Anna Hazare’s ‘Bhendtantra’
While a megalomaniac rides on a media-created wave, what should the Parliament do to save our nation from turning into a banana republic?
We are at the verge of becoming a banana republic. The urban middle class seems to have joined the media-driven frenzy with great fervor. Earlier it was the judges, who would alter and deliver judgments to satisfy the whims of candle campaigners. Now, the entire polity of our nation is getting affected by a madness whipped up by an overzealous TV media.
The huge crowds shown on TV and those who are worked into super-excitement over Anna Hazare’s anti-corruption brouhaha are like a flock of thick-headed sheep or a mob of mesmerized children being led to an abyss by wily Pied Pipers like Hazare, his associates, and the TV media who are trying to herald an era of ‘Bhendtantra’ in our country.
It is also like the way rank bad jingoistic Bollywood movies like 'Gadar' and 'Tiranga' turn out to be blockbusters.
One hopes the corrupt, insensitive, and wily Congress government does at least one thing right in the supreme interest of the nation. It must not buckle under the pressure of the ‘bhendchaal’ movement of Hazare and his ‘team’ of extremely opinionated, scheming, intolerant, and hardened bigots who are not amenable to honest and openhearted discourse.
The anti-corruption movement of the Anna team has turned from being a genuine expression of people’s anger into a massive farce. It has degenerated into unethical and blatant coercion, with downright fascistic overtones. It is so evident in the way the crazy crowds are being egged on by the IAC (India Against Corruption) volunteers through the use of the TV media and extensive carpet-bombing of SMS and Facebook posts to mob and browbeat the members of Parliament into towing the Hazare line.
Once again we are hearing bizarre slogans like Anna is India, and India is Anna. This kind of bigotry and a blind personality cult is unacceptable and must be resisted at all costs by right-thinking people. Who knows, Anna Hazare will be anointed as the next father of our nation since his movement has already been christened as the second struggle of liberation. The TV media can do anything with all those anchors looking desperately for sensational slogans and zabardust bytes to boost their TRPs.
The other day I saw Anna Hazare running at Rajghat and the media singing paeans about the agility of a seventy-eight-year-old man. The media did not elaborate on why he was running. The ‘great’ anti-corruption crusader was running for cover to beat the rains, frenetically pushing aside the policemen and his supporters.
The idiot has just one answer to every question posed by his opponents. ‘They should be sent to a mental asylum.’ Baba Ramdev is out of the picture of this mass-frenzy. He was the man who actually started it all and created the anti-corruption platform and whose feet Hazare touched in gratitude for giving him a new mission in life. Now, Ramdev has to seek an appointment to meet him. Hazare issues his diktats as if he is the sole arbiter of right and wrong. He has become a megalomaniac, inaccessible even to his own village folk.
The government and the political class must not give in even an inch over the supremacy of the Parliament issue. Let Hazare agitate, fast, and die. These media-created monsters cannot be allowed to set the nation’s agenda. The Lokpal Bill must be examined very carefully, under no pressure. Let the Standing Committee take inputs from all sources and telecast its proceedings and sittings. The government should not even talk to Hazare and his ‘team’ unless they withdraw their fast and retreat to a position that is sane and civil, and allows a healthy and serious discourse without the media charade.
And the young SMS, Facebook, and ‘Mombatti’ activists should take a pause and stop beating their chests and drums. They are being plain stupid. It is time they refrain from indulging in this newfound pastime of theirs. They are being used by the media and the wily activists who, riding on their backs, are furthering their personal agendas and not that of the nation. They are trivializing an issue that requires serious application of mind and hard work.
The Lokpal Bill is a tiny part of the continuing fight against corruption. The young brigade should study the Jan Lokpal Bill, the seventeenth draft, carefully to understand what it actually is. They should also read the first draft of the bill; the one Shanti Bhushan wanted to be passed in a big hurry just a few months ago. This will help them understand how ‘immature’ the authors of the JLB are.
In fact, the proposed bill envisages the creation of a brand new institution that will work with the old laws, and with the same old people, who will be reporting to a new all-powerful super-boss - the Lokpal. He will be searched and finally selected by a group consisting of judges, the PM, the Chief Election Commissioner (CEC), and the Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG), and the leader of opposition in the Parliament. Contrary to what the wily activists may make us believe, all of them but the leader of opposition are political appointees in one way or other.
Moreover, an entirely independent Jan Lokpal will inhibit the power of people and their representatives, and strengthen the hands of a self-serving and largely corrupt and an extremely devious bureaucracy that has been the real cause of our nation’s woes since independence. The Jan Lokpal will also provide unlimited scope for wild and mischievous witch hunts by an unethical and unbridled media, and professional social activists who are prone to making factually incorrect and motivated allegations and innuendos based on hearsay. It will hamper the smooth functioning of various governments and compromise the 'unity of command' principle of management. In fact, the very idea of a Lokpal in our kind of democracy is redundant.
Our parliament is called Loksabha in Hindi. It is the meeting place of people, and of those who take care of their interests. It is our elected representatives in various governments who are actually our Lokpals. Their constituents go to them with grievances and seek as well as demand solutions to their problems. We must not weaken or compromise their absolute power to frame public policy and law and their supremacy in the democratic super-structure. It will be foolish to do that.
We cannot let a police officer or a bureaucrat or a judge defy people’s representatives in the name of ‘work according to the rule’ argument. The JLB will become a convenient excuse for non-performance. Look at the people who are in the forefront of this movement. They are all hard headed ex-bureaucrats and lawyers, the real parasites of society. They live off us, secure in their jobs, whereas a political leader has to seek our approval every five years. Bureaucracy has always hated the supremacy of the political class since it invariably comes in their way and prevents them from having a free run.
And trust me you can get away with abusing a Lalu Yadav, or Manmohan Singh or Advani, but you cannot abuse the Collector, the SP, and the judge of your district without inviting strong rebuke, and serious legal consequences.
Now, if a politician does not serve you well and performs his duty badly, pull him up. If he does not listen to you, dump him after five years. What if you don’t want to wait for those five years? You should have the right to recall him. The Indian Constitution does not provide that right to you. So, what next? According to Anna Hazare and his team you should gherao, coerce, and force your representative into accepting your demands, scuttling the democratic process. And some of us are blindly doing that by joining a mob of raucous sloganeers. Is it ‘loktantrik’? No. It is obviously a ‘bheedtantric’ and ‘bhendtantric’ method.
What is the ‘loktantrik’ way of doing it when we don’t have the ‘right to recall’ a bad and corrupt people’s representative?
Instead of fighting for the creation of yet another institution that works with the same set of laws and with the same set of people, we should demand the ‘right to recall’ our bad representatives. It is simple and doable in the age of Internet.
Let us wage a strong war for the right to recall our representatives. That will be a positive and democratic move. Let this government start that process and institute a mechanism whereby dissatisfied constituents can recall their inept and corrupt representatives. Anna Hazare should stop exhorting his fun-loving and over-excited moronic fans to ‘gherao’ the MPs to pressurize them into passing the JLB. If he were really wise and smart, he should have been fasting for this greater cause.
If the present government and the Parliament want to go for a counter-strategy to deal with an over-the-top megalomaniac, this is what they should do. There is an old proverb. If you are asked to shorten a line without using an eraser, you should draw a longer line next to it.
Start the process of incorporating the people’s right to recall their representatives in the constitutional framework. Juxtapose this great idea against the JLB. You must do that before an unbridled media driven mass-movement transforms our nation into a banana republic.
Let all the political parties, jurists, and sane people join hands in this. Convene a joint session of the Parliament to amend the Constitution to grant the citizenry ‘the right to recall’ its reps.
Hazare, the megalomaniac, and his wily cohorts, can then exercise this constitutionally sanctioned power to claim that they are the real voice of the people. Let us see if Hazare succeeds in recalling the MP who represents his village Ralegaan Siddhi* by arousing public sentiments against him and exercising his right to recall. This definitely will be one smart way to save our LOKTANTRA from turning into a media-driven BHEEDTANTRA or BHENDTANTRA.*The development of this village is the sole achievement of the great social activist- turned- megalomaniac since 1965. It is a fact that a well-known corrupt politician like Pawar has done much more for his constituents in Baramati than Hazare.
I hope someone passes on this idea to Manmohan Singh and L.K. Advani and the rest of the political class. They seem to have lost their capacity to think clearly and come up with good ideas. I also hope Hazare and his team-mates, who have turned belligerent after having tasted a bit of success, also think about it with a cool head instead of harping on a piece of a thirty-page legislation. They must divert their passion and energy, and media power to fight for a far nobler, bigger, useful, and democratic idea like the Citizen’s Right to Recall.
And what happened to Bharat Mata’s portrait? Kejariwal says they did not use it to avoid controversy. There is also this new controversy about the slogan 'Bharat Mata Ki Jai' and 'Vande Mataram'. What will Hazare and Kejariwal do now, abandon these as well, and start wearing skull caps to prove their secular credentials? If they can abandon Bharat Mata, they can abandon everything to succeed in their partisan politics. Moreover, they seem to be seriously interested in promoting the UN charter than the Indian Constitution and the cause of our people. The preamble to the JLB does not quote Buddha, Ashoka, Vivekanand, Gandhi, Nehru, JP, and Ambedkar. However, it quotes extensively from the UN charter.
The latest news is that Hazare will only talk to Rahul Gandhi. Wow! One idiot wants to meet the other, and both will determine the fate of our nation. I have this feeling that Hazare's and his team's main grudge is that they were not included in the National Advisory Council (NAC) of the Nehru-Gandhi parivar. It is surprising that Hazare is so much in the awe of the most corrupt family of our nation and yet claims to be an anti-corruption crusader.
RKS
