Recent announcements and actions by Anna Hazare and some of the other leaders of the anti-corruption movement have come in for a lot of criticism for valid reasons. No doubt passing Jan Lokpal bill in the winter session of the parliament was and is the central focus of the movement. The parliamentary resolution passed during last session containng some sort of a commitment by all the political parties to craft the final bill, so as to contain the three basic demands from Anna and his team is expected to be discussed threadbare in the standing committee currently. The committee is also supposed to reconcile these elements with representations and blue prints about the same institution received from other sections of the civil society, government institutions like CVC, CBI (those that might have felt the most threatened in terms of restructuring and operational redeployment). The committee will also hear from political parties, pressure groups representing sections of populations (SC/ST, dalits, muslims) some of whom might have felt apprehensive of aspects of the proposed bill that appeared not sufficiently inclusive. Clearly, though the clarion call for the movement was given by Anna and his immediate supporting organizations, e.g., India Against Corruption, it can not surely be a case of simple rewording of the Jan Lokpal bill as visualized by the team Anna before being placed in the parliament as a fait accompli to be debated and passed like a routine bill.
When the team Anna decided to directly campaign during the Hisar election, many people including many staunch Anna supporters were genuinely dismayed. Not just because this direct involvement in the electoral politics may tend to rob the moral superiority of a movement that was essentially perceived to be apolitical. But the argument provided by some prominent team Anna members like Kejriwal, Bedi and even Anna himself was not very convincing and indicated confusion in thinking. It sounded quite disingenuous for the team Anna to claim that their anti-congress campaign was a simple fall out of the Congress party (through its president) not publicly intimating by a letter to team Anna (as BJP and some other parties involved in the electoral fray had apparently done) or publicly pledging otherwise the party’s commitment to pass the bill during the winter session. And it was rather naïve for them to believe that Congress being the major party within UPA that is in power in the Center, a simple commitment given by Sonia Gandhi or Rahul Gandhi would have been a sufficient guarantee for the successful passage of the bill. The weakness of this position becomes exposed when, well into the Hisar campaign, Anna acknowledged the receipt of the letter from the prime minister assuring him of the passage of a strong Lokpal bill in the coming session and announced his ‘faith’ in the word of the prime minister. It is not clear what would have been their campaign objective or strategy if this letter would come a few days earlier that is before the election campaign.
Three points need be made about these recent confused peregrinations of some of those associated with this movement. First of all, the team including Anna probably has not fully grasped the momentous nature of the achievement of the movement. It was indeed rare in the history of independent India that such a spontaneous, largely non-political response of the common people was on display to a politically significant (legislative) issue. As a result a high level of awareness has been generated about the issues involved across the length and breadth of the country. But this popular support should not be construed by anybody to assume that a referendum has already been conducted (the apparent display of public support notwithstanding) and the results are already overwhelmingly in their favour. No silly pronouncement should have been made, meaningless or harmful actions taken so as to dissipate the momentum, the positive vibe the movement has generated, and open dissentions (not merely disagreements) among the members of the team Anna should not have been paraded. Secondly, Jan Lokpal bill is one among many proposals and it was in the interest of everybody to engage in debates, discussions in appropriate forum (media, parliamentary committees, etc) to find out how much of the positive aspects of their proposals could be retained while augmenting them with other good suggestions from other concerned individuals, groups, political parties (while trying to defeat, in a democratic manner, the bulwark of reactionary thinking holding the parties back). Thirdly, street level politicking (electoral campaign, dharna, hunger strike) has to be held in abeyance at least till the draft bill gets to be debated in the parliament. That stage, if required again, should await its turn.
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