Friday, April 8, 2011

The Devil's advocate

I intended this post to be about Anna Hazare's supposed fast, but as I write this post, I read that the impasse has ended, and the government will indeed join hands with civil society to draft the bill.

Should we be happy? I am tempted to say "yes". We seem to be firmly on the path of battling corruption. It seems the government will be kept in check by the civil society, and hopefully it will be hard for the "corrupt politicians" to  derail the process.

There are, however, several caveats. Involving the civil society in legislation is not a panacea that will rid the society of all evils. Not all members of civil society are of as spotless a character as Hazare, and more importantly, there is no law of nature that the civil society should always be right. All of us have very good intentions for the country, but as someone said, "the road to hell is paved with good intentions". Saying that there should be no corruption is easy, to implement a law that will be successful in eliminating corruption is definitely not.

It should also not be taken for granted that civil society is always correct in its intentions. Right and wrong are dangerous and slippery things, and this is especially true in a nation where the vast majority of the populace is not literate enough to log on to Facebook and air their views. It is easy for us to support the drive against corruption which seems very obviously right, but it is much harder if the issue at hand is, say, the Naxal problem, or, God forbid, the issues of Kashmir or the North east. Also, Hazare has a great backing now, but we are very likely to ignore him when the problems he is talking of do not concern us, us being the middle class, educated population that reads newspapers, logs on to the internet and signs petitions. Indeed, how many of us really knew about Hazare's work in a Maharashtra village?

It is easy to look at your Facebook page and be heartened by the flood of support for a cause. Yet the fact remains that the set of Indians who have the wherewithal to air their views, over the net or otherwise is a miniscule proportion of the true India. As such, chances are that a movement that agrees with the conveniences of the educated elite will be touted as a "revolution", and a movement that does not will be scorned upon as a "mutiny".

Last but not the least, we have to bear in mind that the ills we are fighting against are not external but internal. As someone pointed out in an article, this is free India, and the only evil empire that we can get freedom from is ourselves. When we say that politicians are corrupt, we have to bear in mind that we elect them. There is no external "pseudo-democratic" government: our country is the sum total of the people in it, no more, no less. We have to realise that the evil of corruption is not in some abstracted out entity far removed from the people: it is in every one of us. The law of corruption that we require is, technically, a few hours in front of the mirror.

I guess the thought that I want to leave you with is this: We all supported Anna Hazare's quest to get a strong Lokpal bill drafted, but why did we support it? Was it merely because we have all been at some point or the other been victimized by corruption? If the answer is yes, then it means that our activism is merely a product of the injustices that we perceive as being done unto us, and that what we are striving for is, at the heart of it, no more than our own self-interest. At a deep, and perhaps (but hopefully not) an unachievable level, what we should be driven by is a question of what the right thing to do is. If each of us tries to do what is right, then the politician and the bureaucrat are also not corrupt, and the civil society doesn't need to arm-twist the government into doing what it needs to do.