INDIA AGAINST CORRUPTION & BAD GOVERNANCE STORY 84
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Great Indian Lok Pal trick
[ If the Congress had been sincere about fighting corruption, it would not have drafted a toothless Lok Pal Bill whose provisions are laughable. ]
The promise of bringing in an effective law to curb corruption in the top echelons of the state should undoubtedly go down as the biggest hoax played by the political class on the people of India after independence. Every Government, from the days of Jawaharlal Nehru to Mr Manmohan Singh, promised to establish an institution to bring to book corrupt Ministers and MPs and reneged on it.
But, going by the statements of Mr Manmohan Singh and Ms Sonia Gandhi after the recent settlement with Anna Hazare, there can be no doubt that the Congress and the Prime Minister have taken deception to a new level altogether.
The first acknowledgement that the cancer of corruption had begun to destroy the great gains of the freedom movement came in the 1960s when the Santhanam Committee was appointed to assess the extent of the problem and to suggest remedial action. This was followed by the report of the first Administrative Reforms Commission which recommended the appointment of a Lok Pal to inquire into the conduct of Ministers and MPs.
The farce vis-à-vis the Lok Pal Bill began after Mrs Indira Gandhi became Prime Minister when her Government introduced it in the Lok Sabha in 1968, knowing fully well that the Bill would lapse if the Lower House was dissolved prior to its passage in Parliament. Sure enough, the Lok Pal Bill faced sudden death when Mrs Gandhi opted for early dissolution of the Lok Sabha in 1971. Since then, eight more half-hearted attempts have been made to legislate on this issue in Parliament and on a majority of these occasions, it was the Congress that was in power.
After all this humming and hawing for over four decades, the Lok Pal Bill proposed by the Manmohan Singh Government last year constitutes an affront to the intelligence of every citizen. Here, it must be made clear that this draft had the tacit approval of the Congress and the attempt to distance party president Sonia Gandhi from it is as disingenuous as the attempts by the ruling party to accuse Anna Hazare of resorting to “blackmail” and undemocratic means.
Instead of empowering the aam admi to complain against corrupt Ministers and MPs and arming the Lok Pal to go after the wrong-doers, the Government’s draft Bill seeks to protect the corrupt in a variety of ways, while simultaneously trying to intimidate complainants.
The Government’s draft says the Lok Pal will only be an advisory body without any police powers or the power to register FIRs against the corrupt. Nor will the CBI be under it. Further, the Lok Pal will have no power to initiate suo motu action or receive complaints of corruption from citizens. It will be empowered to proceed only if the Speaker of the Lok Sabha or the Chairman of the Rajya Sabha (both political appointees) permit it to do so. And, after all this, the punishment for guilty politicians who swindle the exchequer of thousands of crores of rupees will be a minimum of six months and a maximum of seven years in jail.
As against this bogus Bill drafted by the Government, Anna Hazare’s ‘Jan Lok Pal Bill’ wants the Lok Pal to be an independent body like the Election Commission with suo motu
power to investigate complaints against Ministers, MPs, judges and bureaucrats, to file FIRs and prosecute the corrupt, and not be just an ‘advisory body’. Further, the ‘Jan Lok Pal’ will directly receive complaints from people and act on them.
There is another major point of difference. Mr Singh and Ms Gandhi do not want the Lok Pal to have the power to investigate the Prime Minister in regard to foreign affairs, security matters and defence-related issues. Anna Hazare’s draft makes no such exception and rightly so. Bofors was a defence deal (purchase of field guns) in which Ottavio Quattrocchi, a friend of the Gandhi family, received commission payments from the Swedish company. Obviously fearing a repeat of a scandal of such proportions, the Government does not want the Lok Pal to investigate defence deals.
The Government’s draft Lok Pal Bill is also so cleverly worded that everything can be classified as coming within the purview of ‘security matters’ and thus kept out of the Lok Pal’s scrutiny. For example, if we had a Lok Pal last year on the lines proposed by the Government, the Prime Minister would in all probability have claimed that the Rs 1.76 lakh crore 2G Spectrum scam was a ‘security matter’ that cannot be probed by the ombudsman.
There are other areas of divergence which are equally significant. Mr Singh and Ms Gandhi prefer to go soft on the culprits (jail term of six months to seven years) whereas Anna Hazare wants the jail term to be five years to life imprisonment. Further, Anna Hazare says the loss to Government must be recovered from the accused. For example, if A Raja is held guilty, then all his properties must be confiscated. Mr Singh and Ms Gandhi do not want such a provision.
Finally, there is a clear attempt in the Government’s draft Lok Pal Bill to scare away complainants by saying that those who file false complaints will be penalised and imprisoned. Anna Hazare’s Bill is devoid of such intimidation.
All this is not to say that everything is fine with Anna Hazare’s draft ‘Jan Lok Pal Bill’. It has its flaws and hopefully these will get ironed out in the coming months. But, is it not ludicrous for Mr Singh and Ms Gandhi, who are primarily responsible for allowing Quattrocchi to walk away with the Bofors loot, to now claim that they are committed to a strong anti-corruption law? Or for Congress loudspeakers to claim that the settlement with Anna Hazare is indicative of the “sagacity and wisdom” of Ms Gandhi and Mr Singh?It has been wisely said that you cannot fool all the people all the time.
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