The neck-or-nothing attitude of Anna Hazare and the other members of his team is threatening to make a dog's breakfast of the exercise undertaken jointly with the five Ministers from the side of the Government to hammer out a Lok Pal Bill. Both sides are reportedly at loggerheads over some issues which Anna's team considers non-negotiable but at which the Government side is baulking.
The first such issue is the question of inclusion of the PM within the ambit of the Bill. From all published accounts, the Government itself had agreed to bring the PM within the scope of the Bill and the version of the Bill as drafted by the Government well before Hazare went on his indefinite fast had a provision to that effect.
Apparently, the Government has gone back on it for fear that it will make the PM's office “dysfunctional” by irresponsible persons invoking the Lok Pal's investigative authority against it with frivolous and vexatious allegations.
The fear cannot be dismissed as unfounded. There are other ways of holding the PM to account. The laws of the land are applicable to the PM as much as they do to every other citizen.
When it comes to the pinch, and if his misdemeanour is serious enough, the Lok Sabha can take recourse to a motion of no confidence and in exceptionally grave cases, the President can withdraw his pleasure, which is tantamount to dismissing him.
The law can then take its course, as it did in the case of P.V.Narasimha Rao. My sincere advice to the civil society members of the Joint Committee is not to carry the dissension on this score to a breaking point.
The Hazare team is not at all justified in insisting on empowering Lok Pal to inquire into the functioning of MPs within Parliament. The conduct of MPs within the confines of Parliament belongs entirely to the jurisdiction of the Speaker of the Lok Sabha or the Chairman of the Rajya Sabha, as the case may be.
Such demands will only hold up the civil society members in a poor light, besides damaging their credibility.
As regards the judiciary, there is already a Bill to constitute a National Judicial Commission, and the aim should rather be to incorporate in it all the systems and sanctions leading to transparency in the selection and appointment of judges, enforcement of accountability to the people and quick action within a specified time frame on complaints of corruption and other types of misconduct.
OVERLORDSHIP
The Hazare team is also impractical in demanding that the Lok Pal should be able to take action against all the thousands of officials of the Government at all levels all over India.
He will be caught up in wild goose chases in no time. His authority should extend only to administrative levels of Joint Secretary and above and to politicians in decision-making positions.
Likewise, taking up matters of day-to-day governance will simply drown him in minutiae. The Lok Pal's charter should be unrelentingly focused on eradication of corruption and he should have nothing to do with matters extraneous to it.
The Hazare team is wrong in presuming that a Lok Pal, to be strong and effective, ought to have under his overlordship all three branches of the Government, and the Central Vigilance Commission, Central Bureau of Investigation and the Enforcement Directorate. At the most, he can have a small and compact investigative setup of his own to pursue cases coming to his notice.
The civil society members should curb their tendency to be overambitious. They should make a modest start and let the Lok Pal prove his mettle. By being wholehoggers, they will only have their good sense and judgment called into question. They should bear in mind that making the Lok Pal a sovereign and super-ordinate authority overstretched in every possible direction is the surest way of bogging him down and making him ineffective and weak
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