaps his children a meal or two. In the case of the rickshaw driver, he is as badly off or poorer than the policeman who leeched off him.
Officially both offenders should have been taken to court and fined. The fine, like the bribe, would make the rickshaw driver more conscious of the law when driving. It would make no difference to the mobile-toting habits of my “friend”. The fine would pass to the public coffers and in a very roundabout way could end up, with millions from other routes, in the Swiss bank account of some corrupt land-developer who has swindled the public purse.
The other question which must be asked is who will police the anti-corruption police? Is Lokpal creating yet another layer of people with the power to extract bribes for turning a blind eye to the bribery they have investigated?
Even more intriguing is the possibility of anti-anti-corruption commissions monitoring the anti-corruption commission and then an anti-anti-anti-corruption commission to spy on them and so on, as in mirrors facing each other, to infinity.