There are many people who have already lost their patience with Anna Hazzareji and there are many nowhere close to that sentiment. However, personally I lost my patience with Anna Hazzareji’s ideas after his comments on the Republic day of India. The defiance of logic and respect, in his idea of empowering the Gram Sabha above the Lok Sabha, has the potential to convince many that just as his methodology even his motive is lost now. A movement that was supposed to have been an anti-corruption, has now become an anti-government movement specifically, anti-union government movement. However my contentions with the movement are not based on that issue, for in a democracy everyone has the right to voice their opinion regarding the government and their own elected representatives. Yet, I lost my patience when it came to empowering the Gram Sabha above the Parliament.
26th January- the Republic Day of India; a commemoration of the day on which our Constitution came into action, is the day Anna Hazzareji chose to blatantly disrespect it. The first feature we learn about our constitution is that the Republic of India is ‘federal in form but unitary in spirit’ and in case of conflicts ‘the union shall prevail’. Hence, the very idea of empowering approximately 265,000 Gram Sabhas, over the directly elected Lower House of the Union Parliament shows utmost disrespect towards the Constitution and the spirit of India it thereby tries to establish. Furthermore, the head of the drafting committee of the constituent assembly, Honorable Dr. B. R. Ambedkar while presenting the constitution to the people of the Republic of India, stated his views as to what he thought would hamper the democracy in India. Use of unconstitutional methods was his biggest fear for India’s democracy. He urged the people to abandon bloody as well as coercive methods to bring about change. This means abandoning methods of civil disobedience, non-cooperation, coercive forms of satyagraha and fast. The usage of such methods, since the implementation of the constitution is according to him “nothing less than the Grammar of Anarchy.” What defies logic the most is Dr. B.R. Ambedkar is talked of as an inspiration by the members of the Anna Hazzare Movement.
Anna Hazzareji’s major contention with the Lok Sabha lies in its inability to pass the Lokpal bill through both the houses during the winter session. He says “550 people were giving their own suggestions” and there was no conclusive action taken. So to overcome the indecisiveness of one institution of 550 people, we must empower to 265,000 Gram Sabhas with a minimum numerical strength of 7 and maximum of 17, with each of the 265,000 Sabhas having a regional interest to further prior to anything else. I wonder what an IIM graduate would have to say regarding managerial diseconomies arising from such an arrangement.
3 comments:
I agree with your view that Anna Hazare has lost his anti-corruption movement to a larger and rather dangerous anti-government movement. Apparently, this is an anti Union government movement and more specifically an anti Congress or in more recent times a narrower anti Sonia+Rahul movement. If this is an anti Sonia+Rahul or anti Congress movement then it is less dangerous than an anti government movement. Nevertheless, what Team Anna seems to be moving towards is clearly away from a mere anti-corruption movement.
But, I would like to bring in a dimension to your argument that the Union is superior to the Local government, if that is what you mean.
I have found tremendous merit in the Panchayati Raj Institutions (PRIs) in India. PRIs have empowered women of minority communities in a sense that matters to them directly. PRIs have banned liquor from villages in Punjab. The RTI is most effective at the PRI level. And, the PRI makes a direct difference to the quality of life in rural India.
State governments cannot provide as much of attention as a PRI can and the Union govenment is totally disconnected from the realities at the ground level.
The problems at the village level are necessarily of a local nature and these demand local solutions. It is about the specifics of the "nul" and the "nullah" and not about just one statistics regarding a village having access to water.
Anna Hazare is vitiating a healthy debate that the subject merits. We need to balance local and national interests. And this will evolve appropriately with healthy debates. We certainly dont need one more flash point based on Quixotic posturings as Team Anna is capable of.
We need people of the calibre of Ambedkar, Gandhi and Nehru to participate in this debate of the balance between local and national interests.
Thank you sir for your comment.
I would like to begin by saying that yes, I do agree with you on the Panchayati Raj system being more adept at solving problems at the grass-root level. It is definitely not feasible for the center to look into the daily problems faced by the people and hence the Panchayats are a very effective method of immediate problem solving and thus improvement of the quality of life in rural India.
Just as before, the Anna Hazzare movement has proved beneficial in facilitating a discussion amongst the citizens of the country who for the most part seem disinterested in policy issues. The topic of How to further the effectiveness of the Gram Sabhas or how to further empower them so that more people can benefit from it definitely needs a lot of thought and discussion.
However my contention with the comments of Anna Hazzare ji is that the context in which he presents it twists around the possibility of a healthy debate into a biased one. But coming back to the issue at hand, and just taking the comment on which the article was based; wont empowering the PRI's over the union government (strictly speaking in the sense that was conveyed by Anna Hazzare's comment)dilute the sense of a nation. Maybe this seems like a long stretch but I am vary of the possible demerits that decentralization could have for a country which requires a strong center, a country as diverse as ours. I would like to accept here that I am biased in my outlook by 'Unitary in spirit' but isn't empowering local interests to the extent that they could override national interest dangerous to 'India- a nation'? Effective local administration need not necessarily stem from the overruling of the union.
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