Rival roads to Delhi
The vision document of the new anti-corruption party is full of general good purposes: fighting corruption, price rise and money and muscle power in politics; realising the “quest for swaraj (self-rule) — from subject-hood to citizenship”; and demanding, among other things, administrative, police and judicial reforms. Though party leader Arvind Kejriwal wore a Gandhi cap which bore the original demand of the Anna Hazare movement: “Mujhe chahiye Jan Lokpal”, it seems too much and, perhaps, too late.
While Kejriwal had the nation in a frenzy in August 2011, when Anna Hazare went on a 288-hour fast demanding the Jan Lokpal law, a quiet rival movement was taking shape in rural India, which also culminated on Gandhi’s birthday with Jan Satyagraha — a planned march from Gwalior to New Delhi, with an estimated 100,000 activists mainly comprising the landless poor. The march has begun. Organised by Ekta Parishad, it has a ‘game-changer’ slogan, too: “land for the landless”. It is simple enough, as Ekta Parishad president PV Rajagopal declares on the organisation website: “[it] could bring 40 per cent of the populace out of absolute poverty and reduce substantially the violence that is gripping Indian society ... We aren’t asking for any concession or bounties from the government but a small piece of land to build [a] house and agricultural land for sustaining livelihood”. Unlike the sudden Anna movement, Ekta Parishad is a 20-year-old organisation with international financial and network support — mainly, the UK-based Christian Aid. The Jan Satyagraha March has been meticulously planned over four years and the activists, mostly dalits and tribals from the poorest regions of India have been painstakingly mobilised since October last year. Christian Aid believes the month-long march to Delhi is “set to be one of the biggest non-violent campaigns the world has ever witnessed”.
Union Rural Development Minister Jairam Ramesh rushed to Gwalior on October 2, but failed to convince the huge crowd of Parishad activists to go back to their states. It is likely that the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government will now seek to trash the very antecedents of the movement with its usual ‘foreign hand’ accusations. But Ekta Parishad openly declares its foreign partnerships and affiliations: in Europe, USA, Canada and Brazil, apart from Asian NGO networks. Many of the foreign representatives have joined the march, providing ‘embedded’ international media support.
The UPA will also try to thwart them by simpler means. Although the Parishad gets an annual grant from Christian Aid, the government blocked foreign funds to the Jan Satyagraha campaign, hoping to cut off food supplies to the marchers. However, the campaign anticipated this and marchers were “encouraged to save precious grains over the last year”, the website says. But food and sanitation remain serious challenges.
The Jan Satyagraha will be a tougher bargain for the UPA than the Jan Lokpal. Leaders who tried to run down the Anna movement as “urban and upper-caste” will be deprived of the rhetoric when it comes to the poorest and most-deprived of Indians. It is no surprise that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh found time to meet the Parishad leaders on Wednesday and Minister Jairam Ramesh promised to announce an action plan on land reforms within a week. A week of the march is long enough; a whole month could seed an electoral nightmare.
Published in The Express Tribune, October 5th, 2012.
COMMENTS (7)
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author seems to be following the theory,that to prove your line longer,shorten others line.Mr Author ,I have sympathy with the cause of landless poor,but how is the cause of corruption less fundamental than poverty?why are you spitting venom on Kejriwal for fighting a battle against corruption?is speaking against corruption less holier than for say land reforms?and strange question of the aggrieved party,when poorest section of the society who is supposed to get the fruits of development is the worst hit by corruption.you distribute land without uprooting corruption and there goes your land into some corrupt minister and babus pocket. and of late I have observed a strange trend in some wanna be Karl Marx,of labeling the movement against corruption as fascist or against law .if peacefully demonstrating for ones rights is a crime in a democracy and criticizing leaders is considered disrespect to democracy and parliament an some thing is seriously wrong with our system.
The same dilemma faced by Pakistan people... .. Until & unless we do away with disparity in Upper & lower classes in our population the same problem will persist... .
To: varuag "Serious land reforms never took place in most of India other than the two provinces that had strong communist parties (WB and Kerala)." Wow, if land "serious" land reform results in places like WB and Kerala, then I hope the rest of India never gets the pleasure of experiencing such "reforms". Agriculture accounts for under 15 percent of the economy. So even if these poor people ever get their little plot to build their shanty and engage in subsistence farming for their livelihood. Will they stop being poor? No, they won't. Then it'll be free electricity. Free water. Free fertilizer. No taxes. And will they stop being poor. No they won't, because no modern economy can sustain so large a percentage of its population in agriculture. How about for once Indians look to the future instead of longing for some imagined past.
@upkamath: I am paraphrasing what has been obliquely described in the Administrative Reforms Commission as well as directly pointed out by former Chief Economic Adviser and current Chief Economist of World Bank Mr. Kaushik Basu. There are basically two types of corruption : Coercive and Collusive The former refers to the corruption wherein one party bleeds and the other party has all the power. This is basically in favor of the bribe-taker at the cost of the bribe-giver. Like bribing an official to get a government certificate et al. The collusive corruption is where both the bribe-giver and bribe-taker gain. Like the bribe that people dole out to traffic police when travelling without documents, DUI, lapsed license et al. There are people who will pay the police to avoid impounding the vehicle and a court date. In this case, if the vehicle owner is well off, he might actually prefer giving bribe and try to buy off the poorly paid police. So the bribe-giver as victim may not be always true. Even in case of crony capitalism, this simplistic notion may fail. Like in 2G spectrum scandal, Raja probably made 200 crores while the companies (bribe-givers) actually made a couple of thousand crores. [and please read whole CAG document before quoting figures of 1.76 lakh crore]
Corruption has multiple dimensions and for the layman its simple to cry hoarse but reality is in shades of grey ..............
@upkamath: "If bribe-giver and bribe-taker are both happy with the outcomes, which one is the aggrieved party?"
If the bribe giver got something that should have legitimately gone to someone else, then taht loser is the aggrieved party. If the bribe giver is seeking his just dues which are being withheld by the ribe giver until his palms are greased then the bribe giver is the aggrieved party - even though he may be unwilling to acknowledge his grievance publicly if he routinely needs to work with the bribe taker.
If bribe-giver and bribe-taker are both happy with the outcomes, which one is the aggrieved party?
Good point on behalf of the corrupt bribe taker. It is a matter of survival for the bribe giver, unlike the taker. The receiver of the bribe gets his salary; or is it to be neglected. May be you are conditioned to believe so. The bribe giver most of the time approaches the government for his survival - say a business permit or ration card. It is the person who receives the bribe who is morally responsible, whatever be the legal point. Law is made by babus to suit them.
Unfortunately the local media will not be out "manufacturing dissent" for the un-glamorous objective of land reforms. Anna Hazare fought for ages in the rain shadow parts of Sahyadris and no one outside Maharashtra winked twice. Suddenly, in Delhi with a media savvy team to back him up, he whipped up a frenzy. The obituary of the movement by Manu Joseph in Open magazine sums up the high-octane shrill farce.
Serious land reforms never took place in most of India other than the two provinces that had strong communist parties (WB and Kerala). Despite the rally, there is no political party which is going to pitch it in their manifesto. There was a huge rally couple of years ago in delhi regarding labour rights. All the trade unions affiliated to all political parties participated jointly and presented a united front. Media gave it a scant coverage and nothing came out of it. To wish that the deaf have now grown new ears is a pipe dream.
There are countless "good" people who suddenly develop the urge to purge politics of its dirt and jump in the fray. There was the ABN AMRO CEO who quit months prior to the Lok Sabha polls, contested from South Mumbai and back as CEO within days of the election. Talk about a sabbatical........ At-least Kejriwal is willing to dug in for a long drawn battle. Politics takes a lot of patience. Yediyurappa sat in the opposition six times before he could set foot in the treasury. And he had an established organisation to boot. Bereft of the corruption rhetoric and the hordes of cameras following, the question is whether Kejriwal has it in him to take multiple failures without losing sight of the task at hand ?