By Amulya Ganguli, IANS,
It was inevitable that the Manmohan Singh government’s hesitant, lethargic, rule-bound and seemingly insincere attempts to tackle the menace of corruption would finally blow up in its face.
As long as it was a case of one scam at a time, Bofors one day, the Harshad Mehta affair the other, the government could afford to carry on with its customary dilatory tactics, arguing that the law would take its own course.
This time, however, the simultaneous eruption of a series of scams – the spectrum swindle, the Commonwealth Games rip-off, the Adarsh housing society scandal, the Niira Radia tapes, the P.J. Thomas and Shashi Tharoor episodes and so on – meant that a routine recourse to the earlier evasions would no longer work.
What was more, the middle class has become far more assertive than before and has also tasted blood by virtually compelling the judiciary to take a fresh look at various cases which had to be closed because the witnesses had turned hostile, such as Jessica Lal’s murder and the BMW hit-and-run cases.
As a result, the quiet resignation with which the country had earlier accepted parliament’s failure to enact the Lokpal Bill for four long decades was no longer possible.
The government had probably expected that this time too, it would go through the familiar routine of constituting the so-called GoM (group of ministers) to examine yet another Lokpal Bill for creating the post of an ombudsman to probe venal practices among the high and mighty. But the charade had been enacted far too often in the past for the public to take it lying down.
The government’s apparent insincerity is not the only reason why greed and sleaze have become such a huge talking point in the last few days with the Gandhian Anna Hazare leading the charge. The other crucial factor which has helped Hazare to gather an admittedly motley crowd around him is that the Lokpal Bill apart, none of the government’s other efforts to curb fraudulent conduct is seen as credible.
Even the previously well-regarded Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) is not deemed impartial, let alone the police. They are all seen to serve the ruling party’s partisan interests, especially when the guilty individuals are connected with it. Since the government has consistently shied away from granting autonomy to at least the CBI (if not the police despite the Supreme Court’s directives), the organization no longer inspires the earlier trust.
It is only when the CBI functions under the Supreme Court’s direct supervision that it is believed to be doing an impartial job. Otherwise, the expectation is that it will abide by the government’s orders even if this means shielding the culprits.
One reason for the loss of faith in the government’s words and deeds is the dwindling image of the entire political class. The most obvious example of the latter’s cynicism and culpability is the increasing number of MPs with a criminal background who have been entering parliament.
All the suggestions made by the election and law commissions to debar at least those candidates against whom prima facie charges have been accepted by a court of law have been rejected by politicians on the ground that the accused might have been framed by his rivals. Hence the preference to do nothing and let the number of MPs with a shady past grow.
Given this long and unedifying record of the politicians of either purposeful inaction or suspected intervention on behalf of the guilty, the latest upsurge of public disenchantment was only to be expected. It needed an individual perceived to be honest like Hazare to come forward with the traditional Gandhian recipe of a fast unto death to compel the authorities to do what he and his followers think is right.
There is little doubt that only a man of Hazare’s pristine reputation could have forced Sharad Pawar to quit the post of chairman of the GoM on the Lokpal bill by wondering aloud how a man with a dubious background like Pawar’s could head a panel dealing with corruption.
Again, only Hazare could have forced politicians like former Haryana chief minister Om Prakash Chautala of the Indian National Lok Dal (INLD) and former Madhya Pradesh chief minister Uma Bharati, who once belonged to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), to leave the venue of his fast.
Hazare’s point was that these leaders, whose past is not lily-white, could not be allowed to jump on to his bandwagon on the pretext of fighting corruption. All that they could do was to sit among the ordinary people and stay away from the main stage.
However, for all the accolades that he has been receiving, there is a downside to Hazare’s campaign. The castigation of politicians may win him middle class applause, but it also creates disaffection against the system. One of Hazare’s frontline supporters, the Maoist sympathizer Swami Agnivesh, has even called for scrapping the constitution.
This is a dangerous trend reminiscent of the period in Europe when fascism gained ground because the democratic political systems were denigrated by “self-selected” leaders, to quote what a Samajwadi Party politician has said about Hazare’s campaign.
(09.04.2011 – Amulya Ganguli is a political analyst. He can be reached at [email protected])