By playing power games over a serious issue like corruption, our two main parties, the Congress and the BJP, are bogging up their own political grounds. If Anna Hazare has been able to magnetise the middle class and the righteous class around the problem of checking corruption despite his suspect methodology and ideology, it is because the issue exercises everyone. Even those who would subject Anna, his team and its Jan Lokpal Bill to sceptical scrutiny believe the issue per se demands urgent, concrete and sincere governmental action. But the Congress-led UPA government, by clamping down meanly on Anna’s right to protest peacefully, has hurt democratic sentiments across the board. This not only betrays the government’s nervousness on corruption, it also shows a repressed guilt over its insincere draft Lokpal Bill.
The UPA has even got its realpolitik wrong. By arresting Anna and his associates, the government has unwittingly invested them with the aura of public heroes. In the process, it has allowed the BJP—unclean though its hands are with scams in Karnataka, Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand—to foreground a forgotten saffron onto public consciousness by invoking the Sangh parivar’s name time and again as the sole sponsor of Anna’s campaign (whether he or his associates like it or not). It has also provided the old NDA allies and other opposition parties, which were all in disarray, a new rallying point in the streets.
Anna might have to answer for some irregularities in trusts he runs, as pointed out by the Justice Sawant committee’s six-year-old report. His associates on those trusts might also have some answering to do. But how could the UPA have been so stupid as to invoke irregularities of a meagre Rs 2.5 lakh, which would only serve to magnify by contrast its own wrongdoings involving several lakh-crores of rupees?
The best way for the UPA would have been to keep Anna and his team engaged by showing credible progress on the government Lokpal Bill presented in Parliament on at least a few counts: an ombudsman (five-faceted, as proposed in an alternative civil society draft, or a single body) that is truly autonomous of government control in matters of recruitment and decision-making, with the authority to initiate proceedings without government concurrence, and with dedicated investigation and prosecution assistance outside of government control. This would have made the government’s intentions more credible in the public eye and limited the Anna team’s options for obstinate public action.
The BJP has more knots to untangle. A smile might be back on its face, but it can’t be seen riding two horses for long. The public hasn’t yet been told of the BJP-RSS’s views on the kind of Lokpal they want. They haven’t supported the Jan Lokpal Bill, nor have they come out with a critique of it. Till now, they have neither expressed a view on the government’s draft Lokpal Bill nor put forth specific points of their own for consideration. All they have done is make general noises against the UPA’s corruption, besides indulging in small-scale violence outside Parliament on August 9. This while their own governments’ performance in Karnataka and other states has matched the UPA’s in venality.
Political battles on the issue of corruption—as demonstrated during the Jayaprakash Narain movement of the 1970s and l’affaire Bofors in the 1980s—usually tend to be protracted. The gainer, generally, is the figure perceived as less tainted—Morarji Desai in 1977, V.P. Singh in 1989.
The Jan Sangh, the earlier avatar of the BJP, had also gained a bit in 1977, untried and untested as it then was. But if the BJP hopes to make any gains in Congress-ruled states by raking up the issue of corruption, it should logically also count on losing out, on the same grounds, in some of the states it rules. Besides, people will want to know its precise stand on having a Lokpal. With nothing forthcoming from the party, they will have no recourse but to second-guess this from how it conducts itself during the course of Anna’s campaign and during parliamentary deliberations on the issue. Also, one might say, from how its chief ministers conduct themselves. At least one chief minister other than B.S. Yediyurappa is making it hard for people to believe in the BJP’s seriousness: Narendra Modi, by persecuting police officers like Rahul Sharma and Sanjeev Bhatt, who are trying to help book those guilty in the 2002 riots, is only hardening the impression that the BJP will never favour the scrutiny of government sins by independent functionaries.
