Author: Sandhya Jain
Publication: The Pioneer
Date: April 12, 2011
URL: http://www.dailypioneer.com/330967/Its-a-civilian-coup-détat.html
The inclusion of 'civil society' representatives
in the drafting committee of the Lok Pal Bill raises several discomfiting
questions. Where are we headed as a nation?
Since RTI campaigner Arvind Kejriwal was micro-managing
Anna Hazare's drive for a Lok Pal Bill conforming to one drafted by select
activists claiming to represent civil society, and as this Bill will yield
an institutional structure giving sweeping powers to a certain ideological
clique, it may be in order to demand accountability from activists associated
with this Lok Pal movement.
Readers may recall that under electoral reforms
made by our defamed politicians, candidates for public office have to declare
all assets and monies held by them, their spouses, and minor children, before
the Election Commission at the time of filing nominations. Bureaucrats make
declarations to relevant authorities at the Centre and in the States.
As the Lok Pal Bill activists derive their
clout from involvement with the Right to Information legislation, this writer
hereby submits an open RTI application on behalf of the nation. We demand
that all prominent persons supporting civil (read a chosen faction) participation
in drafting a new Lok Pal Bill, make full disclosure of all personal assets
and monies held by them, their spouses and minor children.
Disclosures must cover assets and monies of
NGOs they run directly or are associated with, complete with details of projects,
funding and utilisation, diversification of funds (if any). The institutional
revelations must extend to trustees / board members of these NGOs, to reveal
links with current or retired civil servants and / or politicians. And since
prominent NGOs tend to corner a disproportionate share of Government funding,
they should henceforth submit to the scrutiny of the Comptroller and Auditor-General.
As for Anna Hazare, he has repeatedly shifted
the goalposts of his agitation - from civil society participation in drafting
a 'Jan Lok Pal Bill' jointly with Government, to membership of the joint committee,
to naming its leadership. In his haste to achieve results, Anna Hazare repeatedly
invoked Congress president Sonia Gandhi and the National Advisory Council,
and urged her to make the Prime Minister concede on chairmanship of the draft
committee and notification.
This forced Ms Gandhi to come forward and
urge him to end his fast, with diplomatically worded assurances. Her foray
into the domain of the executive and the legislature discomfited even Congress
stalwarts, not to mention outfits like the Samajwadi Party, which questioned
the creation of legal structures not derived from Parliament, and entrusting
power to unelected crusaders with unknown agendas and ample funds to whip
up moderate street participation.
The Hazare saga has ended; but the real fate
of the draft and legislation lies ahead because what was attempted was a palace
coup to destabilise Mr Manmohan Singh. It was a calibrated urban relay-revolution
tapping into the Facebook-Twitter crowd's quest for a 'worthy cause' to espouse,
with prime time TV playing ball with the patrons of the draft. But there are
limits to the attention span of Twitterwallahs, and as IPL 4 grabbed eyeballs
on April 8, the Hazare camp began cracking under pressure as many owed their
prestige to Government patronage and could not afford scrutiny; a compromise
was quickly sewn up to retreat from Jantar Mantar.
The spectre of a civilian coup d'état
becomes clear as one peruses the draft of the 'Jan Lok Pal Bill' which seeks
to subsume the Central Vigilance Commission so that political leaders and
officials come under its ambit, as also the Judiciary. This Lok Pal will have
police powers to file FIRs, chargesheet the accused, and file cases. It will
have judicial power to conduct judicial hearings, send people to jail, and
seize private property.
The Prime Minister's Office would fall in
its ambit, something all Governments have resisted, even though Mr Atal Bihari
Vajpayee was personally willing to be covered by the Lok Pal, and the present
Prime Minister, Mr Manmohan Singh, has nothing to fear from it. The issue,
obviously, is about the prestige of the office, not the person manning the
post. Worse, this 'Jan Lok Pal Bill' seeks to make decisions of the Lok Pal
and State Lokayuktas binding and final. These include powers to dismiss corrupt
officials, including judges and politicians.
It does not take a rocket scientist to see
that as there is an overlap in membership of the 'Jan Lok Pal' draftees and
Ms Sonia Gandhi's publicly-funded National Advisory Council, both the draft
Bill and the agitation to inflict it upon the nation draw strength from the
NAC.
The draft Bill is nothing more than an Uber
Ordinance trying to force Parliament to enact it into an Uber Law in order
to make the NAC the de jure power of the nation. With such totalitarian powers
at its command - equivalent to wielding Emergency-style powers without invoking
an Emergency and without needing parliamentary endorsement for any action
- Ms Sonia Gandhi and her coterie will elevate themselves into the ranks of
awesome leaders.
One admires the breathtaking audacity. The
only institution they dared not touch (in the first instance) is the Armed
Forces. One shudders to think of our fate should they ever acquire powers
to meddle with national security.
Since this proposed Hyper Government of NGO-Kings
must be selected and validated by a hyper-elite club, the proposed selection
committee inter alia includes: The chairpersons of both Houses of Parliament;
two senior-most judges of Supreme Court; two senior-most Chief Justices of
High Courts; chairperson of the National Human Rights Commission; Comptroller
and Auditor-General of India; Chief Election Commissioner; Bharat Ratna award
winners (a ruse to include foreign nationals like Amartya Sen who managed
the mysterious academic credentials of Mr Rahul Gandhi); all Nobel Laureates
of Indian origin (possibly the Chemistry laureate with an American wife);
and the last two Magsaysay Award winners of Indian origin (whose contributions
to society were hardly known till they received the stamp of approval from
the Rockefeller Foundation).
Interestingly, the claim that the 'Jan Lok
Pal' draft compares with the powers of the Hong Kong ombudsman is untrue.
The Hong Kong ombudsman has no powers of prosecution; he merely submits a
report to the Chief Executive; and is appointed by politicians. Actually,
no country in the world permits civil society nominees to initiate prosecution
against citizens, and judge and punish them. It decapitates the constitutional
separation of powers. Ms Sonia Gandhi must explain why she wants such powers
for a band of moral pretenders owing allegiance to her.
