Jan Lokpal Bill: Has Anna Hazare really won?

Victory , especially when it comes after a long , hard and unequal struggle , can taste very sweet. The fact that the Anna Hazare-led movement against corruption has forced the Parliament to agree to key elements from its draft of the Jan Lokpal Bill is an extremely significant one and can potentially mark a turning point in the manner in which democracy is practised in India.

This has been an instance where people have agitated for something rather than against it, and held out against a campaign of cunning and calumny , the kind which usually wears down its opposition into disgusted submission . Deviousness has been countered by stubbornness , and procrastination by a form of emotional armtwisting ; the movement did not waver , nor did it lower the stakes for itself. It gambled everything , every single time and has finally won .

Or has it? The single biggest stumbling block throughout this whole process has been a marked lack of intention on part of not only the government , but the entire political class . If we extricate ourselves for a moment from the debates about which version of the bill was better and whether fasting was a legitimate part of democracy or not , we might wonder as to why , far from dragging its feet on the bill, did the government not wholeheartedly champion its cause instead ?

For an administration that has been under siege on the issue of corruption , wouldn’t a robust act of legislation have been exactly the right signal to emit ? It could have appropriated the protest movement , and used it as cover to navigate the bill through the political class , and emerged as a somewhat belated , but nevertheless , heroic saviour . And yet , it chose to oppose the bill at every juncture , using every means possible but that of honest negotiation .

This continued till the very end , creating a crisis of trust and leading to hardened positions on the other side.
RahulG andhi’sintervention was a continuation of the script . Regardless of the merits of his suggestion ,the manner in whichheentered the debate and the bizarrely delayed nature of the timing made it seem as if he resided on another planet and teleported his way in without any awareness or interest in what happened before .

His disappearanceimmediately after seemingly participating in the Inter-P arty Parliamentary Elocution Contest made it easy for his actions to be decoded asfurther evidenceof the government’s lofty disinterest in the issue . The role of the other political parties was no better , with the BJP dancing around the question of the exact nature of its support till very late in the day . To its credit , when it did reveal its position , it seemed not only to stay with it, but eloquently argue the case on its behalf too.

The fact that the Parliamentary debate was sparkling in its range of arguments and thoughtful in its nature indicates that the central problem is not in our institutions , but in the intention that animates them . If treated with the respect that it deserves , which indeed is the assumption on which it is founded , Parliament delivers to us a form of democracy that is as enlightened as it is representative . The problem is thatit reachesthissideof itself ever so rarely , and in this case , it is instructive that it was pushed , virtually at gunpoint ,tofinditsbetter self. Left to itself, it is clear that Parliamentwouldhavedonewhatitseems to do so well nowadays — collude in a conspiracy of mutual recrimination to avoid systemic change .

The larger question that this experiencebegsisif structurecan force intention . In the immediate short term , we still don’t know if the Parliament will in the absence of a real intention ,comeup with an effective Lokpal bill, now that the Anna Hazare sword has been sheathed . In the longer run , the issue is whether intention can at all be produced by structural change or is it a necessary pre-requisite for the success of any structural change , no matter how ambitious.

However independent a body , it still breathes the same air as the rest of the system and needstointeractwith aswelldepend on the support of existing institutions ,mostof which aretainted .The need would be to simultaneously change all partsof thesystem ,most notably the police and the judiciary , andthiswill need genuineintention on part of the political class .

Why is intent such a problem today ?After all ,whilethe politicalclass mightseethecapitulation to a protest movement led by the urban middle class as a lossof hard-won power ,the truth is that corruption is an issue that bedevils all of the country , and the poor pay a higher pricethan any other section of society .Itshouldideally be in their electoral interest to beseen tobeon the rightsideof such a movement . The central issue that dogsdemocracy in India istheweak causal relationship between governance and electability .

The emphasis on representativeness , an admittedly necessary pre-requisite for democracy in a country with as much diversity as India , has helped create a system of political patronagewhere caste ,class ,ethnic and regionalidentities are converted into vote banks through actsof politicaltransfer payments .Since politicians are notevaluated on the effectiveness of their policiestobring aboutdevelopment of a secular kind , free from considerationsof identity ,their interestin policy hasbeen intermittent .Theurban middle class , which sought this kindof governance ,often for itsown interests ,has never been significant enough in numbers nor focused enough in its demands to merit any electoral consideration .

That is what has changed . The big long-term success of this movement would be if it consolidates this victory into a more durable form of organisation that makes governance an electoral variable .Already this psychological victory will turn into a psephological one , for now no election result can be interpreted without taking this constituency into account . Analysts will have to see voting patterns through this frame , and this will in turn influence political parties to take this class and its aspirations more seriously . In the long run , of course , it is only when the political class can experience a direct causal relationship between their actions and their electoral fortunes that the intention to do the right thing , whatever their version of it is, will begin to come into play . Till then , democracy stands anxiously with its fingers crossed , hoping that better policing will lead to greater honesty of intention .