Is Jan Lokpal Bill enough?

The attacks on the civil society members of the panel drafting the Jan Lokpal (JLP) Bill has subsided a little, or so it appears – or maybe the politicians are playing a relay race wherein a politician starts the smear campaign and gives the baton to the other to take over…is this how we can describe the diatribe of Kapil Sibal followed by Digvijay Singh and now Mani Shankar Aiyar, not to mention the likes of Amar Singh in between? Nevertheless, it also appears that better sense has prevailed within the group of the civil society members and they have decidedly resolved to stand up against the smear campaign and not let any from its flock to succumb to the pressure tactics of our wily politicians!

Hopefully, ceteris paribus, we will have the first draft of the JLP Bill by end of May or early June. However, as mentioned in one of my previous notes, whilst the Jan Lokpal Bill is a law that will keep the corrupt at bay by providing for stern and quick punishments to the offenders and hopefully being a top down intervention, will cleanse the system over time if we have proper checks and balances in place…is it fine to assume this or are we missing something here? Conceded that the JLP Bill is a crucial instrument in the hands of public to cut the cancerous tree of corruption branch-by-branch, but, is this enough? Conceded that we need to also look at bottom up interventions that will regenerate the lost values we as a nation collectively once had….this one is surely a concern and will be addressed separately in another note – in this note, I want to focus on the top down interventions only and from among the various top down interventions, one of the crucial ones is the JLP Bill, however, I feel we need another tool that will not just cut the cancerous tree of corruption, branch-by-branch but a tool that will cut this cancerous tree of corruption root-by-root so that the tree does not regenerate as would happen if only branches were to be cut.

So, what is this other and perhaps more important top down intervention? For this, we need to look at one of the root causes of corruption in India – if one were to look carefully on where corruption is originating from, it will be soon clear that our polity is the fount of corruption in our country – a politician spends crores of rupees to get elected by paying for the votes and then spends the next five years to recover the “investment” he/ she has made along with an obscene “rate of return”, one that can never be made in legal ways. For this “recovery of principal” and the “return on investment”, the politician then initiates a set of triggers that lead to every aspect of public life getting mired in corruption so as to feed the entire food chain all the way up to the political master and deliver the “principal” and “rate of return” – therefore, it is important that we also bring in this intervention that will cut the tree of corruption root-by-root and ensure that it does not regenerate. Not surprisingly, just like the JLP Bill, this intervention too, that is, the electoral reforms have been languishing to see the light of day, as there is stiff resistance by the politicians. Once the JLP Bill is passed and becomes law, then, we need to look at the electoral reforms to ensure that we cleanse the polity of this country brick-by-brick by systematically marginalizing and weeding out the corrupt politicians and criminals and at the same time infuse fresh incorruptible blood into body polity of India.

So, lets get ready for a new crusade after the JLP Bill is behind us!