Democracy’s Nominal Upholders

What does Anna’s movement really represent? A challenge to India’s democracy, or a failure of its leaders.

For more reasons than one, Sashi Tharoor’s recent article at Project Syndicate needs to be damned. In his article, he tries to stymy a non-violent people’s movement against corruption in the Government by calling it a “phenomenon”, and then a “perfect storm”. Unfortunately, all that Mr Tharoor manages to do successfully in his missive, is to change the popular question about the sense of entitlement that India’s law-makers unduly maintain, into a concrete conviction.

It is easy to see how the Government’s version of the Lokpal bill, a law responsible to create an institution that keeps corruption in check actually encourages corruption rather than stemming it. However, not many in the Parliament have been happy to point out the facts, and Mr Tharoor is no exception. In his article, it is amusing to see him call the Government’s version of the Lokpal bill “insufficiently strong”. A sudden loss of words perhaps? Or should we say a deliberate lack of precision?

Nonetheless, the ugly facts remain. In a short span of a year, the Prime Minister’s own stance on corruption has changed radically: From proclaiming that the increasing corruption is just a popular perception not based on facts - a myth, to lamenting that the compulsions of coalition politics lead to ineffective prosecution, and more recently, claiming that his own service record is unblemished while exhorting the Parliament to get the veracity of his statements checked. The shifting stances raise an important question: Were self-proclaimed honest men like Dr Manmohan Singh and Mr Shashi Tharoor so removed from reality all this while? It is almost as if they resolved to not do anything as multi-billion dollar scandals flew in their faces. And rightly so, it took the Supreme Court of the country to bring the alleged perpetrators of the 2G and the CWG scams to justice where a simple say-so from the Prime Minister would have sufficed.

Atypical of himself, Mr Tharoor has been silent throughout Anna’s movement. It is only now that he commits intellectual harakiri by citing concerns about the Lokpal becoming an omnipotent and an unchallengeable institution. These concerns are misguided: Nobody in the Lokpal is immune from prosecution of any kind. The Constitution of India limits legal immunity to just the President. This effectively means that the Prime Minister has traditionally never been immune from prosecution in civil, or in criminal cases. The bill that Anna Hazare and his supporters rallied for doesn’t change the status quo, at all.

Besides this, Mr Tharoor is still confused whether the resolution to introduce the bill in the Parliament was taken to appease Anna Hazare, or under the pressures of the people’s passions. While Anna and the passions of his supporters may be inseparable, it is important to note that the Government’s 42-year-old history of nine attempts to enact the Lokpal bill have resulted in utter failure. Also, one can’t help but see that the pressures from the media and the public were previously either nonexistent, scant or hardly significant.

Mr Tharoor is right in pointing out that, no Indian seriously argues that a citizen’s democratic rights begin and end with the right to vote. But unfortunately for a majority of Indians today, their power to participate in democratic processes starts and ends with their right to vote. The only visits that the poorest of the poor get from their representatives are during elections, or during emergencies - natural and man-made. The power to influence that Mr Tharoor seeks in policy-making has been relegated to crony capitalists for far too long now. Perhaps he’s forgotten that the telecoms scam itself involved competing companies enforcing their wishes in the appointment of ministers through a common PR agency. Or maybe Mr Tharoor seeks an India where an opportunity to be influenced doesn’t arise without a greater opportunity to profit.

It is true that laws can’t and shouldn’t be dictated from the street, and in Anna’s case they weren’t, till the very end. However, it isn’t surprising that Mr Tharoor, in his article, conveniently elides the open and transparent debate that Anna Hazare and his supporters encouraged. What’s more? He deliberately fails to cite that Anna embarked on his fast because a joint effort to draft the bill with the Government was very skillfully run into the ground by the very ministers who supported crony capitalists. The thousands of letters that Anna and his followers wrote to their elected representatives before the joint-drafting efforts are still unanswered. If this is the role and the level of representation that Mr Tharoor envisages for his colleagues and himself, then clearly, India’s parliamentary democracy isn’t working.

Sadly, 153 of Mr Tharoor’s 520-old parliamentary colleagues have a myriad of cases ranging from murder, rape, abetment to suicide, obstruction of justice and corruption to illegal occupation. Fighting injustice also means incapacitating the unjust. Why is that so difficult to understand for Mr Tharoor? It shouldn’t be a wonder why Mr Tharoor chooses to train his guns on an altruistic character rather than his colleagues of vice. After all, shooting the messenger is far easier than putting one’s own house in order.

In the end, democracy is nothing more than a social contract. A contract where the many outsource their responsibilities to an elected few. Winning the elections just gives the elected a mandate to represent. In no way does it create any special or exclusive right to represent the people. The assurance of representation has to be backed by keeping one’s ears to the ground and knowing the trials and tribulations that trouble the populace with the zeal to offer and implement solutions.

Besides showing up to vote, it is the civil-society’s job to ensure that their elected stick to their promises and assurances. After all, the Constitution, the Parliament and the Government exist only to serve the people. Being able to a channelize the passions of millions and attract wide TV coverage makes no saints. All it means is that the supposed people’s representatives have failed to do what they were elected to do. Either the people and their democratic processes are naive, or their laws are insufficient and ineffective.

This wasn’t a “phenomenon”, this was necessity - a need of the hour. This wasn’t a perfect-storm where factors randomly fell into place, this was a wake-up call. A gentle and peaceful awakening to the fact when the people’s representatives don’t do their jobs, the people just might. And, whenever people choose to do the jobs they’ve elected not to, they generally don’t care whether or not their representatives like it.