New Delhi, August 29: The Jan Lokpal, as proposed by Anna Hazare and his team will be a threat to the democratic freedom and may end up being misused against the honest people, whom it seeks to protect from corruption in the first place. This was one of the main issues of discussion at a meeting “Lokpal: Alternative Voices” organized in New Delhi.
The meeting which was attended by civil society representatives, including lawyers, RTI and human rights activists, highlighted the fact that the Jan Lokpal bill being pushed by the team Anna will create a Jan Lokpal which will be autocratic, all powerful and will be accountable to no body. They also expressed their concern at what they termed as a “very disturbing precedent” where mob dictates terms to a democratically elected government.
Anna Hazare, with Arvind Kejriwal and Kiran Bedi [Photo Courtesy: sumit4all.com]
“If you go through the Jan Lokpal bill, drafted by the team Anna, then you will realize that the Jan Lokpal will be a monstrous, monolithic super cop which will actually be in violation of all the democratic institutions of the country,” said legal activist Vrinda Grover.
Grover said at a time when laws like the Right to Information Act (RTI) empower common man, the Jan Lokpal bill will snatch power from hands of people and will centralize too much of power in one figure- Jan Lokpal. For instance the Jan Lokpal will have the power to investigate, prosecute and punish-all the three important powers which are otherwise assigned to three several agencies- people it considers as corrupt.
The fact that it will have executive powers- it will formulate its own sentencing policy and will revise it from time to time; judicial powers- appoint its own judges and can award punishment from six months to life imprisonment, is a dangerous sign, as it will make the figure of the Jan Lokpal, whosoever s/he will be, an all powerful body, added Grover.
Different kinds of powers are divided between different authorities and institutions in order to ensure that power of any authority doesn’t get misused by any agency. The fact that all kinds of powers have been combined together in one authority makes the Jan Lokpal an all super powerful body which doesn’t have any precedent in the democratic structure of the country, said Grover.
Rebecca John, the eminent lawyer criticized team Anna’s Jan Lokpal bill as a senseless and absurd piece of bill which was being hailed by common people as a magic wand which will eliminate corruption from the country. Terming it as a very dangerous precedent for the country, she said that, “there is no power of state which has not been given to Jan Lokpal and that makes the authority of the Jan Lokpal prone of getting misused.”
“What’s the guarantee that the Jan Lokpal, who will have all these sweeping and absolute powers, won’t be corrupt?” This was the question which the legal experts attending the meeting were repeatedly raising and asking.
Film maker Mahesh Bhatt slammed the “movement against corruption” as the handiwork of fascist forces wanting to “subvert the democratic principles of this country which provides equal status to every citizen.” He criticized the way entire debate on corruption has been structured “either you are with Anna or with the corrupt Congress government.”
“These guys are the same people who had said, ‘Mandir wahin banayenge’, now they are saying bill han hi banayenge,” added Bhatt referring to the Ram Mandir movement started by the BJP.
Faisal Khan, founding member of the revival committee of Khudai Khidmatgar slammed Anna Hazare for what hi termed as “double standards on corruption” and for his refusal to condemn Gujarat riot and violence against dalits in Khirlanji in Maharashtra.
“The fact that Anna was silent on several issues of national importance like genocide against Muslims in Gujarat, violence against Dalits in several parts of the country, against AFSPA for which Iron Sharmila has been fasting since last ten years, all these things show that Anna is a Gandhian manufactured by the cacophony of the media,” Said Khan.
Prof. Tripathi from IIT Delhi said that Anna Hazare successfully managed to shift the nation’s focus from the “corruption of the corporate, which is the biggest fountainhead of corruption in the country, to the secondary and much smaller issue of corruption in politics and public life. Corporate corruption gives birth to corruption in public life and ignoring seems to be parts of larger politics.”
Shabnam Hashmi from ANHAD, one of the organizers of the programme, said it was very important to talk about the alternative voices and perspective on the Jan Lokpal particularly when there was no tolerance of other’s point of view which was how Anna Hazare and his team were behaving.
–Agencies