A tsunami in the making

Talking about the Anna Hazare movement on corruption, the perspective from West Bengal could perhaps be useful. The people of the State were tired of Marxist rule in the State for more than three decades and were at their wit's end as to how they could change the political complexion of the Government.

The dam finally burst when Mamata Banerjee provided leadership in the wake of the Singur faux pas of the Left Front Government as also the Nandigram deaths in police firing in March 2007.

No honest Indian will suggest that corruption in all spheres of the average citizen's life has not been increasing since 1947. Indeed, the scourge has become so devastating as regards the silent damage it is wreaking on the fabric of national life that even the President of the republic focussed attention on it in her Independence Day Message .

Clearly, the citizen is fed up with the corrupt behaviour on the part of Government officials at all levels. The pressure has silently piled up over the decades, and now the outburst of angst against corruption, as given specific and pointed shape by Anna Hazare and his band of followers, has provided the leakage point through which the pent-up general frustration has begun to pour out into the streets all over the country.

There is little doubt that a tsunami of concern about corruption in public life has begun to take concrete shape, and when it starts to roll it will sweep away all those standing in its way.

Such being the prospect, it is incredible that some politicians, including Ministers in the UPA Government, are still trying to argue that, in terms of the Constitution, “civil society” – which actually encompasses the entire country now and does not comprise only the Anna Hazare group – is doing the wrong thing by encroaching on the law-making domain of Parliament which, come to think of it, comprises people who have been sent to the Lok Sabha by those who are protesting.

Uncivil response

Take one senior Minister who, in trying to give Indian legislators an exalted position in the Republic, has gone totally against the spirit of the Constitution itself.

Among other things, he declared: “The way the civil society movement is continuing in the country, it gives an impression that the leaders have become legislators. Nobody can be compelled that a law has to be drafted as per his or her desire. It is for Parliament to decide. And what Anna Hazare is doing is akin to challenging the constitutional authority of Parliament, which is not acceptable”.

Another senior Minister proclaimed: “Here is one man who is saying that only my law should be enacted and if it is not my way, I will go on fast,” averring, “There was no way in which we can allow Parliament's right to make laws to be taken away by a few civil activists”.

The stakes for the republic are just too high for such mechanistic views to be taken seriously. Intense negotiations at a very high level between the Government and the citizens must begin immediately if this great nation of ours is to weather the current storm.

Parliament must bend and accommodate the will of the nation because, after all, Parliament is the nation's creation.

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