The parallel of good boiling tea leaves to make tasty tea with the boiling mood of the nation to create a new era complete with a transformed system, as illustrated in the Tata Tea Jaago Rey TVC, is both timely and absorbing.
After the series of scams hit the UPA II coupled with irritants like inflation, popular mood has been seething with anger for a while. Anna Hazare-led India against Corruption campaign galvanized people further.
While the political class and media thought that Ayodhya verdict would lead to another bout of mindless violence, peace and common sense got the better of communalism pronto. Bihar voted irrespective of caste and community, higher women turnout, ensuring a landmark victory for Nitish Kumar, who championed development for the backward state. Several Central ministers, leaders and business executives have been arrested on charges of graft.
A new India on the rise calls for a thorough politico-legal mechanism that combats deep-seated corruption in all walks of life. Lokpal is just one of the key aspects of this mechanism. A strong Lokpal has to be followed with key reforms in electoral politics, legal system, police et al. New India’s long journey needs to start with a few initial steps like a strong constitutionally guaranteed Lokpal institution.
The Central Bureau of Investigation is the apex investigative authority on corruption charges, but is controlled by the government, including appointments, budget, mandate et al. No wonder, it has been used by the ruling party or alliance at the Centre to get back to its detractors. While investigative acumen of CBI can be of great national use, it can be under the ambit of the Lokpal institution. And that would effectively prohibit political misuse of the CBI. Public Ombudsman in the form of Lokpal needs to have all government functionaries within its ambit, from the Prime Minister to lower bureaucracy and a similar model needs to be replicated for Lokayukta as well. Scams showed certain MPs accepted bribes for casting their vote during a no-trust motion or even asking questions in Parliament. In this light, shouldn’t the MPs be brought under the purview of Lokpal?
Whether under Lokpal or through Judicial Accountability law, judicial corruption needs to be tackled. If any non-governmental organization is primarily funded by public money, it also needs to come under Lokpal’s purview.
There is also the services accountability of government functionaries under the Citizens’ Charter. The people’s movement is demanding that each government office must have at its entrance a chart showing all public welfare work being done in that office, who does what, and in how many days, failing which what are the punitive measures and fines. Some of the state governments have introduced the Services Accountability law. This single measure will relieve a large number of Indians from the daily dose of facing corruption at local level.
For more than six decades, India has an elected representative democracy which, despite its limitations, has functioned well barring the 19 black months of emergency. Each PIO ought to take pride for this, in the backdrop of all the nations freed after the World War II having dictatorship in some form or the other, save India.
However, in the process, elections are becoming the only face of democracy, which also are routinely manipulated by money, muscle and media power. The New India needs to turn merely quantitative representative democracy into a qualitative participative democracy where the lowest unit, the gram or mahalla Sabha, needs to be empowered and mechanisms for the elected representatives to gauge the public mood in every major policy or measure need to be evolved. For instance, land, forest, water or minerals for private or public use can only be allowed after sabhas approve.
The youngest nation of the world needs to turn into a country of educated, skilled, ambitious, productive youth.
