For the past two years millions of common Indians came out on streets to fight against the biggest evil in our country today - corruption. This people's anti-corruption movement has exposed the ugly and greedy face of our politicians. No political party in India today works for the common man's needs. The Janlokpal Movement was a call to all the politicians of India to listen to the common man's plea. For almost 2 years we tried every single way available to plead our cause to the government - peaceful protesting, courting arrest, indefinite fasting several rounds of negotiations with the ruling government - we tried everything possible to convince the government to form a strong anti- corruption law. But despite the huge wave of public support in favour of a strong anti-corruption law, all political parties cheated the people of India and deliberately sabotaged the Janlokpal Bill. The time for peaceful fasts and protests is gone. This is the time for action. Since most political parties are corrupt, greedy and thick skinned, it's time to bring political power back into the people's hands. We are not saying that every single politician is corrupt and greedy. There are many good intentioned people in politics today who want to work honestly for the people of India. But the current system of polity does not allow honest politicians to function. We are also not claiming that every single person who joins our party will be hundred percent honest. We are saying that it is the system that has become very corrupt and needs to be changed immediately. Our aim in entering politics is not to come to power; we have entered politics to change the current corrupt and self-serving system of politics forever. So that no matter who comes to power in the future, the system is strong enough to withstand corruption at any level of governance.

Aam Aadmi Party Gets 'Broom' as its Election Symbol

Aam Aadmi Party is happy to announce that the Election Commission has allotted the party a reserved symbol of 'Broom' for all the 70 assembly constituencies of Delhi. With this the party has crossed the second milestone (after party's registration) on its way to cleaning up the polity of the country. With the Broom which symbolizes dignity of labour, the party hopes to clean the filth which has permeated our government and our legislature. The country needs a clean sweep of its corrupted main stream political parties.

Three independent polls conducted recently by CSDS, C Voter and Total TV are already showing that Aam Aadmi Party is not merely a serious contender in Delhi already but is on its way to sweep the polls in Delhi to begin with. These surveys show that AAP is being perceived as the right political alternative in Delhi.

AAP would formally launch the Party's election symbol in a public event on August 3rd.

National Executive

Party Executive

The party Executive comprises of the following members.

ARVIND KEJRIWAL - He resigned from the Indian revenue services to plunge into social work to create awareness campaigns. After successfully carrying out campaign on Right To information Act, he brought in together prominent citizens on a common platform to start movement for “Jan Lokpal Bill”. Arvind has been awarded the prestigious “Raman Magsaysay Award” for his contribution to the social work. He has made all possible efforts to compel the Government to pass “Jan Lokpal Bill”. For this he fasted from 25^th. July 2012 for ten days.

MANISH SISODIA - By profession Manish Sisodia is a journalist who had worked on various positions for a long time in Television and Radio and has now got involved in movement for social awareness on full time basis. He has played an active role in the campaign for Swaraj, campaign for Right to information Act and Jan Lokpal campaign. He has fought a long battle for Jan Lokpal campaign and sat on a fast for ten days in July of 2012.

GOPAL RAI - Gopal Rai is associated with Student’s movement and for a long time with All India Students Association. After resigning from A.I.S.A he was associated with Indian Students Union as its President. Right from the very beginning he was working for Janlokpal movement. For this Gopal Rai sat on a fast in July 2012 for ten days.

PRASHANT BHUSHAN - He is lawyer by profession and his image is that of a crusader for social causes. He has given voice to exploited section of society through his Public Interest Litigations (PIL) and exposed the corrupt. He has expertise in PIL related to issues of Human Rights, Environment and Accountability of Government servants. He is associated with Jan Lokpal movement right from the very beginning.

SANJAY SINGH - Sanjay Singh is getting associated with social welfare programme like, cleaning of rivers, taking care of destitute patients in the hospital, providing shelters for the homeless etc.. As president of Independent Social welfare society he has been active in providing assistance to the people affected by natural calamities. Sanjay Singh has fought for the right of the students to the right of the people living in slums. He is associated with Jan Lokpal movement right from the very beginning.

PANKAJ GUPTA - As professional engineer Pankaj Gupta after having worked for twenty five years on various senior positions in software companies resigned and took up active social work. He began to teach children from economically backward section of society. Pankaj Gupta is associated with Janlokpal movement on a full time basis.

Dr. Kumar Vishwas - He is a well-known poet. He has recited his poetry both in India and abroad. Through his poetry he is known as one of the most popular poets of the country. Kumar Vishwas is very popular amongst the youth. He makes some bold and scathing remarks on the social issue through the medium of his poetry. He is associated with the Janlokpal movement right from the very beginning.

NAVEEN JAIHIND - He is involved in social service work. He had started the movement for Right to Information Act and campaigned for Swaraj in Haryana. He has been organising Blood donation camps and camps for donation of body organs. Under the name “Jaihind” he formed an organisation of students on 15^th. August 2006. Navin has been associated with Janlokpal movement right from the very beginning.

DINESH WAGHELA - Active in both social and spiritual works Dinesh Waghela had participated in J.P. Narayan movement and Navnirman movement. Fighting corruption as a worker of Right to Information Act he got involved actively with the Janlokpal movement, providing meaningful support.

YOGENDRA YADAV - Yogendra Yadav is a well-known social scientist and Political analyst of the country. He is the Senior Fellow of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies. Yogendra Yadav is also associated with many National and International forums. For rolling out law for Right to Education, Yogendra Yadav was made a member of National Advisory Council in the year 2010.

PROFESSOR AJIT JHA - He is professor in Delhi University. Professor Jha, associated with “Lok Rajniti Manch”, has been working on the “Panchayati Raj” system for a long time. He is also associated with “Samajwadi Jan Parishad”, a political party.

CHRISTINA SAMY - She is active in Karur district of Tamil Nadu where Kristina had successfully galvanised people from Tamil Nadu against the sand mafia. She also floated a women’s political party under the name “Women’s Front” (Tamil Nadu). This party fought elections for Parliament, state legislature and Panchayats. Women’s Front was quiet successful in Panchayati elections.

Professor Anand Kumar - He is professor of sociology in Jawaharlal University. He has taught in many Universities all over the world besides prestigious Universities like JNU and BHU. Professor Anand Kumar is associated with Students movement and have worked on social, political and democratic front.

SHAZIA ILMI - Shazia Ilmi is a social activist who had begun her carrier as TV journalist. She has played an active role in Janlokpal movement.

HABUNG PYANG - He was an Information commissioner in Arunachal Pradesh. He is counted as one of the most strict and adept Information Officer in the country. By passing strict orders against the officers not providing information, he had created quite a stir in the state. Before becoming the Information Commissioner Habung Pyang was actively contributing to social work. Habang Pyang’s contribution has strengthened the Political awareness in North East states.

YOGESH DHAHIYA - He is a well-known leader of Farmers in the Western Uttar Pradesh. He has been giving voice to the demands of Sugar Cane farmers. Yogesh Dhahiya has fought a long battle, both on the level of land and law, to get just prices for sugar cane to farmers.

ASHOK AGGARWAL - He is a social worker. For the rights of the exploited Ashok Aggarwal has been filing Public Interest Litigations for issues related to public welfare. For getting free education to children of economically backward section of society and getting medical treatment in government and private hospital he has fought long battles, with success.

ILLIAS AZMI - He was elected MP, twice from Uttar Pradesh. Illias Azmi was always supportive of our movement and now has again joined politics full time for “AAM AADMI” party.

SUBHASH WARE - He was the President of “Chatrabharati” for Maharashtra. He has headed many agitations and now decided to work towards changing the politic of the country along with “AAM AADMI” party.

KRISHNAKANT SEVADA - (Sanjuji) Krishnakant Sevda is from Rajasthan. After completing masters in Law and Commerce he has joined his pet field financial administration with the movement.He is a supporter of not only financial honesty but also of moral honesty.

MAYANK GANDHI - He is a social worker. He has worked actively with many social and business organisations. Mayank Gandhi has contributed actively in formulating many useful laws like Right to Information for Maharashtra, Law relating to transfer of Government employee, law relating to Nagar Raj Bill. Mayank Gandhi is associated with Janlokpal movement right from the very beginning and has contributed a lot in strengthening the movement in Maharashtra.

PROFESSOR RAKESH SINHA - He is Ceramic Engineer by profession. After having worked in TATA at Raurkela, he has taught at prestigious institutions like I.I.T. and B.H.U.. Professor Sinha has been founder member of “Samta” organisation. Known as a social and political thinker, Prof. Sinha has edited “Varta” a current affairs magazine.

PREM SINGH PAHARI - He joined many political parties where he has had bad experiences. He realised that these parties had no agenda for welfare of the country and therefore, he distanced himself from politics. Now he is seeing sentiment of welfare with the AAM AADMI party, which is promising to change the political system of the country, he has decided to re-join politic.

Organization and Structure

The structure of the Aam Aadmi Party shall comprise of the following 5 levels of organisation:-

1. Primary
2. Block
3. District
4. State
5. National

The 5 levels of the party organisation shall comprise of the following sub-divisions:-
i. Primary Level
● Primary Unit

ii. Block Level
● Block Council

iii. District Level
● District Council
● District Executive
● District Political Affairs Committee

iv. State Level
● State Council
● State Executive
● State Political Affairs Committee

v. National Level
● National Council
● National Executive
● National Political Affairs Committee

The area of a Primary Unit shall be defined as per clause B below. The area of a Block Unit and District Unit shall ordinarily be the same as that of an Administrative Block or District in a State. The area of State Units of the Party shall conform to the States and Union Territories mentioned in the Constitution of India.

1. PRIMARY LEVEL
a) The Primary Unit will be constituted at:-
i. Ward Level in a Municipality (Ward Sabha);
ii. Village Level (Gram Sabha); and
iii. Each college or equivalent Higher Education Institutions (Chaatra Sabha) and shall comprise of all the ordinary and active members of that unit. However, a Primary Unit shall not be formed unless there are at least 10 Active members in that Unit.

b) Powers and Functions of the Primary Unit
The Primary Unit shall be the general body of all the ordinary and Active members of that Unit. It shall:-
i. deliberate and decide on any issue or action program to further the objective of the Aam Aadmi Party including electoral participation, struggles, opinion making and/or other constructive actions;
ii. recommend applications for Active Members;
iii. elect 1 Coordinator and 1 Co-Coordinator (out of which at least one shall be a woman) by consensus, failing which by voting in the presence of a representative of the District Executive.
iv. Coordinator and Co-coordinator shall be available for the Party work on regular basis.
v. form such teams as required and assign them such work as deemed fit.
vi. perform such tasks as assigned to it from time to time by the Party.

2. BLOCK LEVEL
a) Block Council
i. A Block Council shall be constituted at the Level of a Block
ii. Coordinators of all Primary Units falling in a Block shall together constitute the Block Council.

b) Powers and Functions of the Block Council
i. A Block Council shall organize and coordinate the activities at the Block Level and shall raise public issues affecting more than one Primary unit in that Block.
ii. A Block Council shall exercise such powers and discharge such other functions as are assigned to it by the Aam AadmiParty.
iii. The members of a Block Council shall elect from amongst themselves or from amongst Active Members in that Block, one Coordinator and one Co-Coordinator (out of which at least one shall be a woman) by consensus, failing which by voting in the presence of a representative of the District Executive.
iv. The Block Council may form such teams as may be required for its activities and the discharge of its functions.
v. Coordinator and Co-coordinator shall be available for the Party work on regular basis.

3. DISTRICT LEVEL
a) District Council
Each District Council shall comprise of the Coordinators and Co-Coordinators from all Primary Units and Blocks falling in that District.

Powers and Functions of the District Council:-
i. The District Council will elect the District Executive.
ii. The District Council shall have the powers to recall the District Coordinator and/or the members of the District Executive.

b) District Executive
Each District Executive shall organize and coordinate the activities of the Party at the District Level.

i. The District Executive shall comprise of not more than 25 members selected by consensus from amongst the Active members in that District, failing which elected by a majority vote in the presence of a representative of the State Executive, of whom at least 5 shall be women and 5 shall be students.
ii. If the Coordinator of any Unit is elected to the District Executive, he/she shall resign as the Coordinator of the concerned Unit.
iii. In addition, the District Executive will have one representative from each block of the District as decided by that Block Council.
iv. If the Coordinator of a Primary/Block Unit is elected to the District Executive, he/she shall resign as the Coordinator of the concerned Primary/Block Unit.
v. The District Executive may co-opt upto 5 members in order to give fair representation to disadvantaged social groups, such as SC, ST, Backward Classes and Minorities. If the co-opted members are not already Active members of the Party, they shall be deemed to be Active Members of the Party as soon as they are co-opted and shall have all the rights of elected members of the Executive.
vi. The District Executive may, through consensus, invite anyone from within or outside the Party to attend its meetings as a ‘Special Invitee’ for one or more meetings. However, Special Invitees shall not enjoy any voting rights.
vii. The members referred to in sub-clause (i) above shall elect one person from amongst themselves as the District Coordinator.
viii. All elected members of the District Executive shall be available for the Party work on regular basis.

Powers and Functions of District Executive
The District Executive shall:
i. form as many teams as are required to carry out the objectives of the Party.
ii. monitor and supervise the activities of Party functionaries in that District.
iii. undertake all such activities as are needed to meet the objectives of the Party in that District.
iv. undertake activities related to public issues affecting that District.
v. maintain the Register of Active Members of the Party of that District.
vi. maintain and keep accounts of District Level Finances
vii. form District Level Committees for settling internal disputes, grievances and disciplinary actions.
viii. set up the first District Level Lokpal to receive and decide complaints of violation of Code of Conduct against members of the District Executive, Block/Primary Level Coordinators and Co-coordinators.
ix. elect a District Political Affairs Committee consisting of 5 members from amongst elected members of the District Executive.

c) District Political Affairs Committee
The District Coordinator shall consult District Political Affairs Committee in every decision.

4.STATE LEVEL
a) State Council
Each State Council shall comprise of the Coordinators from all Districts and Blocks falling in that State.

b) Functions and Powers of the State Council:-
i. The State Council will elect the State Executive.
ii. The State Council shall have the power to recall the State Coordinator and/or the members of the State Executive.
iii. It shall meet at least twice every year.
iv. It will decide the stand and policy of the Party on issues concerning that state in such manner as may be prescribed.

c) State Executive
Each State Executive shall organize and coordinate the activities of the Party at the State Level.
Composition of the State Executive
i. The State Executive shall comprise of not more than 25 members selected by consensus from amongst the Active members in that State failing which elected by a majority vote in the presence of a representative of the National Executive, of whom at least 5 shall be women and 5 shall be students.
ii. In addition, the State Executive will have one representative from each District as decided by that District Executive.
iii. If the Coordinator of any Unit is elected to the State Executive, he/she shall resign as the Coordinator of the concerned District.
iv. The State Executive may co-opt up to 5 members in order to give fair representation to disadvantaged social groups, such as SC, ST, Back-Ward Classes and Minorities. If the co-opted members are not already Active members of the Party, they shall be deemed to be Active Members of the Party as soon as they are co-opted and shall have all the rights of elected members of the Executive.
v. The State Executive may, through consensus, invite anyone from within or outside the Party to attend its meetings as a ‘Special Invitee’ for one or more meetings. However, Special Invitees shall not enjoy any voting rights.
vi. The members referred to in sub-clause (i) above shall elect one person from amongst themselves as the State Coordinator.
vii. All elected members of the State Executive shall be available for the Party work on regular basis.

d) Functions and Powers of State Executive
The State Executive shall:-
i. form as many teams as are required to carry out the objectives of the Party.
ii. monitor and supervise the activities of Party functionaries in that State.
iii. undertake all such activities as are needed to meet the objectives of the Party in that State.
iv. undertake various activities related to public issues affecting that State.
v. maintain and keep accounts of State Level Finances.
vi. form State Level Committees for settling internal disputes, grievances and disciplinary actions.
vii. set up the first State Level Lokpal to receive and decide complaints of violation of Code of Conduct against members of the State Executive.
viii. elect a State Political Affairs Committee consisting of 7 members from amongst elected members of the State Executive.

e) State Political Affairs Committee
The State Coordinator shall consult State Political Affairs Committee in every decision.

5. NATIONAL LEVEL
a) National Council
The National Council shall be the highest policy making body of the Party. The National Council shall comprise of the Coordinators from all the States and Districts. In addition, It may co-opt 50 members from amongst the following:-
i. experts from such fields as the National Council deems fit.
ii. eminent people from the country
iii. members from disadvantaged social groups, such as SC, ST, Backward Classes and Minorities if there is inadequate representation of such groups.

b) Functions and Powers of the National Council
The National Council shall:-
i. elect the National Executive.
ii. have the powers to recall the National Coordinator and/or the members of the National Executive.
iii. have the power to amend the Constitution.
iv. meet at least twice every year.
v. decide the stand and policy of the Party on issues of National interest in such manner as may be prescribed.

c) National Executive
The National Executive would be the highest executive body of the Party. It shall organize and coordinate the activities of the party at the National Level.
i. The National Executive shall comprise of not more than 30 members selected by consensus from amongst the Active members of the party failing which elected by a majority vote, of whom at least 7 shall be women and 5 shall be students.
ii. In addition, the National Executive will have one representative from each State as decided by that State Executive.
iii. If the Coordinator of any Unit is elected to the National Executive, he/she shall resign as the Coordinator of the concerned Unit.
iv. The National Executive may co-opt upto 5 members in order to give fair representation to disadvantaged social groups, such as SC, ST, Back-Ward Classes and Minorities. If the co-opted members are not already Active members of the Party, they shall be deemed to be Active Members of the Party as soon as they are co-opted and shall have all the rights of elected members of the Executive.
v. The National Executive may, through consensus, invite anyone from within or outside the Party to attend its meetings as a ‘Special Invitee’ for one or more meetings. However, Special Invitees shall not enjoy any voting rights.
vi. The members referred to in sub-clause (i) above shall elect one person from amongst themselves as the National Coordinator.
vii. All elected members of the National Executive shall be available for the Party work on regular basis.

d) Powers and Functions of the National Executive
The National Executive shall:-
i. form as many teams as are required to carry out the objectives of the Party.
ii. monitor and supervise the activities of Party functionaries at various levels in the country.
iii. undertake all such activities as are needed to meet the objectives of the Party in the country.
iv. undertake various activities related to public issues.
v. maintain and keep accounts of National Level Finances.
vi. form National Level Committees for settling internal disputes, grievances and disciplinary actions.
vii. set up the first National Level Lokpal to receive and decide complaints of violation of Code of Conduct against National Executive members.
viii. elect a National Political Affairs Committee consisting of 7 members from amongst elected members of the State Executive.

e) National Political Affairs Committee
The National Coordinator shall consult National Political Affairs Committee in every decision.

OTHER STRUCTURES
For all towns and cities governed by Municipal laws, Council/Executive shall be formed at following Levels:-

A. Ward Level
(i) Ward Level in any Municipality shall be equivalent to the Primary Level mentioned in clause b) stated above. The Sabhashall be formed in a similar manner and they shall work similarly.
(ii.) If any Municipality is smaller than an Assembly, then only Ward Level units (Ward Sabha) shall be constituted in that Municipality.

B. Assembly Level
(i.) If there are one or more assemblies in any Municipality, then Assembly Level Council/Executive shall be formed in that Municipality. Assembly Level in any Municipality shall be equivalent to the District Level mentioned at clause D of Article IV above. Council/Executive shall be formed in a similar fashion and they shall work similarly.
(ii.) If any Municipality is smaller than a Parliamentary constituency, then only Ward Level units and Assembly Level Units shall be constituted in that Municipality.

C. Parliamentary Level
(i.) If there are one or more Parliamentary constituencies in any Municipality, then Parliamentary Level Council/Executive shall be formed in that Municipality. Parliamentary Level Council/Executive shall be formed in similar manner as District Council/Executive and they shall work similarly.

How are we different

1. There is no central high command in Aam Aadmi party. The party structure follows a bottom to top approach where the council members elect the Executive Body and also holds the power to recall it.

2. No MLA or MP of this party will use red lights or any other beacons on his or her vehicles.

3. No MLA or MP of this party will use any special security. We believe that elected people's representatives need the same security as a common man.

4. No MLA or MP of our party will live in opulent and luxurious government housing.

5. No one would need to buy an election ticket in our party. Candidates contesting elections from an area will be selected by the people of that area.

6. In all political parties today criminals and mafia goons are given election tickets. Such people will never be given tickets in our party. A thorough screening process will ensure that no one with a criminal record or proven corruption charges could stand for elections from our party.

7. This party will function with full financial transparency. Every single rupee collected by donations to run this people's party will be publicly declared on the party's website and all expenditures will also be declared on the website.

8. Every member of the Aam Aadmi party will have to follow a strict internal code of conduct or internal Lokpal. This independent body will be headed by 3 jurists and other eminent personalities with impeccable public records and will investigate charges of corruption, crime, substance abuse and moral turpitude against all office bearing members of the party. Any citizen can present proof of wrongdoing against a party member. If internal Lokpal finds the party member guilty, he or she will be subjected to appropriate disciplinary action as decided by the internal Lokpal.

9. No two members of the same family will be eligible to contest elections in our party and no two members of the same family can become members of the Executive Body.

10. Today we give our vote to a candidate, he or she wins the election, and then they disappear from our life. Today most elected representatives make no time to listen to the problems of their constituents. And in the current electoral system, the people have no choice but to suffer this candidate for 5 years. We want to create an alternative. We will enact a Right to Reject law wherein the common man does not have to wait for 5 years to remove a corrupt MLA or MP from office. People can complain to the election commission anytime to recall their representative and call for fresh elections.

11. Aam Aadmi Party is fully committed to the principles of gender equity and will represent women and students amply at all levels of party organisation.

12. Aam Aadmi Party is committed to the principles of justice for all and will coopt representatives from the Dalit and other minority segments of society at all levels of party organisation.

Internal Lokpal

Procedure for Receiving and Disposing Complaints

As per constitution, National Lokpal consists of a maximum of 3 members. It is required to enquire into complaints of violation of Code of conduct by any of the National Executive members.

Presently, National Lokpal is a 2 member body. The two members are -

Admiral Ramdas

Ex. Navy Chief Admiral Ramdas has agreed to become National Lokpal for the Aam Aadmi Party.

Dr. Ilina Sen

She is an internationally known feminist scholar, human-rights activist, and an author. Dr. Sen has worked for more than three decades among some of India’s most impoverished and socially stigmatized populations and manages the NGO Rupantar. Presented as part of the Town Hall Civics series with AID India and Asha. She is also a professor at Tata Institute of Social Studies and has agreed to become National Lokpal for the Aam Aadmi Party.

The Lokpal had its first meeting on 28 Nov at 7 pm and adopted the following procedure for receiving and disposing complaints -

1. Any complainant could make a complaint pertaining to violation of Code of Conduct as defined in the constitution of the Party (Article VI A), to the Secretary of the Party in writing along with an affidavit and all the evidence either through email or send the complaint at A 119, Kaushambi, Ghaziabad -201010, UP.

2. Lokpal would not entertain a complaint directly from the Secretariat of the Party. There ought to be a complainant.

3. After receipt of such a complaint, the Secretary may video record the statement of complainant depending on the seriousness of the complaint.

4. Such complaints will be examined in the office of the Secretariat and will be forwarded to the Lokpal along with its observations/comments.

5. Secretary, in consultation with all Lokpal members and as per their convenience, would call a meeting of Lokpal.

6. Lokpal would decide if there is prima facie case or not. After deciding they will proceed accordingly either to enquire or reject the complaint. For reaching out any conclusion Lokpal will adopt appropriate methods suitable to the complaint and the circumstances.

7. If they find that no prima facie case is made out, Lokpal could dismiss the complaint. However, reasons for doing so would be recorded.

8. After completion of enquiries, lokpal will pass an order, which shall be binding on the Party.

Goal of Swaraj

PEOPLE'S RULE - CREATING SWARAJ

60 years ago India's founding forefathers had a dream for all of us - a dream of an equal and just society where every man, woman and child has the right and privilege to lead a fulfilling and nurturing life, free from all kinds of oppression. This was a dream and a hope over 60 years ago. The Constituion of India and specifically the Preamble to the Constitution of India, defines a clear roadmap for the future of our country wherein the common man and woman hold the power to decide their destiny.

Today nobody can say that India has achieved this dream. Before independence the common man was a slave to foreign powers; today he has become a slave of the political system of our country. There is a new master in our country today - the political Neta. This Neta, who asks for our votes during elections, and then forgets us after he wins, this political entity decides the common man's destiny.

But every civilisation reaches a plimsoll line of tolerance. This is our line. India's common man has had enough of oppression, inequality, injustice and unkept promises. For the last 2 years the anti corruption movement has galvanised the country from end to end into one common voice - a voice that is demanding a complete rehaul in the way political parties and their leaders function.

This national demand for a change in the way our political system works has forced our anti corruption drive to enter the political arena to clean it from the inside. Politics itself is not a dirty word - it is our current breed of politicians who have made it dirty. Our Party wants to make politics a noble calling once again.

The biggest problem facing our democracy today is that no one in government can or wants to hear the common man's basic needs. This is the situation in the whole of our country. People need basic amenities and the government provides something else. Decisions affecting millions of common Indians are taken by a few select leaders of the ruling party in Parliament. Democracy has become a slave of the leader of the ruling-party.

We believe that good governance happens when people have the power to influence decisions that shape their life. This is a major change that India needs badly. No present day party will usher in this systemic change. For this very reason, ouranti corruption movement has been forced to enter politics.

The Aam Aadmi party, the common man's party, wants to overhaul the 3 pillars of our democracy and make them accountable for their actions to the people of India. The following is the roadmap we aim to follow:-

1. The Executive

Today all big and small decisions that affect the nation are taken by a few select members of this body of governance. Once the ruling party comes to power, a few top leaders at the head of the party and a handful of influential corporate honchos decide all policies. Where is the voice of the common man in this decision making process? There is no Right to Recall in our country today. So once we elect a leader, we are stuck with him for 5 years. And this gives the current breed of politicians enough time to loot the resources of the country.
Is this the true meaning of Democracy? Of course not. In a true democracy The people have the power. Governments should be responsible to the people, not the other way around. This is the goal of Aam Aadmi Party - to give the power back in the hands of the people of India. This is SWARAJ or self rule - but can it be done practically?
The answer is YES!
SWARAJ can be created in a fully democratic system and many countries in the world have done it. India can also create a system which makes the government directly responsible to the people. Aam Aadmi Party aims to decentralise the system of governance in such a way that people can influence the policies that affect their local area. All the provisions to create SWARAJ are defined in the Constitution of India. All it takes is the political will to implement the spirit of the Constitution on the ground level. No political party in India today will do this. It is this corrupt and selfish current political system, that forms the Executive pillar of our democracy, that we aim to change.

2. The Legislature

The common men and women of India elect the MLAs and MPs and send them to Parliament. These chosen few then betray the trust of the common man and make unfair and corrupt policies and take unilateral decisions that affect the lives of millions of Indians. In the current system once we elect our representatives, the common people have no recourse to have a say in the law making and policy formulation process. And in this India is one of the 5 unfortunate countries in the world which do not have constitutional provisions to allow people's participation in policy making.

All the other democracies in the world have 2 such provisions - REFERENDUM and INITIATIVE. In these countries if a pre determined majority of the population consider a law unfit for the people, they can reject it and send it back to their elected representatives. This is called Referendum. Similarly, if a pre determined majority of the population considers a law necessary for their nation, through a clearly defined procedure the people can send the law to their chosen representatives and this right is termed Initiative. These are just two examples of how democracy can be made truly participatory and representative, if the political system supports it. Our party is committed to giving these two rights of REFERENDUM and INITIATIVE to the people of India.

3. The Judiciary

Today if a common man wants a lawyer to represent him in either the Supreme Court or a High Court, he needs lakhs of rupees to afford legal representation. Justice in India today is so expensive that it is out of reach for a common man. The only way a poor person can appeal to the highest judicial courts is if some lawyer agrees to fight the case at nominal cost. This means that you can have justice in India today as a charity, but not as a right.

This is not the justice for all that is envisioned in the Preamble to the Constituiton of India. Access to the highest level of justice is a fundamental right of every Indian and should be made easily available to the common man. Our party plans to implement long overdue judicial reforms in order to create a judicial system easily accessible and affordable for all Indians.

Political Affairs Committee

1. Arvind Kejriwal

2. Gopal Rai

3. Ilias Azmi

4. Kumar Vishwas

5. Manish Sisodia

6. Pankaj Gupta

7. Prashant Bhushan

8. Sanjay Singh

9. Yogendra Yadav

Key Agenda Items

Janlokpal

Aam Aadmi party will pass a powerful anti corruption law, Janlokpal, to remove corruption from our system. Under this law, people will be able to complain directly and imprison corrupt politicians and bureaucrats.

Today a corruption case gets extended for years in our courts. In this time the corrupt politician is re-elected many times over to loot the nation. Many times accused politicians have died before being declared corrupt by the courts. Janlokpal Act will ensure that investigation of corruption charges and prosecution is done under fast tract conditions within 6 months. If found guilty the corrupt official shall serve appropriate jail time from 1 year to life, depending on the severity of the case, his or her property will be seized and he or she will be dismissed from job.

If our party’s government comes into existence, those found guilty of corruption charges in graft scandals in recent years will be jailed within six months.

When a common man goes to an office, he is asked for a bribe. Under Janlokpal, every function of a government officer, the officer responsible and the time limit within which the work must be completed will be clearly defined. If the concerned officer doesn’t do the work within the stipulated time, Lokpal will penalize such officer, compensate the sufferer and get the work done in 30 days.

Right To Reject

When we go to cast our vote, we know that almost all the candidates are either corrupt or criminals. But our current voting system forces us to choose any one candidate and waste our vote on someone we know is unfit for the job. We the people's party plan to give the voter an alternate choice - a Reject All button. All voting machines shall have a “reject all” button at the bottom. If you dislike all candidates, you will have an option to use this button. If this button gets majority of votes, the elections to that constituency will be cancelled and fresh elections will be held within a month. The parties and candidates rejected in the cancelled elections will forfeit their right to contest again in the re-elections.

Right to Recall

Today we give our vote to a candidate, he or she wins the election, and then they disappear from our life. Today most elected representatives make no time to listen to the problems of their constituents. And in the current electoral system, the people have no choice but to suffer this candidate for 5 years. We want to create an alternative. We will enact a Right to Recall law wherein the common man does not have to wait for 5 years to remove a corrupt MLA or MP from office. People can complain to the election commission anytime to recall their representative and call for fresh elections.

Political Decentralization

We believe that good governance happens when people have the power to influence decisions that shape their life. This is a major change that India needs badly. No present day party will usher in this systemic change. For this very reason, our anti corruption movement has been forced to enter politics.

The answer is YES!

SWARAJ and decentralisation of power can be done in a fully democratic system and many countries in the world have done it. India can also create a system which makes the government directly responsible to the people. Aam Aadmi Party aims to decentralise the system of governance in such a way that people can influence the policies that affect their local area. All the provisions to create SWARAJ are defined in the Constitution of India. All it takes is the political will to implement the spirit of the Constitution on the ground level. No political party in India today will do this. It is this corrupt and selfish current political system, that forms the Executive pillar of our democracy, that we aim to change.

http://www.aamaadmiparty.org/

The AAP conundrum: Steering clear of doctrines

Thursday, Jan 9, 2014, 10:31 IST | Agency: DNA

Praful Bidwai

That the Aam Aadmi Party represents something unprecedented in Indian politics is a truism. AAP is India’s first party since the JP movement of the 1970s to have evolved from a civil society mobilisation. It’s formally a regional party, but with unhidden national ambitions and a fast-growing presence outside its original base. Unlike most regional outfits, it has no crystallised caste, class, ethnic, religious or location-specific identity.

AAP claims to have no ideology or affinity to doctrines like socialism, secularism, liberalism or Hindutva. Ideology, it says, is “for the pundits and the media…” AAP is itself content to be “solution-focused”. It deplores the “tendency to pin down political parties as Left, Right, Centre…”
AAP is less about goals — barring eradicating corruption, its principal agenda—than process: popular participation to reduce the distance between people and politics, rulers and ruled.

This is a mix of positive and negative features. Take the positives. AAP has publicly rallied the normally apolitical middle class. It will willy-nilly eat into the BJP’s votes. No party places as much emphasis as AAP on grassroots democracy, gram-sabha and mohalla deliberations, local ownership/control of resources like water, minerals and forests, and participatory decision-making, including referendums. This can empower people and give them a sense of ownership of politics, so lacking in India. AAP’s social agendas like providing water, power, health and education are also welcome.

The negatives are AAP’s silence on vital questions like poverty, inequality, communalism, and gender and caste discrimination; prevarication on affirmative action for the underprivileged; refusal to take a stand on Narendra Modi while mainly targeting the Congress; and ad-hoc policy-making unrelated to a broader vision.

Rejection of ideology, which alone can provide vision, is crucial here. Take the AAP government’s first two decisions: to supply 700 litres of water free to each Delhi household daily, and halve electricity tariffs for monthly consumption below 400 units. Contrary to appearances, these don’t favour the poor as much as the middle/upper-middle class, and duck issues of universal access and equity.

More than one-third of Delhi’s households, typically poor, don’t have piped-water connections, and will be effectively excluded. Little will be done to improve supply to water-deprived areas or break the water-tanker mafia’s stranglehold. But 54 per cent of Delhi’s water will continue to be wasted. A person only needs 50-60 litres daily. Giving 140 litres free to all will increase waste.

Take electricity. Private distribution companies (discoms) have been overcharging consumers through meter-tampering, cost-padding, etc. AAP should have ordered an audit, and then proceeded towards tariff reduction. Instead, it raised subsidies to discoms! Poor and middle-class people don’t need 400 monthly units. Even an un-airconditioned three-bedroom home with a refrigerator uses 200 units. Halving tariffs for 400 units means subsidising the rich, but leaving 8 lakh poor families unconnected.

AAP’s transportation policy is similarly warped: its minister opposes bicycle lanes and Bus Rapid Transit, which is superior to the Metro. AAP’s “Vision” document talks of education and health unpardonably naively. It only wants to raise government schools’ quality to that of private schools—not establish common schooling. Healthcare involves nutrition, sanitation, environmental safety, and preventive and curative medicine. AAP reduces it to hospitals alone.

Worse, AAP is bending to pressure to conform to “mainstream” positions. That’s why Prashant Bhushan had to recant his sensible statements on Kashmir. As MNC executives, bankers and professionals join AAP, its composition and positions will become more elitist. Whether and how it will combine this with a grassroots orientation remains unclear.

The author is a writer, columnist, and a professor at the Council for Social Development, Delhi

http://www.dnaindia.com/analysis/column-the-aap-conundrum-steering-clear-of-doctrines-1947770

One, not two, cheers for AAP

An economically socialist and politically parochial party cannot provide an attractive alternative to Indian voters

Vivek Dehejia

The barely disguised glee of some in the commenting class on the meteoric ascent of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP)—both in its stunning debut in the Delhi assembly election and in its preparations to contest the upcoming national election—reflects, in some measure, a sense of relief at having a non-Congress, non-Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) political party to root for.

Those who wish to see the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) punished at the polls for a range of legitimate reasons—including its poor track record on economic policy and corruption, to name the two most obvious—and who are, equally, uncomfortable with the return of a muscular Hindutva to the national stage, as represented by a Narendra Modi-led BJP, have now, it seems, found a new mascot in Arvind Kejriwal and the AAP.

There are good reasons to celebrate. It is a tenet of economics that, for the most part, more competition is better for consumers than less. Likewise, one might reason that, in the electoral sphere, a more competitive political space is better for voters than one that is less. More competition not only gives voters greater choices, which in itself is presumably good, but it also forces incumbent parties who have grown stale in office (or in the expectation of office) to think anew about their policy platforms and may give them reason to refresh their roster of leaders in the bargain.

Much as in the US, with its entrenched two-party system, the Indian polity, until the advent of the AAP, seemed to be congealing into a de facto two-party state, with, presumably, the Congress and the BJP taking turns being in government (episodes of which might be punctuated by messy and short-lived “third front” governments in the event of an indecisive mandate from voters). This, in a sense, is the sign of a mature, if boring, democracy, in which mainstream political parties have coalesced on various sides of the preferred choices of the “median” voter over a range of issues.

The AAP has unsettled the serenity of this unfolding narrative and now, it would appear, is poised to provide the Indian electorate with a viable and genuinely distinct alternative to the Congress and the BJP: committed, on the one hand, to a Congress-style buy-in of historically disadvantage groups (such as women, SC/STs, and OBCs) which differentiates it from the BJP, while, on the other, committed, self-evidently, to tackling root and branch the rot of corruption, and pitching for “good governance” (ill-defined and nebulous though that concept is), which heretofore has appeared to be a Modi monopoly.

What is more, as has by now been widely commented upon, the AAP appears ready to poach the BJP’s natural constituency—urban, middle class voters—and may, therefore, be in a position to play spoiler, or kingmaker, in the event that neither the Congress nor the BJP and their respective allies win a majority of seats in the next Lok Sabha.

This is where three notes of caution are in order amidst all of the current euphoria.

First, on matters of economic policy, where the Congress since 2004 has retreated atavistically into its pre-1991 socialist mould, the AAP does not offer voters anything better, on current evidence. Indeed, they may, if that is possible, try to out-Congress the Congress when it comes to ill-conceived, albeit popular, redistributive schemes such as its free water and subsidized electricity programmes in Delhi.

Further, their first few weeks in office suggest a possible parochialism in government (if not in their philosophical ideas, as loftily expressed by party ideologue Yogendra Yadav) which might even impress chauvinistic political parties such as Maharashtra’s Shiv Sena. The scheme, recently mooted, to reserve 90% seats in Delhi

University colleges for local students will be enormously damaging to the well-earned cosmopolitanism of one of the nation’s premier university systems as well as be entirely unfitting for the nation’s capital region.

Yet in keeping with the propensity of some in the media to give the AAP a free pass, this outlandish proposal (not originating with the AAP, but one which they have made no attempt to squelch) has surprisingly elicited little opprobrium apart from one or two newspaper leaders pronouncing a mild rebuke. Imagine the media reaction had a similar proposal been suggested elsewhere by the BJP.

Finally, with the real possibility that the AAP may eat into votes that the BJP (prematurely, it turns out) had assumed were in the bag, and therefore that the general election may deliver a hung Parliament rather than a decisive outcome, one does have to ask whether a protracted period of political uncertainty under the aegis of a fractious “third front” government, with or without the AAP, would at all be in India’s best interests. This question, surely, answers itself.

Thus, while the rise of the AAP is certainly to be welcomed as providing a fresh voice in our national discourse, voters should not be misled by gushing commentaries portraying this event as an unalloyed boon.

An Indian electorate looking for a viable alternative to the Congress may yet decide that an established national party such as the BJP is a better bet than the green and as yet largely untested AAP.

Vivek Dehejia is a professor of economics at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada.

JAN 08 2014

http://www.livemint.com/Opinion/XA9HOfJaNxrRwygXweN1NO/One-not-two-cheers-for-AAP.html

AAP Breathes Life Into Mute, Demoralized, Lost Souls

By Raouf Rasool

30 December, 2013

Countercurrents.org

"Can't die of the cold!!!! Send him out in a few less clothes and let's see if he isn't singing a different tune pretty damn quick!" This was Chief Minister Omar Abdullah’s reaction to the UP Principal Secretary (Home) A K Gupta’s remark that "no one died of cold" in Muzaffarnagar relief camps. The bureaucrat, while defending the death toll in the relief camps for the riot victims of Muzaffarnagar, had said on Thursday: "Children have died of pneumonia, not of cold. Nobody can die of cold. If people died of cold, nobody would have been alive in Siberia."

Past week Chief Minister Omar Abdullah inaugurated a basketball court in a park at uptown Rajbagh area here. It was the very first day of the ‘Chillai Kalaan’ -- the harshest and chilliest 40-day period of winters in Kashmir. Interestingly, what Chief Minister’s close confidante and MLA from Amirakadal constituency, who is also the provincial president of the ruling National Conference in Kashmir, said on the occasion was equally insensitive if not more than that of UP bureaucrat’s remark. Obviously Chief Minister did not react to it -- it is easy to train guns at ‘others’! But if he had, then Abdullah’s criticism of his very own Nasir Aslam Wani, should have read something like this: “Play basketball to beat the Chillai Kalaan!!!! Send Nasir out to play basketball and make sure that the electricity supply to his home is snapped (to give him a feel of what frequent, undue, unscheduled, and prolonged power-cuts mean in chilling winters) and let’s see if he still believes that Kashmiris can beat Chillai Kalaan by playing basketball!”

Come on Mr. ABC…, grow up. You have already failed people on so many different counts, more so and more recently on the power front. Now please don’t add insult to their injuries by such insensitive and mocking remarks!

Let’s hope they learn their lessons, which they will have to, as quickly as possible. The Aam Admi Party AAP) has already pushed the Congress party to margins (even if so far only in Delhi) -- and the way it is shaping a new political discourse and culture, any resistance to change may well cost the old warhorses dearly. Congress and BJP are already feeling the heat, and certainly no other party, regional or otherwise, is going to remain unharmed. Courtesy AAP, people have, for the first time, got a feeling of their power potential (people’s power); they relish it and are ready for the kill.

Democracy, it is said is a ‘way of life’ and not a formula to be ‘preserved’ like jelly. “It is a process – a vibrant, living sweep of hope and progress which constantly strives for the fulfillment of its objective in life – the search for truth, justice and dignity of man.” Over the years, the traditional polity had robbed the “world’s largest democracy” of that dynamism which is its essence, its heart and soul. There is no truth, no justice, and above all there is no dignity for the common man (Aam Admi) - the have-nots. If there is anything in it, it is the privileges and perks for those who have mastered the art of maintaining the status quo in the name of preserving democracy in the world’s second largest country (in terms of population). Finding their space shrinking with each passing day, common people too had long back recoiled into their caves knowing that they would be called out when needed – once every five years.

AAP has brought about a huge change by striking at the very roots of so many myths that were woven by the ‘thermo-politically cold haves’ to maintain their power, their privileges. Those who had dismissed AAP as a bunch of rhetorical junkies have suddenly realized that it is possible to channel the adrenaline rush towards a turbine of constructive change. That it is possible to win elections without the black and sleazy money. That, the so-called political toddlers could replace the old assembly line political jokers. That if people really have that deep desire to shake off the torpor of frustration, hopelessness, and despair, there are ways to climb out of the valley of anonymity.

AAP is not just Arvind Kejriwal or for that matter any other member(s) of his team, individually or collectively alone. AAP is, as the party itself takes pride to claim, a movement with far-reaching impact on the general political culture in India and elsewhere as well. Irrespective of whether or not, or how much AAP is able to deliver on its poll promises, fact of the matter remains that AAP’s rise has definitely lend a new direction and orientation to politics in India. Kashmir’s uniqueness aside, politics here too is not going to be same – this place can’t remain immune to the “contagions” wanting to travel northwards. They have reached here, and I am sure that no amount of masking and muffling of people’s eyes, noses and throats will help now.

(The writer is Editor of Kashmir Images, a daily English newspaper published from Srinagar and Jammu simultaneously.)

http://www.countercurrents.org/rasool301213.htm

Aam Aadmi Party: Beginning Of A Novel Experiment In Politics

By Dr Sandeep Pandey

30 December, 2013

Citizen News Service

With the formation of Aam Aadmi Party government in Delhi the country is going to witness a novel experiment in politics. The first target has been the VIP culture. Arvind Kejriwal has refused to accept security, beacon fitted vehicle and a government bunglow not only for himself but all his ministers. In a country where most people become politician to avail of all these facilities it is going to be a trend setting decision. In fact, the facilities given to people’s representatives and bureaucrats should be drastically cut down. This is an unnecessary wastage and burden on the tax payer.

People’s representatives and bureaucrats should use their own vehicles or public transport and own houses or guest houses. They get enough salary to take care of these expenses themselves. The bureaucracy is already preparing to hike its salaries and perks by proposing the seventh pay commission. The salaries of bureaucrats need to be cut down rather than increased. During the years of economic reforms the gap between the rich and the poor has galloped. It is time to revise the wages of unorganised sector in upward direction and not the service class.

The bureaucrats must also learn to mingle with people. In most offices of senior government officials one needs a pass to enter. The pass is made only if the office of the official informs the people at the gate. This implies that you cannot meet a bureaucrat unless you know him/her through some connection. It is possible for ordinary people to meet politicians at home but the bureaucrats don’t entertain people at home. This system of requiring a pass should be done away with. If AAP leaders can do without security why can’t the bureaucrats learn to come out of their secure environs.

The biggest change that the AAP government will bring about is restraining corruption. Since AAP doesn’t need black money to finance its politics, there is no need for their leaders to become part of the existing corrupt political culture. AAP is the first party after the communist parties which has kept account of its political donations and expenditure properly and made them public. The check on day to day corruption will be a big relief to the people and end of commission raj will bring efficiency in the system. Overall the governance will improve. Arvind Kejriwal started his social activism from fighting corruption in income-tax department, electricity department and in the Public Distribution System in lower income localities. His colleague Santosh Koli, who was recently killed, emerged from the grassroots struggle against corruption in PDS. PDS and other social welfare schemes are of great concern to the poor and can really help in poverty alleviation. Corruption is proving to be a big road block in ending poverty in this country.

The most amazing change that AAP is going to bring about is in the decision making process. People will be involved in most decisions taken in open meetings of mohalla sabhas. In a country where so far only the elite and that too in closed rooms has been taking decisions which impact the lives of majority of the people it is going to be a welcome departure. When decisions are taken collectively chances are that wrong decisions will not be taken. There will be checks and balances among people themselves. Hence chances of AAP MLAs becoming corrupt are slim as the people are going to keep a strict vigil on their representatives and AAP has put in place an internal Lokpal which will deal with complaints against people within the party. When political bosses don’t indulge in corruption it will be easier to put pressure on the bureaucracy to change its ways. Then bureaucracy and lower employees will have no excuse to justify corruption. AAP has changed the set of leaders at top. But it is going to be a tougher task to tame the arrogant and corrupt bureaucracy and the attendant government machinery. It is time that the idea of making service sector truly service oriented may be considered. People should not work in service sector for salaries and perks. They should volunteer to work for service sector. Like people have taken time out from their jobs to work for AAP a similar model could be considered for running the governments. Why do we need permanent bureaucrats? Most of them have used their service for personal aggrandizement anyway.

If people get involved in decision making and a number of things are done with collective labour we may not need as many government employees as there are presently whom it has become an uphill task to manage. Most of them have formed unions which oppose any progressive moves. For example, recently government school teachers in UP protested against the corruption in education department but there was no word uttered on teacher absenteeism in schools during the demonstration.

Mood in the country is upbeat. People are joining AAP in big numbers. There are some who want to contest election too. An IIT Kanpur engineer who is a ferrocement expert and presently teaches at MNREC, Allahabad, has offered his technology to AAP government to build houses for poor. Two serving engineers of UP Power Corporation Limited have told Citizen News Service (CNS) to work out cost of electricity so that AAP can fulfill its promise in Delhi. A policewoman called to say that she doesn’t trust politicians and Arvind must accept security. Common people feel it is their government and everybody wants to contribute in whatever they can. This is certainly sign of political transformation at work.

(The author is a Ramon Magsaysay Awardee and a senior social activist who writes for Citizen News Service - CNS. He is the Vice President of Socialist Party (India) and member, National Presidium, Lok Rajniti Manch. He has led National Alliance of People's Movements (NAPM) and is a former faculty of IIT Kanpur. Presently he is a faculty at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) BHU. He did his PhD from University of California, Berkeley and is a visiting faculty for a number of US Universities and IITs in India. Email: ashaashram@yahoo.com)

http://www.countercurrents.org/pandey301213.htm

AAP: Subversion By Innocence

By Satya Sagar

21 December, 2013

Countercurrents.org

From time to time in the history of every nation there emerges a maverick force that collapses the existing system by taking its logic to the extremes. Arvind Kejriwal and his Aam Aadmi Party are precisely that, a ‘wild card’ in Indian politics, threatening to turn it upside down in ways no one could have imagined before.

Ever since they were born out of the throes of Anna Hazare’s anti-corruption movement, a couple of years ago, everyone has tried to slot the AAP in the regular political categories of right, left and center. Some have dubbed the Aam Aadmi Party as the ‘new Congress’ and others as the ‘B Team’ of the BJP. Supporters of the party have hailed its leader Arvind Kejriwal as a ‘modern day Gandhi’ while one opponent has intriguingly called his party ‘right wing Maoists’!

In my opinion though, if there is any one term that can be used to describe Arvind Kejriwal and his Aam Aadmi Party it is simply ‘innocently subversive’. I have no doubt at all now that they are simply the most dangerous political formation to have emerged on Indian soil in a long time – though they themselves obviously don’t realize it as yet!

So subversive and dangerous in fact, that for now AAP deserves nothing less than the wholehearted support of the people of India. For the threat they pose is not to the ordinary citizen per se but to the façade of democracy papered over the strange mix of feudalism, crony capitalism and rent-seeking bureaucracy India has become.

By forcefully promoting a cleaner, more transparent and participatory politics AAP is calling the bluff of India’s very claim to being a democracy at all and unwittingly pulling the mask off a system that hides beneath it a thousand dictatorships. Contesting elections with public donations, involving the citizen in decision making and calling for accountability from public servants and politicians AAP is testing the limits of the country’s long rotten, creaking political apparatus.

By its naïve insistence on implementing rule of law and ‘cleaning’ up political practice Arvind Kejriwal and his followers are bringing into sharp focus the complete disconnect between the rhetoric of Indian democracy and the harsh realities that citizens face in their daily life. If they can carry this process forward successfully over any period of time, they would have exposed the true workings of the Indian political process to everyone. Including the fact that almost every mainstream Indian political player has become an enemy of both democratic institutions and values as well as the rights guaranteed to the population by the Indian Constitution.

All these decades since Independence Indian politicians have basically paid lip service to this noble document emerging from the Indian anti-colonial movement, that underpins the very idea of modern Indian democracy, while wilfully violating all its principles in practice. Though mainstream political parties and media commentators have accused AAP of being ‘confused’ the fact remains that they themselves are the ones who have been most confused on the question of what Indian democracy should be all about.

For example, the Congress, which has ruled India the longest since Independence, has confused democracy with the task of promoting the same dynasty back to power repeatedly and using the ‘first family’ as a polite front to loot the public exchequer. While Congress spokesmen glibly talk of theirs being a party of ‘Gandhi and Nehru’ the fact is today they are basically a rabble of rank opportunists with no spine to protect either national sovereignty against imperialism or subversion of Indian democracy by both domestic and foreign corporations. And on the issue of communalism the Congress, despite protestations of being ‘secular’, has undoubtedly become the ‘B’ team of the BJP.

The BJP, on the other hand, has confused politics to be the perverted goal of keeping a Brahminical version of Hinduism dominant in Indian society- using every method possible- including regular pogroms against religious minorities- to achieve this. In their last stint in power at the national level the BJP’s mother organisation, the RSS, had openly talked of replacing the Indian Constitution and foisting a ‘council of sadhus’ at the top of the hierarchy of the country’s goveranance.

There is no doubt that this fascist plan is still alive on their agenda – something we will hear about more if Narendra Modi manages to become the Prime Minister of the country. Interestingly enough, when it comes to protecting corporate interests the BJP turns out to be the ‘B Team’ of the Congress, united with its rival by their common love for Mukesh Ambani and Ratan Tata!

On the theme of Indian democracy, the mainstream Indian Left is the most confused of the entire lot. Spouting the rhetoric of X or Y kind of ‘revolution’ in their party documents, in practice they are resigned to doing all politics within the iron framework of the Indian state. This gives rise to a strange ambivalence in their attitude towards the Indian Constitution and democracy itself, neither able to defend it vigorously nor transcend it with anything new and creative.(As Comrade Talat Mahmood put it once ‘Unse aaya na gaya, hamse bulaya na gaya…’)

The Maoists are an exception to this trend on the Left of course, with their open claim of trying to ‘overthrow the Indian state’ and obvious contempt for the Indian Constitution in both theory and practice. However, they have become largely irrelevant in the national context and remain merely of nuisance value to the Indian state. By choosing to hide deep in the forests and operating with methods that have no traction with a majority of the Indian population they have lost a great opportunity to creatively shape the future of the country.

AAP, on the other hand, has started the process of exhausting the possibilities of India’s Constitutional democracy. By fiercely trying to make the sytem according to its own theoretical framework they are exposing its contradictions. While it is too early to read their exact future they are at least paving the way for the creation of better alternatives to the current system and that too, with considerable public participation.

The emergence of AAP is historic for its ability to open up new space and fresh entry points into the existing theater of Indian electoral politics, hijacked for long by money, muscle and media power. While its vision is quite mundane- to ensure that citizens will get all that they are promised routinely by the government- what is attracting people to it in droves across the nation is the open nature of AAP’s project that gives them a say in the politics of power for the first time in a direct way.

And AAP is managing to do all this while appearing to be totally naïve in its politics and without any grand revolutionary rhetoric, save the slogan of ‘going back to the Aam Aadmi’ for its political inspiration and decision making. In fact, to me, the AAP’s radical potential arises precisely because it has few abstract pretensions and instead holds on to its faith in the wisdom of ordinary Indian citizens thus restoring agency to them and eschewing the politics of left or right elitism.

Also, by focusing on specific, tangible issues that affect the lives of ordinary folks- water, power, roads, health, education, interface with state agencies and so on- the AAP is politically educating the Indian masses on the fly in an unprecedented manner. It is upto the Indian citizen- all of them to the last person- to help deepen Indian democracy and prepare the stage for a potential revolution in the future for a better India.

Ok, maybe I am jumping the gun a bit and being too rosy about the AAP here, as very little is known yet about their stand on a variety of other issues. For example, it is not clear what stand the AAP will finally take on the idea of the ‘Indian nation’ itself, in particular regarding movements for autonomy and independence in Kashmir or the northeast. Furthermore, AAP with its base largely within the urban middle-classes has also not spelt out its position on class and caste – probably the most important political themes in Indian society.

Nor is it really possible to support the AAP’s narrow, accountant’s definition of corruption. The Jan Lokpal Bill, it promotes is a somewhat laughable attempt to find a new ‘tough law’ along with a ‘few good men’ to fix the problems of Indian society and its goverance. As if in an age, where finance capital swirls around the globe like a tsunami, it is possible to keep one’s physical self, leave alone morals, tethered to anything stable!

There is much greater corruption, obviously, manifested in the deep-rooted caste system, institutionalised discrimination against religious minorities and women or the accumulation of wealth through inheritance of property. None of these can be sorted out through mere passage of legislation in the Indian parliament and need much larger social mobilisations and many hard battles.

There is also no telling at this stage of course how long AAP’s current streak of sincerity and zeal for a clean politics will last- tested as it will be by the dynamics of actually wielding power, even in a limited sphere to begin with. Who can guarantee that the AAP will not be ‘defanged’ by the very system they have taken on and turn out to be yet another failed promise, like so many in the past?

While all these doubts surely need to be answered the real question is whether one should be a passive bystander in this process and cynically wait for the AAP to make all the usual mistakes, collapse and disappear forever? In my opinion, what even those who don’t concur with the AAP on everything should do is to work with them and build upon those aspects they can agree upon.

Spurning the option of being a rocking chair revolutionary one should rather reflect on the harder question, “If the Aam Aadmi Party represents any hope for a better Indian politics and democracy what can we do to strengthen them?”

For given the barrenness of the Indian political soil in terms of new ideas, quality of participants and processes, the AAP certainly represents a positive trend that needs to be supported. As in romance, in good politics too, it is always better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all…

Satya Sagar is a public health worker, writer and human rights activist based in Santiniketan, West Bengal. He can be reached at sagarnama@gmail.com

http://www.countercurrents.org/sagar211213.htm

Another Politics Is Possible

By Prahlad Shekhawat

18 December, 2013

Countercurrents.org

The most significant outcome of the elections in the States were the massive win for the BJP in Rajasthan, but equally the historic breakthrough for alternative politics provided by the Aam Admi Party(AAP) in Delhi. There was wide spread cynicism about the political system, political culture and the belief that the space for genuine democracy and transparent elections , not dominated by money and muscle power, was shrinking.

The dominant parties were seen as not serious enough about corruption and electoral and other reforms, and taking turns to win by default

Enter AAP less than a year before elections with a band of dedicated, honest and motley group of mostly young people thrown up by the Anna anti corruption social movement. They had no funds, no experience, no muscle power but an authentic and honest seeking for a genuine alternative and to test if the flawed democracy can allow real change in favour of the common man. Now we know it is possible but there has to be a lot of systematic, and strategic hard work on the ground.

Arvind Khejrival, had said “We would like to have educated, committed and dedicated people to come forward as we want to change the face of politics in India. Delhi being our debut election, we want to showcase it as a model for the rest of the country.”

The party came out with 71 manifestos, one for each constituency and one common manifesto for all. Volunteers went to each and every household to list the important issues in each constituency. Based on this a constituency-wise manifesto was prepared and then a common manifesto for the State.

The AAP had carried out a unique process to select candidates for the Delhi Assembly elections. Six months before the elections over 1.5 lakh volunteers, roughly one for every 30 households in Delhi, went door to door asking people for names of suitable candidates besides finding out issues important to them. They collected feedback on people who want to be the party’s candidates.

People who wish to be considered for selection were to get at least 100 people from their constituency to recommend them. All applications were screened by a committee comprising senior leaders. Five candidates were shortlisted for each constituency. Their names were displayed on the party website for over a month for public scrutiny. AAP workers in each constituency then voted on their choice among the five and the person who get the highest number of votes will be the party’s official candidate.

The criteria for accepting aspiring candidates applications was strict. People with criminal records, people from the same family and rebels from other political parties were not be accepted. The aspirants will have to give an undertaking that they will not use cars with red beacons, stay in government residences or have bodyguards.

Thousands of young educated volunteers poured in from around the world and India to help out selflessly, to donate and to set up smart research methods and effective social media. They went from door to door to learn and to seek support and their earnestness and honest approach to actually find out the problems of the common person was refreshing and the people could recognise it.

Dedicated voluntary work created huge empathy, connect and adds value. It also brings greater sense of purpose and satisfaction to the volunteers and much hope to those who felt helpless because they thought elections were all about spending money to mobolise and transport, calculating caste and community factors and in a way buying or inducing voters

For long there has been a confusion among the civil society and social movements , who shied away from party politics because of the fear of not having enough resources, not succeeding and being tainted and blamed for pursuing power. The whole idea of politics was considered a dirty business and the disenchantment among the youth and many others was massive

At the same time we have seen so many episodes of public anger, mass protests, spontaneous mobolisation and social movements which shined bright but could not be sustained once the fatigue set in and the TV channels switched to another sensational story.

The International Democracy Index of the Economist Magazine has rated India low and pointed out the participatory democracy deficit. The moral victory of the AAP shows in a small way that another politics is possible and social unrest can perhaps be better channelized and sustained through an organised institution of a clean and democratic political party with a principled purpose

More than the BJP wave and the Modi factor, the impressive debut By AAP has the potential to change the nature and direction of Indian elections and democracy, although it will be a long and hard struggle. The only alternative to Congress’s shortcomings and incumbency was BJP and its skills to mobolise the anger and frustration, which it did very well

But in Delhi there was for the first time in the history of Indian democracy, not just a substitute in the form of BJP but a real alternative to traditional politics. People voted for it massively in spite of the fear that the AAP was untested and that they may not be able to form a government against the might of traditionally dominant parties.

Khejrival himself thinks the lessons to be learnt are patience, faith in honesty and the learning from the grassroots, the street and the voices of the ordinary poor and the powerless

Now the hope and trust has come alive and Delhi has shown the way. But the rest of India is more complicated, diverse, inexplicable and huge in scale than the small city State like Delhi. Selfless idealism, honesty combined with smart out of the box ideas, learning from people’s voices should always be the core but politics even in developed democracy is also the art of trade offs and coalitions.

Can AAP maintain its core values and yet be resilient enough to strike a balance in the art of making tactical comprises and alliances? Can the momentum generated by the inspired dedication be sustained for the long haul?

Prahlad Shekhawat prahladsingh.com

Director, Alternative Development and Research Center,Jaipur.
Writer & Freelance Journalist.
Author of 3 books on aspects of Human Development,Culture and Well-being.*A poetry book.
New Book;New Pathways for Human Progress, to be published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing UK
Ex-Associate Professor,Institute of Development Studies,Jaipur
Ex-Research Associate, International Institute of Social Studies,The Hague,Netherlands
Studied Creative Writing, Exeter College, Oxford University ** Lectured in Europe and Japan
M.A Development Studies, International Institute of Social Studies,The Hague, Netherlands

http://www.countercurrents.org/shekhawat181213.htm

AAP Has Come: aap ne bulaya kis liye

By Willy

02 January, 2014

Countercurrents.org

The recent state election results in central and north India show an interesting and dangerous trend emerging. Leave aside Delhi for a while, we see a consolidation of bi-polar politics with Congress and BJP on the two poles. The complete sweep of BJP in Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh and a majority in Chhattisgarh – significant loss to other parties like the BSP.

With Narendra Modi heading the BJP campaign for the 2014 parliament elections, this meant that bipolarism would be complete – thanks to has fascist ideology and the 2002 Gujarat pogrom. All secular parties would be hijacked to support the so-called 'secular' camp led by Congress – whose secular credentials during the last 10 years in power are all in the open. Be it's actions or inactions in Kandhamal or Mangalore or Muzzaffarnagar or Hindutva-terrorist groups, the secularists are forced to back this unsecular Congress pole to save the country from fascist Modi.

And on the ground, movements all over India resisting nuclear power plants, mining, landgrabs, corporate loot – people are sick of both these poles as both mean more plunder and loot of peoples resources, livelihoods and lives.

But Delhi for the first time has something new to offer. The phenomenal success of AAM AADMI PARTY (AAP) wiping out the Congress and eating into the votes of BJP is a party-spoiler for bipolarism. AAP came out of the mass movement for Lokpal Act to curb corruption in government. With Anna Hazare as the masqot, the entire agitation was masterminded by Arvind Kejriwal and his colleagues in Parivartan – a campaign group which had worked on RTI and halted the Delhi Government and World Bank's attempt to privatise water. The agitation was meticulously planned with media commitments – as they had good relations with the media and had done it earlier on RTI.

Surprisingly, the agitation caught peoples imagination – especially youth across the country and NRIs and spread like wildfire. Forced by the politicians of all colours to use the parliamentary path to get Lokpal Act, the AAP was born. Transparently funded by individuals aspiring for a clean government in Delhi and India, crores of rupees were mobilised. No corporate fund was accepted. Thousands of students from IITs and Delhi colleges campaigned for the party, including door-to-door campaigns. There were hundreds of volunteers, including professionals in various disciplines, who came from different parts of India and the world to work for one to six months. All social networks like facebook, twitter etc were skillfully used.

All efforts of these youngsters bore fruits. People were given an alternative – Modi's so-called magic wand was broomed away by the youth. Even Chief Minister Sheila Dixit was badly defeated. This sudden catapultion of a new party to near-power surprised everyone. No wonder, despite being an atheist, Arvind thanked God in his speech after the Chief Ministership swearing ceremony - "This victory is not because of us, it is a miracle, and I thank 'Bhagwan, Ishwar and Allah', He further honestly shared - "This victory is really a miracle, we could not even have thought two years back such a revolution would come that we would be able to uproot the corrupt parties and real democracy would be established."

Analysts are totally confused with this phenomena. They first try to strike parallels with the JP movement. They forget that 70% of the campaigners in that movement came from the RSS, with (Narendrabhai) Modi heading it in Gujarat. They then strike parallels with Lallu using the JP movement to jump into power. But they again forget that Lallu was a very localised Bihar phenomena, unlike AAP which has supporters from Kashmir to Kanyakumari to Washington.

Others keep harping that this party lacks ideology. Excepting BJP – in some percentages on it's Hindutva ideology, today how does ideology matter in Indian parliamentary politics committed to a capitalist model of development? How can one explain: CPM's debacle on landgrab despite it's good understanding of neo-liberal capitalism and Trinamool's opposition to landgrab despite any ideology, or BJD love for POSCO and the corporates or Jayalalitha's such great hunger for nuclear power that justified slapping sedition cases on over 7000 Tamilians?

So far AAP has fared far better – it stands opposed to corruption, it wants transparency in government, it wants daily active involvement of citizen's in running the country, it wants elected representatives to serve and rule, it wants to end privatisation of basic services, it wants to stop shady landgrab, etc, etc. They have had the guts to take the risk of hitting out at Reliance, Robert Vadra, Nitin Gadkari by exposing their corrupt deals in public.

Watch out 2014 national elections, the ground has been prepared by AAP. They are here to put a spanner in the bi-polar joke being played on the Indian citizens for long by the Congress and BJP. The communal-secular cards will blow off. Don't be surprised if AAP takes strong positions on other issues plaguing the nation like nuclear power, mining, land displacement and Armed forces special powers. The reality is that today an overwhelming majority of Indian voters are youth and they are angry with this corrupt system and they want a government of youth. AAP has arrived and is here to stay, other parties need not shed crocodile tears now - aap ne bulaya kis liye!

Wilfred Dcosta is a activist with Indian Social Action Forum (INSAF), based in Delhi as well as the international convenor of Jubilee South- Asia Pacific Movement on Debt & Development.

http://www.countercurrents.org/willy020114.htm

The Aam Aadmi Party and Animal Farm

January 9, 2014

by Shuddhabrata Sengupta

The plot of George Orwell’s ‘Animal Farm’ can be summarized in a single sentence – “This novel demonstrates the consequences of the addition of four important words -’but’, ‘some’, ‘more’, and ‘others’ to the phrase – <all animals are equal>”.

In other words, it describes the transition from the axiomatic statement <all animals are equal> to the qualified formula <all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others>.

Aam Aadmi Party founder and Delhi’s new chief minister Arvind Kejriwal’s ruling out the possibility of referendums in Kashmir about the presence of the armed forces in Jammu & Kashmir (in response to his party colleague Prashant Bhushan’s endorsement of the idea of such a referendum during a recent television appearance) could signify a shift within the Aam Aadmi Party’s evolving political doctrine that parallels the transition that the pigs in Animal Farm made while turning their revolution into a counter-revolution.

As someone who wishes the new Aam Aadmi Party dispensation in Delhi well, and believes that the aspirations it claims to represent could (given the cultivation of the right conditions and attitudes) actually evolve into what it says is “the alternative to, not the substitute for” the decadence of the Indian political mainstream, I certainly hope that is not the case.

I have been told that the Aam Aadmi Party is a work in progress. I take that claim on face value. There are elections coming, and the Aam Aadmi Party has said that it has constituted 31 groups with around 115 members to work on policy aspects of its manifesto. It is also in the process of setting up a coordination team to finalise a national road map. This process involves consultations, amongst others, with the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII). That is as it should be. What I am interested to know is whether it also involves, say, consultations with the workers of the Maruti Suzuki plant in Manesar who might have ideas very different from the leading lights of the CII (and lest the AAP think they are insignificant, let us remember that industrial workers in Haryana constitute a sizable force, just as the Khap Panchayats, whom Yogendra Yadav, an AAP luminary, has offered to have a dialogue with, also represent a sizable force in Haryana).

I am all for dialogue, with as many different kinds of people as possible, even with Khap Panchayats and the CII and the Waqf Board of X and the Bhajan Kirtan Mandali of Y and the Resident Welfare Association of Z and the Parent Teacher Association of Q, and the Revolutionary LGBT League (M-L) because naturally, it is possible to create a robust political charter that attends to different interests only by listening to a great diversity of views, from mainstream to fringe, and then choosing the ones, regardless of where they come from, that are genuinely democratic, egalitarian and conducive to the sustenance of a free society.

But if the AAP can find the time to have dialogue with the CII and not with workers’ councils, with the ex-servicemen and not with the Jammu and Kashmir Coalition for Civil Society, with security experts and not with the Peoples Union of Democratic Rights, or with khap panchayats of Haryana and not with with queer men and women in Gurgaon, then I, and many others like me, will begin to have questions about exactly how big the tent of the Aam Aadmi Party is going to be. I would like it to be as big, as messy, as maddeningly fascinating as the social world we all inhabit.

If the Aam Aadmi Party does not intend to degenerate into the Telegu Desam or the Trinamool Congress of Delhi, or find its niche as the B team of the Congress, the BJP or some rump Third From made up to accommodate the idiocies of Mulayam and Mamata, or even transform itself into a dose of steroids for the comatose apparatchiki of the CPI(M), then it can and must rise above the din of cliches that dominate the mainstream of political imagination in India. To do this, it will have to prove that it can speak an entirely new and different political language. This is not impossible.

And If it can dare to at least desire to be different on so many significant issues, why should we not expect it to dare to desire to be different, say about the shibboleth of National Security ? Why should someone who does not subscribe to the overarching doctrine of National Security (which is used to terrorize large sections of the population) not be entitled to the dignity of being just as aam an Aadmi as any other? And if the AAP readily admits to being post-ideological, and pragmatist, then why can we not (very reasonably) expect it to (pragmatically) be ‘post’ the ideology of nationalism as well? Or are we to believe that some ideologies, such as nationalism, like some aadmi, such as the citizens of Delhi, are more khaas than others?

The maintenance of the massive military infrastructure of the nation state in the territories governed by the Indian republic is an enormous burden not just on aam-Kashmiris, but on all aam-Hindustanis as well. Why can the Aam Aadmi Party not take a stand on this that includes – among other things – a pledge towards unilateral nuclear disarmament, a substantial cut in defense spending (which would automatically decrease corruption and release more resources for the welfare of the population), the lifting of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act. and dialogue in Kashmir and elsewhere outside the purely ideological framework of the commitment to the sanctity of Indian republic’s current borders and constitution? Why can a pragmatic commitment to a humane attitude to all existing problems that beset this fractious republic not be part of the core agenda of the manifesto of the Aam Aadmi Party. In other words, why not argue for one, two, three, many referendums in Kashmir, or anywhere, at all, on as many issues, as necessary?

If, on the other hand, we follow Arvind Kejriwal’s current line of thinking on the question, then, referendums by citizen centric Mohalla Committees in Delhi about whether or not Kejriwal should rule them, because he promises them electricity and water are ok, but referendums by identical citizen centric Mohalla Committees in Srinagar, Sopore or Baramulla about whether the Army, the BSF or the CRPF should shoot them, if they take out protests against erratic electricity supply during a cold winter are not ok. In other words – we should all talk about Bijli-Paani (Electricity and Water) issues and corruption, but the people of Srinagar should keep quiet about what happens if you talk about Bijli-Paani and corruption. I am hoping that the Aam Aadmi Party has enough people with a more capacious political imagination than the limitations (whether sincere or cynical) of Arvind Kejriwal’s tight embrace of the obscene fetish of National Security.

Those with a memory longer than the duration of a tweet might recall that the mass uprising that shook Kashmir in the winter of 1989-90 was actually triggered by the brutal repression of protests against power cuts during a particularly cold winter, when homes were left unheated.

At one such electricity-protest in Khanyar, in Old Srinagar, in the cold December of 1989, scores of protestors were killed. Bijli-Paani, which is so dear to Kejriwal, happened at that point, to come in the way of National Security, which is also dear to Kejriwal, and National Security won, as it has done again, and again. Only last week, as the new year had barely begun, on the 2nd of January, Altaf Ahmed Sood, an eighteen year old student of Barnait, Boniyar in North Kashmir’s Baramulla district was shot dead by troopers of the Central Industrial Security Force when they fired on people protesting against electricity shortages.

Arvind Kejriwal undertaking a fast against inflated electricity bills in Sunder Nagri, New Delhi, Photo – Mail Today

The citizen of say Sundar Nagri, New Delhi is as much an aam aadmi (common man or woman) as the aam aadmi of Boniyar, Baramulla or Khanyar, Old Sringar, but clearly, according to Arvind Kejriwal some aam (common) aadmi are more khaas (special) than others, or else what could explain the fact that Bijli-Paani protests in Sundar Nagri or Lajpat Nagar in Delhi are signs of civic democracy that we must all laud, while Bijli-Paani protests in Boniyar or Khanyar in Kashmir are occasions for the issuing of ‘shoot to kill’ orders. All aadmi are aam, but some are clearly more khaas than others. All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.

Is this the khaas-baat of the Aam Aadmi Party? is this blood stained legacy something that it wants to take forward ?

On the 27th of August, 2011, in a post titled Hazare, Khwahishein Aisi I had tried to sketch a way of thinking that might make it possible for those interested (like Arvind Kejriwal says he is) in thinking about corruption, to also think about Kashmir, and a few other things. This is what I found it necessary to say then. Substitute Arvind for Anna, and the AAP for ‘India Against Corruption’ (in this text, as has happened in life) and it remains what I think necessary to say now.

If by corruption, we mean a hollowing out of the things that make life worth living in dignity, then the low wage is as much a sign of corruption as the bribe. And yet, while Anna Hazare does talk about the evil of the bribe, I have yet to come across anyone in ‘India Against Corruption’ speak of the evil of the non-living wage. In all probability, some of the good men and women who endorse them today might tomorrow find workers taking to the streets for higher wages a very ‘corrupt’ sight. If, by the eradication of corruption we mean that a woman in Kashmir has no one to bribe in the local police to get news of her son in custody, then I would much rather have her pay the bribe and know whether her son is living or dead, and have the policeman take the bribe and give her the information that the dark legality of the state forbids him to do, then have her face the possibility that he might be one of the more than two thousand odd unidentified bodies that are now known to be rotting in mass graves in the valley. And yet, while Anna Hazare does talk about the evil of the bribe, the scam and the sleazy deal, I have yet to come across him speaking about the corruption and the corrosiveness that placed the rotten body in the unmarked grave in the first place. In the last week, while Anna has fasted, we have also come to know that a state agency (the J&K State Human Rights Commission) in Jammu and Kashmir has finally Aadmitted what was known all along. That there are at least two thousand and one hundred and fifty six unidentified dead bodies in thirty eight mass grave sites in different parts of the state. If this were to happen in any other part of the world, there would have been an immediate hue and cry. And yet, here, its as if, some remains have been found in an obscure set of archaeological digs. The problems of disappearances and of mass graves full of unidentified bodies that have been put there by people acting in the name of the Indian state ought to be central to any discussion of what it means to have corruption eat into the vitals of the political system. This is not just a question of bad policy, or errors of judgement. It is a huge, systematically constructed moral lapse, impelled by strong monetary incentives, at the very core of the functioning of the state in India. And Anna Hazare has nothing to say about this. His silence (and the silence of his close associates) about a black hole as profound as this at the heart of governance is as disturbing to me as Manmohan Singh’s silence about the 2G scam.

Revolutions, as we know well by now, have a habit of eating their own children. This is actually as true of revolutions stained red in blood as it is of revolutions milked dry and lily white by by pious and peaceable virtue. While offering my salam to the AAP for making its spectacular debut in Delhi, I sincerely hope, that unlike the pigs of Animal Farm, they do not end up making a salami of those they claim to speak for.

Why I’m not a part of the Aam Aadmi Party

The central issue for our society is inequality, not just corruption, feels Sandeep Pandey

December 31, 2013

Lately, some friends have been suggesting that I join the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) while others want to know whether they should do so themselves. A few others think I am close to AAP and want me to recommend their names as candidates from their respective constituencies for the next general election, as experts from different fields are offering their services for the benefit of schemes for the poor to be implemented by AAP in Delhi. One policewoman called me to beseech that Arvind Kejriwal should accept security as she thought that politicians cannot be trusted, having had the experience of watching them from close quarters.

Firstly, I’d like to state that when Justice Rajinder Sachar revived the Socialist Party in 2011, he asked me to join them. This is the party of Dr Ram Manohar Lohia, Jaiprakash Narayan, Acharya Narendra Dev, Achyut Patwardhan and others that had merged with the Janata Party in 1977. I am also part of the People’s Political Front (PPF) which was formed by Kuldeep Nayar before the previous general elections. I have been devoting my energy to build both the Socialist Party as well as the PPF, which brings together about a dozen small parties. We have to remember that the political culture that we wish to cleanse includes the tendency to defect from one party to another when one sees greener pastures. That is why a law against defection had to be enacted. Of course, the option of an alliance when there is agreement in ideology and working style is open.

But the main reason why I am not a part of AAP is because their focus is on corruption, whereas I think that the central issue for our society as well as globally, is inequality. So long as we are not able to build a society where every human being respects another human being to the same extent that he/she expects from others, we will not have a humane society. This will not be achieved by merely getting rid of corruption or establishing swarajya.

Let us assume that in Arvind Kejriwal’s rule, corruption is totally banished. There is not a single paisa of bribe given or taken. Let us also assume that people directly participate in every decision made, through gram sabhas or mohalla sabhas, i.e. swarajya is established. Will we then be satisfied?

What about caste based discrimination? Will the rich be willing to sit beside the poor? Will every woman feel safe and will it mean the end of patriarchy? Will there be an end to violence? Will half the children, who are victims of malnutrition and therefore school dropouts, start receiving full nutritious meals as well as be able to attend schools of the quality that children of the rich go to? Will the poor be able to receive treatment of the same quality that the rich can afford in private hospitals?

AAP has promised to halve the electricity bill, but what about those who are yet to be connected to the grid and will probably never get connected? We simply don’t produce enough electricity in this country for everybody because we don’t have enough resources. The rich and those who service them will have access to it, not everyone. If we don’t find a cleaner alternative to thermal power soon, the situation of paucity is not going to change in the near future.

Water is a natural resource and meant to fulfill the basic needs of all human beings. The government or any private company doesn’t have any right to sell it. It is the government’s responsibility to ensure that that all human beings get as much water as they need for drinking, irrigation, bathing etc. But water should not be wasted in swimming pools, water parks or golf fields. In fact, there should be a ban on the private installation of water pumps, except for the purpose of irrigation. If this follows through, there will be no need to place a limit on water usage. When farmers adopt organic farming, the need for water for irrigation will also reduce.

Since we want to build a humane society which will not have any place for violence, we dream of creating a weapons-free world, at the level of individuals as well as nations. Hence, the Socialist Party has decided that its members should not discriminate among human beings, be against all forms of corruption but also believe in the concept of security without weapons. Brave people like Arvind Kejriwal don’t feel the need for weapons for their security.

Also, AAP’s foundation is based on the concept of nationalism. We believe that the concept of nationhood is as divisive as that of caste and religion. The security of nations is ensured by their relations with neighbours based on trust and not by nuclear weapons.

It is because of the above mentioned differences in some basic ideologies and also because of the corporate style functioning of the party, where people are being associated with not on the basis of human relationships but because of their utility value, that a person like me doesn’t feel comfortable being a part of AAP. However, since the party is out to change the decadent political culture in this country, it has our full support and we hope it will rid the politics of this country of corruption and criminalisation.

http://www.tehelka.com/why-im-not-a-part-of-the-aam-aadmi-party/

Prashant Bhushan takes on Narendra Modi, calls him a Reliance puppet

Ritika Chopra, ET Bureau Jan 9, 2014, 05.00AM IST

NEW DELHI: Prashant Bhushan has described the BJP's prime ministerial candidate, Narendra Modi, a "puppet in the hands of Reliance (Industries) " and said that his party will take Modi head on in the Lok Sabha polls in April and May this year. The AAP has refrained from articulating its stand on the BJPleader or Gujarat's governance, except for allegations made a year earlier that the Gujarat CM is favouring Adani Groupfor supplying electricity, even as cheaper power tariffs were offered by the state-owned Gujarat Mineral DevelopmentCorp. But, with the party setting its eyes on the Lok Sabha elections, this would change Bhushan, a member of AAP's Political Advisory Committee (PAC) told ET

"His (Modi's) talk on corruption is bogus. We (the AAP) consider him to represent the same kind of corrupt politics that we have seen in this country and have already exposed his corruption in the Adani case. And why is Modi silent on the gas pricing dispute which is one of the biggest scams today? If you listen to the Radia tapes you'll see that the BJP leadership is nothing but a puppet in the hands of Reliance and Modi is part of this corruption," he said, referring to the conversation between Rajya Sabha member of the Janata Dal-United (BJP's ally at that point) NK Singh and Niira Radia on getting BJP to replace Arun Shourie as the lead speaker in the Upper House to change the course of the discussion on gas pricing in July 2009 in favour of RIL.

Yogendra Yadav, widely regarded as the new party's chief strategist, echoed Bhushan's views on Modi, though his tone was softer. "It's not a question on whether we will raise Modi's corrupt practices because we have already done it. We were the first one to talk about it when we raised the Adani issue.

As and when the need arises, we will talk about it again". Alleged snooping by Gujarat government agencies would also be brought to the fore during the election campaign, Bhushan said.

"He used the state's security agencies to snoop on innocent people and destroy the career of honest officers like Pradeep Sharma. Amit Shah, a man with murder charges against him is his lieutenant. He didn't allow the Lokayukta to be formed in Gujarat.

Closer to the Lok Sabha elections, we will raise these issues and tell everyone what we think about Modi," the activist lawyer said. After the Delhi assembly elections, AAP has seen its membership in the western state increase to around one lakh from 6,000 members.

Apart from BJP MLA and social activist Kanu Kalsariya, senior academicians, and former bureaucrats, among others, have joined the party in the state in recent times. Gujarat, according to Bhushan, is one of the states AAP expects to do well in the upcoming polls. Bhushan has been an old antagonist of the RIL, having filing a PIL in the 1990s against the award of the Mukta-Panna oil and gas fields. RIL has two industrial complexes at Hariza and Jamnagar in Gujarat.

http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2014-01-09/news/46030315_1_prashant-bhushan-narendra-modi-bjp-mla

National Interest and the Aam Aadmi

January 07, 2014, Abhijit Dutta

Yesterday, Delhi Chief Minister and Common Man-in-Chief of the AAP, Arvind Kejriwal, declared that “We don’t agree with what Prashant Bhushan said about Kashmir, it’s his personal view. Whatever the Army wants to do regarding the deployment, there is no question of a referendum on it. We do not support Prashant Bhushan’s statement.”

Bhushan’s comments, made on NDTV’s ‘We The People’ show, which, in a matter of happy coincidence happens to be the Constitutional term for Aam Aadmi, was simply this: wishes of the people of Kashmir be taken into account while determining whether the Army was needed for internal security or not. Unreasonably, and with shattering common sense, Bhushan had argued that if the Armed Forces deployed within Kashmir (as opposed to the border areas) were meant to protect the general Kashmiri population, might it not be a good idea to ask that population whether they wanted the protection or not.

The answer, obviously, is “No, of course not! Who the hell are Kashmiris to decide whether they get protection or not. It is a matter of National Interest. We cannot compromise with National Security.” This is an axiom, a truism, a self evident truth with no scope for interrogation. To question this is to question your mother’s sexual fidelity and suggest that your Brahmin father eats cow meat on every night of Navaratri. No can do. You cannot possibly speak about the right of Kashmiris to anything without immediately and irrevocably violating National Interest. In all likelihood it is against National Interest to allow Kashmiris to eat rajma chawal without express written permission from the Army Chief.

If you think I am trying to be funny you are gravely mistaken (not to mention, against national interest). In his blogpost decrying Bhushant’s anti-national comments, BJP leader Arun Jaitley wrote:

The BJP is committed to Shri Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s declaration that all issues would be resolved within the framework of ‘Insaniyat’. It is this philosophy which entails elimination of terrorism, dismantling of terrorist infrastructure, comfort, peace and a high quality of life to the people of Jammu & Kashmir. The de-militarisation of the valley can take place only after this object is achieved. The army presence till then is necessary to protect both the territory and the people of Jammu & Kashmir.

How marvellous. Like the bleached billboards strewn around on Kashmir’s roads and highways depicting soldiers offering yellow flowers to pretty little Kashmiri children with the words ‘Jawan aur Awaam/Aman hai mukaam’, Jaitley too conjures up a vision that is not only patently untrue and deceptive but is also cruel in its irony. Imagine having lost a child to the brutalities of the Indian Army, or having been raped or killed or maimed - all in National Interest, remember - you now also have to contend with being forced to have Jawaan brand of Aman and Yellow Flowers in your life. The idea that “Insaniyat” necessarily must involve the deployment of more than half a million armed men in the midst of a civilian population of six million who must not be asked what they think of such an arrangement is an assault on all ideas and ideals of what humanity means and stands for. For flavour of what such Insaniyat feels and tastes like, you only have to browse through the ALLEGED PERPETRATORS report written by the good people at the J&K Coalition of Civil Society (JKCCS) and devastatingly summarised here by filmmaker Sanjay Kak for the Caravan Magazine.

As the AAP has ridden the popular wave of electoral victory, Kejriwal has astutely avoided any disambiguation between the Aam Aadmi and the Aam Aadmi Party, encouraging a seamless, if simplified, convergence between these two entities. What the common man thinks, the Party thinks; the Party cannot risk having a mind of its own. And so, Kejriwal’s announcement today is wholly consistent with the professed make-up and character of the party he has built.

All this we know. The question I am interested in is, can it be different? Can we possibly create a language where to say anything about Kashmir - even something as blindingly obvious as what Prashant Bhushan said - isn’t to be immediately set upon by a band of BJP brigands and put on the highly inflammable gas burner of National Security and National Interest.

To answer this - and of course there isn’t any whole answer, only a rubble of ideas where we must scavenge - we need to start by reframing the Kashmir issue.

The Kashmir Issue

To me, the Kashmir Issue isn’t about Kashmir at all. It is about India. As someone who has written intermittently on the place, I am often asked by friends - well meaning but ill-informed friends - ‘so what do you think, what’s the solution, what should we do in Kashmir’. In the beginning, I used to get irritable. How was I supposed to answer something as intractable as that between the refill of my martini. It annoyed me no end that ‘the Kashmir issue’, to these friends - again, I must emphasise, good of heart people, the kind who oppose corruption and rape and donate to the AAP - was an exotic subject in the league of ‘so what’s this whole 377 deal yaar? It was the kind of issue that seems important, but doesn’t affect ‘them’ directly, so in absence of their own personal engagement with the issue, they look for cues from others. A regular case of ‘If you want my opinion, give it to me’.

In time I developed a standard position statement: “the reason why Kashmir is an issue is because only Indians get asked what they think about Kashmir, never the Kashmiri, who’s issue it is”. It is only half an answer but I would get away on most occasions (they would lose interest pretty quickly). Yet, it gave me the opportunity to reframe my own engagement with Kashmir.

As a privileged Indian who has actually partaken of the much derided ‘Shining India’ what business did I have to go poking my nose in the open wounds of Kashmir. I had bijli, pani and vodka, what more could I want. My interest was secured. And yet.

In a way, Kashmir is indeed a matter of national interest. I think it should greatly be of interest to my nation as to how we conduct ourselves with respect to fellow human beings. It is unarguably in the national interest to determine what values we are willing to stand up for, stand by, and defend. Just as we have, albeit with great difficulty, shifted the national debate of women’s safety from an interrogation of the behaviour of the victim (what she wears, where she goes, if she drinks, if she likes to have sex by choice) to that of the nature of men, constructs of patriarchy, institutional safeguards and judicial processes, we need to shift the conversation about Kashmir from being about Kashmir to being about what sort of an identity we wish to bear. Yes National Security is something to hang on to, but what about National Identity. Do we want to be a nation or a mob? Is our collective conscience only aroused in the interest of seeing a man dead or can that collective conscience be pricked when seeing injustice. Forget about Kashmir, let Kashmiris figure out what the solution is; can we, Indians, We the Aam Aadmi, focus on asking questions and making sure no one is making a chutiya of us. Can we ask why plebiscite or a referendum is a bad idea? Can we ask why it is against national interest to listen to our own citizens?

In a country where so many people go hungry everyday, so many die of disease, and so many bear the worst privations, it is meaningless to talk of human rights and justice. It means nothing to the common man. But if we talked of his freedom, showed him how his freedom was held ransom by this duplicitous chicanery of national interest, would he be interested?

In her essay ‘AZADI’, Arundhati Roy wrote:

The unimaginable sums of public money that are needed to keep the military occupation of Kashmir going, is money that ought to be spent on schools and hospitals and food for an impoverished, malnutrition population in India. What kind of government can possibly believe that it has the right to spend it on more weapons, more concertina wire and more prisons in Kashmir.

Just as the nation is lining up behind Kejriwal to demand the audit of power companies, can there be not a case for an audit of the government’s own books, an account demanded of every paisa that is going to for “internal security”. If the Indian is inherently selfish of character, then let us all stand up and ask why our money going to protect the Kashmiris. Leave them alone, let them be, I want my money back, my street light fixed, my hospital fully equipped. If Kejriwal and Co. wants to give subsidies and is running short of money, how convenient for them to find a pot of money sitting there, ready for the taking. IF. Surely, that is in national interest?

AZADI for the Aam Aadmi

The AAP is a force greater than anything anyone ever imagined, including I would argue, the people who founded it. It is a radical force precisely because it is not a single ideology. Here, for only the second time since Independence, is emotion in politics. In the desert dry cynical landscape of scumbag politicians, we have real people who say real things based on their own life experiences. Till now the party has understood the power of this emotion, ridden on its crest. It has had the gall to say ‘we don’t care whether we win or lose, we will do the right thing’. It is this show of defiance in the face of established logic that has transformed them into heroes and a giant slayer.

Kejriwal says there will be no referendum on the way the Army operates in Kashmir. But in fact they have already clocked in the results of the referendum. The decision to contradict Prashant Bhushan is a calculated, psephological projection of popular opinion (manufactured yes, but popular nevertheless). In other words, the Aam Aadmi has just behaved as a political party. It is a betrayal.

The sooner Kejriwal realises that ignoring what is true on ground, relying on fabricated concepts and trying to ‘play it’ is inimical to what the Aam Aadmi stands for (and stands by), the sooner he can fulfill his promise of ‘Swaraj’ in way that actually means something. If he doesn’t, he will join the ranks of all those other parties and their leaders who are the real enemies of national interest.

http://babelbabblebubble.blogspot.sg/2014/01/national-interest-and-aam-aadmi.html

Beating AAP with the Kashmir stick

January 9, 2014

by Shivam Vij

When Prashant Bhushan first made his remarks supporting a referendum in Kashmir to decide whether Kashmir will stay in India, a hooligan had gone to his office and slapped him. The Aam Aadmi Party made it clear that these were Bhushan’s personal views and were not endorsed by the AAP, but the stick was too good to ignore. At a loss of words to see the rise of the AAP, somewhat dimming the euphoria over the rising fortunes of Narendra Modi, the BJP has gone on and on over Bhushan’s views on Kashmir. Even when the AAP was proving its majority on the floor of the house, the leader of the opposition, Harsh Vardhan, made Prashant Bhushan’s personal views out be somewhat of a national security threat to India. Just saying that a people should be allowed to decide their fate is anti-national because we know that making such an allowance would bring results we’d rather not see.

But are the critics, within and without the BJP, deaf that they can’t hear the AAP’s repeated protestations that these were not the views of the party? Is it fair of us to expect every political party to be run on the diktat from the top, such that its members can’t express views different from the party’s?

The critics, of course, know this. But if they don’t pick on the smallest things such as the personal opinion of one party member on one issue, how do they get the goat of the new kid on the block?

How do they discredit a party that 30 per cent voters in Delhi thought was a better idea than the Congress or the BJP, even though it is just a year old? How else do they discredit a party which seeks to rid us of corruption and thus destabilise the mechanism with which the ruling elites loot India?

Then there are the other critics, the five or seven people strong defeated army of the Indian radical Left which will now deliver us holy sermons about how the Aam Aadmi Party fails the test of radical purity. How is the AAP different from any other party if it is unable to take a courageous view on Kashmir? For the radicals this is not simply a moment to further the noble cause of the democratic rights and aspirations of the people of Jammu and Kashmir. This is an opportunity to say ‘I told you so’ and hit out at the AAP. You see, the radicals have been saying from April 2011 that the Anna movement is right-wing, fascist, an RSS conspiracy and a BJP ploy. Their relentless criticism and scrutiny of the Janlokpal movement and the AAP was abruptly halted by the AAP’s spectacular debut, its alliance with the Congress, and its perceived dampening of the alleged Modi wave. So how do they let go of an opportunity to re-assert that the AAP is right-wing? How do they not exploit an opportunity to defend the secular corruption of the Congress party?

India needs a national conversation on Kashmir. But it’s absolutely unfair to expect such a conversation to be begun by a fledgling new party that seeks to reform India. It is not as though the Kashmiris are going to vote for AAP. But you never know, if India does begin a conversation with itself about corruption, the economic interests that keep alive the Kashmir conflict may be hurt. That could a beginning to our introspection on Kashmir.

(First published in DNA.)

Few things AAP Govt in Delhi must do

January 3, 2014

Gopal Krishna

Few things AAM AADMI PARTY Govt in Delhi must do:

1. It should abandon hazardous waste incinerator based power plant in Okhla and adopt zero waste philosophy for decentralized management of municipal waste.

Delhi residents heaved a sigh of relief with the electoral defeat of Sheila Dikshit who vociferously supported the waste incinerator based power plant in Okhla, Narela-Bawana and Ghazipur. Even Jairam Ramesh as the Environment Minister had written to Sheila Dikshit, Delhi Chief Minister confirming violations of environmental regulations but she did not pay heed to the bitter opposition to Okhla’s waste incinerator plant. This plant is based on an admittedly unproven Chinese technology located in Sukhdev Vihar amidst residential colonies and in the vicinity of a bird sanctuary, vegetable market, hospitals and educational institutions, which faces bitter resistance from the residents, environmental groups and waste recycling workers. Environmental groups have been opposing it since March 2005 when Rakesh Mehta was the Commissioner of Municipal Corporation of Delhi.

The residents have been demanding closure of the power plant by Delhi’s Timarpur-Okhla Waste Management Co Pvt Ltd (TOWMCL) of M/s Jindal Urban Infrastructure Limited (JUIL), a company of M/s Jindal Saw Group Limited. The Jindal’s plant is meant only for 2050 tons of municipal waste. After 28 dates of hearing at Delhi High Court and about a dozen hearing at the National Green Tribunal (NGT), the matter is listed for hearing yet again on January 15, 2014.

Meanwhile, an incineration based waste to energy plant in the suburban Jiading district, China exploded at 3.00pm on December 5, 2013 killing at least one person and injuring at least 5 persons. The explosion happened at an incineration based waste to energy plant with a capacity of 1,500 tons per day.

Like Delhi’s waste, Chinese waste also has low calorific value and unfit for burning to generate energy but incinerator technology companies have bulldozed their technologies for energy generation and waste management. Like Jiangqiao Incineration Plant, Okhla plant also boasts of having won awards that disregard the human cost of such hazardous plants. Waste incinerator technology is a fake solution and exposes the hollowness of carbon trade as it takes governments for a ride by making them adopt proposals for building landfills in the sky. Chinese incinerator technology and its ilk face relentless opposition across the globe. Sheila Dikshit’s initiatives have distorted waste management and snatched the livelihood of waste recycling workers. AAM AADMI PARTY’s arrival has come as a ray of hope for the aggrieved residents to save them from an impending public health disaster.

2. Make present and future generation of Delhi residents safe from the terrorism of private schools, hospitals and transport

AAM AADMI PARTY’s Government should adopt Common School System which has been advocated for long since. In recent times it was recommended by a Committee appointed by Nitish Kumar government but he did not take any step to act on its recommendation that called “for a legislation underpinning the Common School System.” The Delhi Government should use it and pass legislation for it. If it happens it would be a trendsetter beyond empty posturing. The new government should provide robust public health system like Germany and Cuba instead of promoting five star hospitals which compel women to mortgage their jewels for medical expenses. This makes the poor fall into a vicious debt trap.

AAM AADMI PARTY’s choice of Metro as a mode of transport to commute instead of availing private vehicle is a welcome step. Earlier, Veerapa Moily had announced that he would use public transport once a week starting Oct 9, 2013 but it soon turned out that it was empty posturing. His acceptance of the role of being an Environment Minister who has a regulatory role exposes his hypocrisy because as Minister of Petroleum & Natural Gas is promoter of projects which are cause of environmental destruction. How can he be allowed to be a promoter as well as a regulator? Such gross conflict of interest exposes Moily as one of the most insincere politicians in the country. AAM AADMI PARTY’s should provide infrastructure and space for walking and cycling should get even more priority than public transport. Wednesday or Friday should be declared a Free Public Transport Day as first step towards making public transport totally free. The public transport can be funded in full by means other than collecting fares from passengers. It may be funded by national, regional or local government through taxation. Several mid-size European cities and many smaller towns around the world have converted their bus networks to zero-fare. The city of Hasselt in Belgium is a notable example: fares were abolished in 1997 and ridership was as much as “13 times higher” by 2006. Zero-fare transport can make the system more accessible and fair for low-income residents. Road traffic can benefit from decreased congestion and faster average road speeds, fewer traffic accidents, easier parking, savings from reduced wear and tear on roads. It will lead to environmental and public health benefits including decreased air pollution and noise pollution from road traffic. If use of personal vehicles/cars is discouraged, zero-fare public transport could mitigate the problems of global warming and oil depletion.

Delhi’s new Government should take lessons from countries and cities which are care free. Copenhagen, one of the most densely populated cities in Europe, in Denmark has successfully transformed car parks into car-free public squares and car-dominated streets into car free streets.

3. Make Delhi India’s first asbestos free state

There are 3 factories engaged in handling asbestos namely, Makino Auto Industries (P) Ltd in Shahdara, Brakes International in Udyog Vihar and Minocha Metals (P) Ltd in Patparganj Industrial Area. They should be asked to switch non-asbestos materials in the light of the fact that more than 50 countries have banned white asbestos mineral fibers that causes incurable lung cancer according to World Health Organisation. This will go a long way in combating fatal diseases caused corporate crimes and in making Delhi the first state in the country to adopt zero-tolerance policy towards the killer fibers. National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) passed an order in Case No: 693/30/97-98 recommending that the asbestos sheets roofing be replaced with roofing made up of some other material that would not be harmful. PK Tripathi, Chief Secretary, Government of Delhi informed Dr Barry
Castleman, a former WHO consultant that asbestos was banned in Delhi at Maulana Azad Medical College, New Delhi in December 2012. It has been claimed that NCT of Delhi has banned use of asbestos roofs for new schools. If this indeed true the order has not been implemented, the official letters should be made accessible on Delhi’s Govt’s website and steps taken to ensure that only non-asbestos building and water supply pipes etc are procured. A register of asbestos laden buildings and victims of asbestos related diseases should be created. A compensation fund for the victims of primary and secondary exposure must be established. Villages in Muzaffarpur and Vaishali in Bihar and Bargarh in Odisha have stopped the establishment of asbestos based plants. If AAM AADMI PARTY takes note of it and acts decisively it will send nationwide and worldwide clear signal that its government is sensitive to environmental and workers’ issues.

4. Abandon 12 digit biometric Unique Identification (UID)/aadhaar number in Delhi

The new Government in Delhi must scrap UID/aadhaar related regressive legacy of Indian National Congress led regime which made right to have citizens’ rights dependent on being biometrically profiled and not on constitutional guarantees and Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This has takes citizens to pre-Magna carta days (1215 AD) or even earlier to the days prior to the declaration of Cyrus, the Persian King (539 BC) that willed freedom for slaves. Should it not be resisted? The democratic mandate in Delhi is against UID/aadhaar which was made compulsory and caused hardship to residents of Delhi. Unmindful of the fact that people’s right to energy and to cooking fuel funded by government is being snatched away by linking it with aadhaar. The right to life and livelihood is under tremendous threat because significantly large number of Indians has been moved away from fire wood and coal based cooking. Delhi, for instance claims to be a 100 % LPG state. That means right to life and livelihood can be snatched away with its link with aadhaar. Thus, the threat of exclusion in absence of aadhaar based on decrees and sanctions unleashes violence on the people. This is unconstitutional.

All parties other than Congress must rigorously examine the ramifications of biometric information based identification of residents of India in the light of global experiences. UK, China, Australia, USA and France have scrapped similar initiatives. US Supreme Court, Philippines’ Supreme Court and European Court of Human Rights has ruled against the indiscriminate biometric profiling of citizens without warrant.

AAM AADMI PARTY ought to take note of the fact that endorsing Supreme Court’s order, even Parliamentary Standing Committee (PSC) on Finance in its most recent report dated 18 October, 2013 has asked Government of India to issue instructions to State Governments and to all other authorities that 12 digit biometric Unique Identification (UID)/aadhaar number should not be made mandatory for any purpose. The Seventy Seventh Report of the 31 member Parliamentary Standing Committee (PSC) on Finance reads, “Considering that in the absence of legislation, Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) is functioning without any legal basis, the Committee insisted the Government to address the various shortcomings/issues pointed out in their earlier report on ‘National Identification Authority of India Bill 2010′ and bring forth a fresh legislation.”

If AAM AADMI PARTY introduces this resolution, it will further establish its claim to represent the common man.

In any case, in view of the order dated November 26, 2013, the new Delhi Government will have to file its affidavit in the Supreme Court in Writ Petition (Civil) NO(s). 494 OF 2012 because notices have been “issued to all the States and Union Territories through standing counsel. In its interim order dated September 23, 2013, the court has directed, “In the meanwhile, no person should suffer for not getting the Adhaar card inspite of the fact that some authority had issued a circular making it mandatory and when any person applies to get the Adhaar Card voluntarily…” When Ministry of Petroleum sought the modification of this order this order was reiterated on November 26 wherein the court said, “Interim order to continue, in the meantime.” The next date of hearing is on January 28, 2014.

In the meanwhile, a resolution was passed by West Bengal Assembly on December 2, 2013 against biometric aadhaar related programs. AAM AADMI PARTY Govt should introduce a resolution in the Delhi Assembly seeking scrapping of biometric aadhaar asking all the parties to support the resolution. It is evident that from the resolution against the aadhaar
that all the parties other than Indian National Congress are opposed to the implementation of Aadhaar based programs.

Notably, wherever Direct Benefits Transfers scheme based on aadhaar was launched in the states that went for elections recently, Indian National Congress lost. Rahul Gandhi had turned aadhaar as his key promise in UP and Amethi but he and his party lost miserably in Uttar Pradesh election too. Promises based on biometric aadhaar is like India Shining campaign of BJP-led Government are rooted in a make believe world to which Indian voters are allergic. Even Sanjay Gandhi faced the adverse consequences of forcing planning on human body. Aadhaar linked programs make Indian citizens subjects of Big Data companies. It is akin to Sanjay Gandhi’s forced family planning programs. Despite the ongoing electoral debacle being faced by Indian National Congress, it has failed to see the writing on the wall.

The abandonment of biometric aadhhar number by AAM AADMI PARTY will demonstrate that its government will end the culture of spying on its citizens and children in myriad disguises. It will make citizens stand up against illegitimate advances of the state.

Gopal Krishna, the author of this article, is an activist. He runs ToxicsWatch Alliance, Ban Asbestos Network of India (BANI), IMOWatch, MediaVigil & WaterWatch Alliance. He is also researching the corporate crimes in India after Independence. He can be contacted at gopalkrishna1715@gmail.com.

http://bargad.org/2014/01/03/some-issues-aap-delhi/

We must offer the AAP our critical support

January 8, 2014

Anand Patwardhan is the best known documentary filmmaker and one of most respected voices in India. This commentary is taken from his facebook page.

Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) has thrown us all a challenge of gauging whether our system is capable of meaningful internal change. Some, including myself, are cautiously hopeful at this new experiment in democracy, but not yet convinced that it can actually succeed over time and space.

But because waiting for perfection may mean waiting forever, I think those of us who may have differences with the AAP should nevertheless congratulate it on its spectacular success in rekindling hope. And we must offer the AAP our critical support even if some choose not to join it.

My point of difference is simple. I believe Narendra Modi is a fascist and the BJP is not just corrupt, it is something far worse – it is opposed to the very idea of a secular India. Not only this, but there is a complete nexus between Modi’s Gujarat model of development and the interests of multinationals and of corporate India. These forces today are in complete ownership and control of our mainstream media and this media in turn is largely responsible for why and how the BJP can literally get away with murder, and corruption.

So everything we do must be directed at ensuring it does not rule us ever again. At times this may mean choosing the most-likely-to-win alternative even when that person or that party is NOT our favourite. This is the principle of strategic voting. It is too early to judge if the AAP is able to make a targeted entry across the nation that ensures that those who would destroy the very fabric of our potentially secular democracy are kept out of power.

The composition of the think tank in the AAP gives me hope that it can be alive to this issue. So I hope that the terrible mistake Jai Prakash Narayan made by allowing the entry of the RSS into the Bihar movement in 1974-1977 will not be repeated by the AAP. The fact is that today you do not need to be in the RSS to have an RSS mindset. Lies sustained over decades have ensured that this mindset has been internalized by many though most are probably unaware of it.

As new cadre make a beeline for the AAP I hope the fledgling party understands that it is relatively easy to get people to unite against corruption. It is much harder today for people to realize that if India loses its secular character or denies justice to its weakest minorities, it gives up the right to be a democracy.

http://bargad.org/2014/01/08/we-must-offer-the-aap-our-critical-support/

10 prominent people who have joined Kejriwal's Aam Aadmi Party

Brajesh Kumar, Hindustan Times New Delhi, January 10, 2014

The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) created a sensation with a stellar debut in the Delhi assembly polls and is increasingly attracting people from different walks of life.

With the rookie party going strong on its anti-corruption plank, here’s a look at some of the big names who have decided to join hands with Arvind Kejriwal.

Captain Gopinath (62)

The founder of budget airline Air Deccan, Captain Gopinath joined the AAP on January 3. Gopinath made his first foray into politics in the 2009 Lok Sabha elections, in which he fought from Bangalore South against BJP’s Ananth Kumar and lost. Said to be impressed by the AAP’s anti-corruption stand, he has not ruled out contesting the upcoming polls.

Mallika Sarabhai (60)

A bitter critic of Gujarat chief minister and BJP’s prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi, danseuse, actor and social activist Mallika Sarabhai joined the AAP this week. She contested the Lok Sabha elections in 2009 as an independent candidate from Gandhinagar against BJP leader LK Advani and lost by a huge margin. Daughter of scientist Vikram Sarabhai and classical dance exponent Mrinalini Sarabhai, she has often been in news for taking up issues related to the 2002 Gujarat riots.

Ashutosh (47)

Senior editor and well-known TV personality Ashutosh left his job at IBN7 to join the AAP. Ashutosh made his decision public on Twitter. He wrote, “These are historic moments, societal churning is on, everybody has to contribute to make the change robust and beautiful. Eight years back I changed my course, now there is another time, another call of destiny, have to swim.”

Meera Sanyal (52)

The former chairperson and CEO of Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS, India), Meera Sanyal contested in 2009 as an independent candidate from Mumbai South and lost. She got associated with the AAP during the Delhi assembly elections, in which she campaigned for the party for New Delhi and Greater Kailash seats. She has expressed her desire to fight the upcoming general elections from Mumbai South again.

Sameer Nair (49)

Former NDTV and STAR TV CEO Sameer Nair joined the AAP before the Delhi assembly elections to help the party formulate communication strategies. In a press release, Nair had said he had joined the party to offer his expertise in whatever way possible to bring a change in the society. “... my friends are ready to contribute to AAP’s communication work free of cost,” he had said.

V Balakrishnan (48)

After stepping down as a board member of software behemoth Infosys in December last year, Balakrishnan wanted to focus on creating a successful private equity fund. However, the result of the Delhi assembly elections, according to him, was an eye-opener. “I genuinely want to be part of such a change and revolution. I strongly believe that the real impact of AAP will be felt in the 2014 parliamentary elections,” he wrote in his blog.

Kanubhai Kalsaria (60)

A former BJP MLA from Gujarat, Kanubhai Kalsaria has been at the forefront of all land and environment-related agitations in Gujarat. He won the Mahuva assembly seat three times in a row, but parted ways with the BJP in 2012 elections, when he fought and lost the seat.

Alka Lamba (38)

Former NSUI member Alka Lamba broke her 10-year-long association with the Congress to join the AAP in December last year. Lamba had joined NSUI in 1994 and won the DUSU election for the post of president in 1995. She was appointed as the general secretary of the All India Mahila Congress in 2002. One year later, she unsuccessfully contested the Delhi Assembly polls from Moti Nagar constituency against BJP leader Madan Lal Khurana.

HS Phoolka (58)

Senior Supreme Court advocate HS Phoolka has been the face of legal battle for justice to the victims of 1984 riots for years. Although he has worked closely with Shiromani Akali Dal-controlled Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee and Delhi Sikh Grudwara Management Committee, he chose to join the AAP instead of the Akali Dal.

Adarsh Shastri (40)

The grandson of former Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri and son of Congress leader Anil Shastri left his job as the sales head in Apple Inc to join the AAP. In a tweet after joining the party, he said he would try and live up to his grandfather’s name. “We all feel his vacuum in these trying times,” he wrote on Twitter. He also said he did not join his father’s party as he thought he would not fit into the Congress.

http://www.hindustantimes.com/specials/coverage/myindia-myvote/chunk-ht-ui-myindiamyvote-

countdownto2014/10-prominent-people-who-have-joined-aam-aadmi-party/sp-article10-1171226.aspx

Hazare, Khwahishein Aisi: Desiring a new politics, after Anna Hazare and beyond corruption

August 27, 2011

by Shuddhabrata Sengupta

Hazare, khwahishein aisi, ke har khwahish pe dam nikle
bahut nikle armaan, lekin, phir bhi kam nikle
Hazare, so many desires, that every desire takes our breath away
so many hopes, and yet so few

(with due apologies, for liberties taken, to Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib, sometime poet and native of Delhi)

On the ninth of april, this year, I wrote a posting on Kafila titled – ‘At the Risk of Heresy : Why I am not Celebrating with Anna Hazare Tonight‘. A little more than four months later, I have to say I have not yet found reasons to celebrate. But I am not in mourning either. What follows is my attempt to think this through, in all its contradictory character. For once, I am not even trying to be consistent. If my argument occasionally faces two directions at once, it is probably because I feel the needs to be double faced in order to understand a double-faced moment. When all the talk is only of the need for honesty, one might want to stake a claim to being double-faced, if only for the sake of breaking the moral monotony.

The Story So Far

A lot has happened since April, and not all of it is bad. A seriously bad draft Jan Lokpal Bill with its frivolous provisions of setting up selection committees composed partly of Nobel Prize winners to choose the Lokpal has given way to a draft Jan Lokpal Bill that is still marked by flaws, still worrying in the way it concentrates power, but is, at the same time, a much more substantive and serious piece of work. Unlike its earlier avatar, the current version of the Jan Lokpal Bill can be the basis of a serious discussion on how to confront the issue of corruption.

This only goes to show that close and vigilant reading of the things that are never read but get talked about very loudly on television still has its uses.

We also have the suggestions made by activists associated with the National Campaign for the Peoples Right to Information, and many of them are substantive. The draft bill prepared by the state is a joke, which is not surprising, because this government is a joke, and a bad joke at that. The government bill is just as much of a joke as the first draft of the Jan Lokpal Bill was. So at least on the matter of circulated drafts of legislations for the institution of the Lok Pal, we are in a sort of two steps forward, one steps back dance. Still, I suppose, some movement forward is much to be preferred to stasis, or to regression.

Meanwhile, babas and sants have come and gone, and more will come and go. Baba Ramdev has danced his dance, and Rahul Baba has sung his song. Sri Sri Ravi Shankar offered us his wisdom (delink the agitation from the fast, and proceed with both, because Indian tradition teaches both steadfastness and accommodation) and Srimati Kiran Bedi has visited her erstwhile office (Tihar Prison) in the entourage of its recent most honored guest. The Anna Hazare touch is truly transformative. How else can we explain the phenomenon of Ms. Bedi blossoming into an excellent and lively vaudeville performer from the dour guardian of law and order that she once used to be. Clearly, the struggle against corruption can do wonders for personal development, as was in evidence in her excellent recent performance at Ramlila Maidan. On the same stage, we have also witnessed the moving ‘coming out’ of a management guru’s ‘inner revolutionary’. This management revolutionary, this shining lodestar, endoresed Hazare-ji’s crusade and promised us that we would become as clean as South Korea and Singaore. Perhaps it was merely a paucity of time that prevented him from mentioning that South Korea had matured into its cleanliness over several decades of military dictatorship and that Singapore, while it is known to be free of the corruption of chewing gum traces, is not exactly a shining example of vigorous democracy, or fiscal probity. Never mind. The speech was excellent. It will go down in history as the kind of thing we will look at several decades in the future while wondering how we ever got there.

Even T.N. Seshan, that sweet old curmudgeon, has come up with his own version of a Lokpal Bill, I suppose it can be called the Run Lokpal Bill (Seshan was always thought to have run every institution he served).. A serving prime minister is beginning to resemble his predecessor (or at least the mukhota/mask of his predecessor), cocooned as he is in the silence (or statemanseque staccato statements) of his own devising.

And yet, the wheels of politics are turning. Sooner or later, somebody will offer Shri Hazare the customary glass of orange juice that signals the timely restoration of what is praised as harmony and good sense in our polity. And in all probability, a bill, maybe even two bills, maybe three, will be tabled on the floor of parliament. The more things change, the more they remain the same. What started out as a fast may well eventually turn into a feast. Times Now has said it is a ‘victory’ and when Times Now is victorious, all times past and future are bound to submit in homage.

Where is the ‘Independent Left’? Where can it be?

Many amongst us on the left, especially on what we like to think of as the ‘independent left’, have felt bereft by the fact that ‘we’ seem to be unable to ‘respond’ adequately to this situation. I have been told, “We are committing another historic blunder if we remain distant from this situation” and so on. The situation, meanwhile, seems to be doing quite well without us. Regardless of how many ‘people like us’ turn up at Ramlila Ground, like slightly bewildered tourists, the crowds, vast numbers of whom are unaffiliated, have swelled. And they are not tourists, they are more like pilgrims at a Kumbh Mela or an Urs. They know what to do. They know that a lot of what needs to be done is about being patient, listening, sitting, chatting, finding echoes and resonances, comparing genealogies and geographies, just being there. As ‘peoples’ movements’ go, this one seems not to be suffering in the absence of the left’s effective presence at all. The crowds are peaceable, they are diverse, they are ridiculously, amiably well behaved. I don’t think that we can improve them in any way. Even the Delhi Police personnel at the venue (“with you, for you, always”) are being chivalrous and gentlemanly. I hope they stay that way.

The question that my friends are really asking, then, is not about what the left can do for the movement, but rather, about what the movement can do for the left. So, the real concern is not necessarily the merits of Anna Hazare’s crusade against corruption. Rather, it seems to me to be based on a dispute over the dividends of finding a place to stand in the big tent of Hazare.

As of now, the most important thing that the Hazare campaign seems to be offering is an opportunity to wreck the fragile consensus that an independent left might have been able to build for itself, within itself, post-Nandigram. Now, it is no longer a question of what kind of attitude one can have to the ‘mainstream’ left, but also about whether or not to align with Anna Hazare. Surprise, surprise, all those who thought they had finally ridden the hump of longstanding internal differences in the post-Nandigram and Singur euphoria are now confronted with the enigma of how to respond to some of the camp followers of ‘Faster’ Hazare, (not necessarily on the left) who, like the Marathi children’s detective hero, ‘Faster’ Fene, can find the whiff of a pro-corruption tendency in the most unlikely of places, even in the deep well of the minds of those within the independent left who are not wearing ‘I am Anna’ caps.

Because, after all, they have said, if you are not with Hazare, (read a certain thread of comments on any postings that question the Hazare agenda, even on Kafila), you must be with the Hazaron, (thousands) Lakhon (hundreds of thousands), Karodon (millions and tens of millions) rakam (amounts) of Kala Dhan (black money) that is secreted away in all those locations (Switzerland, Mauritius, Dubai) where song sequences in Hindi movies are routinely filmed.

We need to separate this natural suspicion and hostility that might greet the choice of some of us not to be celebrants of what is going on from our own assessment of the importance of this moment. Even if people caricature our distance and our questions as, ‘indifference bordering on support for corruption’, ‘insensitivity’, ‘stand-offishness’ and ‘elitism’, we still need not respond with counter-caricatures of our own – with mistaken claims that this is all only a result of an RSS conspiracy (notwithstanding the fact that the RSS may indeed be playing an important part) or that its all upper middle class and middle class posturing translating itself into a media-friendly spectacle. The moment for making this kind of comment, in my view, is past. It has been overtaken by the genuine transformation of a narrow anti-corruption stance into the possibility of a mass movement, or even, several mass movements. A movement does not have to be endorsed only because it stands at the threshold of acquiring a mass character, even if momentarily, but it has to be taken seriously. This does not mean that there are no longer things to be critical about. In fact, the need for criticism, unmarked by dismissal, is greater today than it was before.

At such a juncture, we can maintain the vigilance of our questions without being arrogant towards the people who flock to Hazare. At the same time those of us who haven these questions can refuse to silence or even mute them. To do so in the name of the chimera of a slippery and fragile unity of an independent left position would be to let ourselves by overwhelmed by what we have seen unfolding on Ramlila Ground in the past few days.

Unity/Disunity

My heart does not break easily over left disunity, or about the difficulty of choosing clear sides, which then becomes the ‘obstacle to unity’. I actually occasionally prefer the confusion that the complexity of situations like this bring in their wake to the holy grail of left unity. Unity is necessary when the left claims itself to be the vanguard, the leader. I think it is time that people on the left realized that sometimes the interesting revolutionary thing to do is to listen, and to have a conversation, rather than to lead. That in a genuinely transformative situation, the best thing that the left can do is to be an interlocutor, a learner, not a dictator, or a pedagogue, so that people can make up their own minds. That is what makes the left democratic, when it chooses democracy. Otherwise, the left can turn into an authoritarian vampire, sucking its own blood, and the blood of all those who are drawn to it.

A platform like Kafila, which does not try to conceal real differences under the rhetoric of false unity, is indicative of the kind of possibilities that remain open to us, and to a new style of politics. For these possibilities to be realized, maintaining a diversity of positions, which is sometimes also known as ‘disunity’ may not be a bad thing. In order to even understand what this means, the men and women on the left, especially the young men and women on the left, need to stop giving slogans that contain ‘the only path’ or ‘the only party’ as subordinate clauses. There can be more than one path in and out of this ‘situation’. One path might be walked into being by going into Ramlila Maidan and another might be trudged by walking out of it. Instead of being demoralized by what some might think of as our own apparent insignificance, we could also say that encountering Hazare makes us realize that Hazaron Khwahishen Aisi Aur Bhi Hain ( a thousand desires still remain), and that we could then begin articulating those thousand desires. The Hazare phenomenon has made it possible for a lot of ordinary men and women to actualize their desires of being in public space, of articulating their discontent, of discovering solidarities. This is something for us to build on, not to dismiss. Especially, and even if we are not comfortable with a lot of the content of the things that get said when people meet under the tricolor. It is not a matter of what we do with, or within, the crowds at Ramlila Maidan. It is more a question of realizing what we can do by being within the terrain of the social even after the crowds melt away from Ramlila Maidan. It is more a question of how we learn from this experience to organize in a myriad disaggregated ways. It is about how we shape popular discontent at having been cheated by the way things are run in the direction of claiming a share of the social surplus directly. It is about staying the course, and about being in there for the long haul.

Vanguard/Rear-Guard, Inside/Outside

If one stops trying to be the advance guard of revolution, and brings up the rear instead, then a whole new set of possibilities open up. We can then also fight a few rearguard battles that are worth fighting. We can retreat, regroup and recover lost ground. We do not have to constantly worry about our ‘irrelevance’, or our ‘failure’ because we do not desire ‘our’ victory. What we desire is an interesting and fair outcome, one that maximizes liberty and justice for as many people, and as many kinds of people, as possible. We can be mature enough not to identify the prospects of this occurring with the petty political fortunes of our own formations. We can then learn to take advantage of our marginality, our ‘irrelevance’ even, by presenting agile and visionary proposals (that do not insist on being realized at all costs and thus are free to be more open ended and imaginative, more capable of shifting the goal-posts of the discussion than interested in scoring goals and self-goals). We can try and ensure that such visions, by admitting openly to their own imperfections, can open up spaces of discussion rather than close options through sheer force, manipulation, emotional blackmail and bluster. We can do the unspectacular thing of listening and talking, rather than fasting and feasting on fasting.

Let the independent left actually stake out the ground of constituting a radically imaginative politics that anticipates other worlds of action and reflection rather than be bound and gagged to a commitment to the fine tuning of this social order. The ‘current situation’ offers us that possibility, and we neither HAVE to be at Ramlila Ground to seize it, nor do we have to remain aloof from what is going on in people’s minds when they agitate against corruption. We can, instead, choose to be at Ramlila Ground and try and make things more interesting and lively for every one there, without necessarily buying into the dominant rhetoric of what is emanating from Hazare’s vicinity. Alternatively, we can stay away, and take advantage of staying away by questioning the very premises of a ‘moral cleansing’ of capitalism. Both seem to me to be valid options, and can be exercised by different kinds of people, for different purposes, in different styles. I will not lay a claim to constructing a false hierarchy of moral choices between them, because unlike Anna Hazare, I am not duty bound to making moral noises and moral choices. My only mandate is to make things interesting for my comrades on the left, and that too not necessarily by offering them a bouquet of better or worse choices.

A united leadership can be terribly authoritarian, and a disunited leadership can be a terribly fractious and annoying thing. It is a combination of both these dynamics that we see in the government and the congress party in the recent past – a leadership that is incapable of taking the lead, or even decisions, and yet tries to be authoritarian, and therefore makes a complete ass of itself. The productive disarray that I am advocating as a stance that some of us on the left might take to, perhaps to good effect, is something altogether different.

The Crowd in Hazare’s Tent

I had said earlier, and I say it again – i cannot effect a disdain towards those who flock to Hazare, because I do not possess that disdain. I do not doubt their sincerity. And today, I do not doubt their number. I also do not believe that what we are seeing is something that is happening because of media manipulation alone. The situation was different in April. Between then and now, the ineptness of this government, has transformed what might have been a vocal minority into a growing and very diverse constituency. This phenomenon is partly crystallizing around Anna’s charisma, partly mobilized by right wing as well as liberal formations, and partly conjured up from nowhere by the desperate foolishness of the government. Of course it is fueled by 24X7 coverage, but to say that it is being created by it would be both inaccurate as well as un-necessary.

I also think that there is something admirable in the fact that the crowds at Ramlila Ground have been as diverse as they have been peaceable. I said it before, in April, and it needs to be said again, I do not think this is a solely, middle class, upper caste mobilization. I think it is genuinely cross-class phenomenon, and must be recognized as such. I think that being there affords people a sense of solidarity, an experience of peaceable togetherness, between men and women, between generations, between classes and communities, that our fractured society rarely provides occasions for. What is tragic for me is that we think of this as exceptional, whereas it should actually be a part of the normal, routine, banal fabric of life. Strangers are finding themselves surprised by their friendliness towards each other, and there is something both sad and joyous about this realization.

We should recognize this hunger for solidarity, and learn from it, respect it, not hold it in contempt. If people say that this is what the experience of being there is about, I have no reason to doubt them. It is the experience of a society coming to know, in its own fuzzy, touchy-feely sort of way, that something in the nature of society actually exists. In a city like Delhi, the last two times crowds (as in crowds that are not bused in by political parties) were out in force on the streets were during the 1984 riots and the Anti-Mandal agitation. Both were occasions where the crowd had a menace written into it. This time, the crowd is altogether different.

But recognizing this fact is one thing, and endorsing the currents and the politics that generate the momentum of this togetherness is another. More of that later. That being said, I do believe that the fraternization, the friendliness of strangers, the search for ways of saying things politically on the street, even the random attempts at claiming public space, of gathering in front of the residences of ministers and the prime minister, that have been part of the experience of the past few days – all these are good things, and we on the independent left must find it in ourselves to build on the fact that a lot of ordinary people seem to have discarded their inhibitions about being out on the streets at all hours of the day and the night, peacefully, in order to hear each other and make themselves heard. We do not have to endorse the content of the slogans to appreciate the importance of the phenomenon that has unfolded before our eyes. Something in Delhi has changed, and that transformation need not be lamented.

On the Right in Hazare’s Tent

Let me clarify, lest I be misunderstood, that I am also, not unduly perturbed by the presence of the right, or the predominance of nationalist motifs in the mobilization around Anna Hazare. Some of my friends on the left are upset because they hear ‘Vande Mataram’ and ‘Bharat Mata ki Jai’. This fact upsets me not at all. I am not upset by hearing these slogans exactly in the same way as I am not upset by hearing ‘Allah-o-Akbar’ in a demonstration on Kashmir. Incidentally, there has been quite a bit of sporadic chanting of ‘Allah-o-Akbar’ at Ramlila Ground, and that, in my view, proves nothing. Neither that ‘minorities’ are with Hazare, nor that they are not. And those who are trying to base their criticism of the movement around Hazare on the grounds of the fact that it either excludes minorities and dalits are, in my opinion, barking up the wrong tree. Nor does the number of dalits and minorities in the crowd tell us anything about the ‘inclusiveness’ of ‘Team Anna’. Let us leave censuses to the examining eye of the state, and not try and reduce every political discussion to statistical performances.

I am also not disturbed by the presence of RSS workers in Anna Hazare’s camp in the same way as I am not disturbed by the presence of Syed Ali Shah Geelani and his followers in mobilizations on Kashmir. I oppose both these kinds of formations and the visions that they hold out (the RSS in India as well as the Islamists in Kashmir) politically. But I do not dispute their right to be present in the field of politics, even of their right to attempt to hijack and dominate the proceedings (which, I believe must be countered, and I have every intention of doing so, without denying them their claim to political space and attention). Any political current that seeks to enlarge its space would do the same. And for the same reason, I do not castigate those on the left, especially on the independent and far left, who wish to be present with Anna Hazare. I hope that they can respect my distance as much as I respect their decision to be close to the heart of the anti-corruption campaign. We should be able to talk with each other despite how close or how far we happen to be from the Hazare tent.

It is not inconceivable that an RSS shakha pramukh, a Jamaat activist, an NGO worker, a Marxist-Leninist, a Gandhian and a conscientious technocrat who prides himself on his apolitical stance, may all be equally enraged by the fact that this government is so egregiously corrupt and inept, that their rage may bring them, from their very different corners into the same space. That does not disturb me one bit. In fact, it is probably a positive sign, because at least they will not be able to dismiss each other so easily, and at least they will get a sense of each other’s presence in the social arena. It will certainly improve the quality of their conversation with each other, and even amongst themselves.

Perhaps I am just a congenital spoilsport. So let me continue to be a heretic, and a spoilsport. Because I think it is important that there be such people amongst us, even so that the rest might shine better in the reflected lustre of their own moral worth. And so, I ask for indulgence towards my spoilsport questions. After all, if those who claim to have right on their side, do answer them well, they will only be strengthened by the occasion and the opportunity to do so.

Corruption and Justice : A Complication

My main question is as follows. Why must we believe that a society cleansed of corruption (as ‘India Against Corruption’ see it) will necessarily be a more just society?

I do not mean to ask this question in the - ‘there are other and more important problems, structural issues, that need to be tackled, and the discourse on corruption is just a smokescreen’ – sort of way. I am speaking of corruption as substantively, and as narrowly, as Anna Hazare and his colleagues do.My understanding of what ‘Team Anna’ upholds as its discourse on corruption is basically a dispute about the way in which socially generated surplus is distributed under the conditions of the rule of property and capital. Wealth, or any asset, in this view, is legitimate when its owners can currently demonstrate their legal claim over such a resource, and is illegitimate, when they cannot. Access to an asset is legitimate when it has been acquired by the unsullied operation of the free market, without fear, favor or influence, or when it is yours by inheritance. Those who buy their food are clean, those who try and feed themselves by means that do not involve buying what they can get their hands on, are dirty.

This means that both the encroacher who builds a villa in Sainik Farms, in violation of land use laws, by greasing the palm of a local official is as much a party to corruption as the squatter who hacks away at state owned land in a city like Delhi by building an ‘illegal shelter’ protected momentarily by arriving at an accommodation with a lower level municipal official and the local thug. It means that the man who accumulates wealth by secreting much of it in a Swiss Bank is as corrupt as the person who cuts corners while at work during a grueling fourteen hour shift in a factory. Both are not doing something – not declaring their assets, not obeying the clock, concealing their earnings or stealing time on the shop floor. Look back on the history of prosecution under any law of the land and you will realize that more of the working poor were fined, imprisoned, punished, hung, detained in solitary confinement and tortured as compared to other, more privileged sections of the population. Equality before the law in a deeply unequal society always more often than not tilts the scales of justice in a direction favorable to the rich and the powerful. A Dominique Strauss Kahn gets away with sexual assault because the maid he had assaulted in the hotel had once been economical with the truth in order to substantiate her claim to asylum as an immigrant. Barring a few spectacular prosecutions, the majority of ‘corruption cases’ will fill the prisons with more of the working and deprived poor, and with those, especially in the lower echelons of the bureaucracy, who make things easier for the working and deprived poor for the price of a bribe.

Imagine this

Now let me propose a scenario to you. Imagine that you are a recent migrant from the hinterland in a city as heartless as Delhi. (in its legal avatar the city of Delhi is heartless although it is quite generous and welcoming in some corners of its ‘illegal’ soul). Imagine realizing that you cannot afford to pay rent, even in a tenement that looks and feels like a prison cell, because of the way in which real estate is structured in Delhi by the purely ‘legal’ apparatus of the master-plan. Imagine realizing that you cannot make ends meet with legal, documentable work. Imagine that you have to find ways and means to cut and paste a living by doing slightly shady work. Imagine that there is no ‘honest living’ to be made. For the vast majorities who face the glare of documents, the demand for transparency, the imperative to come clean and be visible – corruption offers an occasional patch of friendly shade. Corruption, at least as a certain looseness with the law and with the regulatory power of the legal apparatus, is what keeps this society humane at its deeper, darker recesses. When wages are horribly low, it is the circulation of surplus in the form of a bribe that brings food to many tables, and also makes way for some things to be done. Ask an ill paid clerk, a linesman, a postman, a government school teacher, a health worker, or a policeman what it means to raise a family on the pittance that they earn. Ask an industrial worker in NOIDA how much of his or her wage would be eaten by rent if he or she did not live in an illegal settlement. Then talk to me about corruption. If by corruption, we mean a hollowing out of the things that make life worth living in dignity, then the low wage is as much a sign of corruption as the bribe. And yet, while Anna Hazare does talk about the evil of the bribe, I have yet to come across anyone in ‘India Against Corruption’ speak of the evil of the non-living wage. In all probability, some of the good men and women who endorse them today might tomorrow find workers taking to the streets for higher wages a very ‘corrupt’ sight. If, by the eradication of corruption we mean that a woman in Kashmir has no one to bribe in the local police to get news of her son in custody, then I would much rather have her pay the bribe and know whether her son is living or dead, and have the policeman take the bribe and give her the information that the dark legality of the state forbids him to do, then have her face the possibility that he might be one of the more than two thousand odd unidentified bodies that are now known to be rotting in mass graves in the valley. And yet, while Anna Hazare does talk about the evil of the bribe, the scam and the sleazy deal, I have yet to come across him speaking about the corruption and the corrosiveness that placed the rotten body in the unmarked grave in the first place. In the last week, while Anna has fasted, we have also come to know that a state agency (the J&K State Human Rights Commission) in Jammu and Kashmir has finally admitted what was known all along. That there are at least two thousand and one hundred and fifty six unidentified dead bodies in thirty eight mass grave sites in different parts of the state. If this were to happen in any other part of the world, there would have been an immediate hue and cry. And yet, here, its as if, some remains have been found in an obscure set of archaeological digs. The problems of disappearances and of mass graves full of unidentified bodies that have been put there by people acting in the name of the Indian state ought to be central to any discussion of what it means to have corruption eat into the vitals of the political system. This is not just a question of bad policy, or errors of judgement. It is a huge, systematically constructed moral lapse, impelled by strong monetary incentives, at the very core of the functioning of the state in India. And Anna Hazare has nothing to say about this. His silence (and the silence of his close associates) about a black hole as profound as this at the heart of governance is as disturbing to me as Manmohan Singh’s silence about the 2G scam.

Life in 3 Cases

Please do not misunderstand me. I am not saying that Anna Hazare, or anyone, can at any given time, articulate, or even be reasonably expected to articulate, grievances against everything that is wrong in our society. I am not one of those who is saying – “look he doesn’t talk about corporate greed, or big dams, or communalism, or private sector corruption”. Frankly, I don’t expect him to. He has said he is interested in the abuse of power by the state, and in the way it favours those who benefit from corruption, and that is why it makes sense to me that he talks about black money and land grabs So I am not disappointed when he doesn’t talk about things that he thinks are unrelated to what he says is his central mission. Perhaps other people should take up these causes with as much energy as he has shown, or take them up again, if they have done so already. But when Hazare and the people around him talk about how the people who run the state unjustly take away from us the things that we hold dear (hard earned wealth, assets, land, services, life) and that are ours by right, I do expect this very specific idea to be followed through. I am afraid that is not what I find happening in the big tent of Anna Hazare.

The most basic asset that all of us possess and have inherited is life. Bare life. And those with power who act in the name of the state, and with the force of the state, routinely, by legal and illegal means, deprive people of what should be theirs, their life, or the means to sustain life, through force or fraud, and sometimes through a combination of the two. That is why there is a connection between the fact that common people often do not have access to quality medical attention in a government hospital because medical supplies have been siphoned away in a minor scam (let’s call this Case 1), or that workers in large, prestigious, public building projects may be denied the wage (that can sustain their lives) that ought to be theirs by right (let’s call this Case 2) and the fact that somewhere, say in Kashmir, a common man - a barber, a baker, a teacher, disappears in the fog of the AFSPA because some officer in the army or the special police forces finds it necessary to demonstrate a ‘kill’ in order to try and maneuver a promotion, and with it access to unaccounted for counter-insurgency funds (let’s call this Case 3). In each of these instances, in terms of what happens to medical care, the prospects of earning a living wage, and life itself, the casualty, the harm, occurs because of acts of omission and commission, acts of force and fraud, by the state and its agents.

Anna Hazare’s movement would have no difficulty in recognizing and acknowledging corruption in Case 1 – the poorly equipped government hospital. With regard to Case 2 – they would probably quibble over whether or not low wages (not stolen wages, not unpaid wages, just low wages) constitute a corrosive force in society (even though it is impossible not to link the scale of bribes to the level of wages, especially at what gets called the lower level of the phenomenon of corruption). I do not think that they would even acknowledge Case 3, or, their recognition of Case 3 would be so muted as to be of no consequence. Questioning the terms of what is happening in Case 2 would require them to think about the relations between classes, between capital and labour. Questioning the terms of what is happening in Case 3 could take them uncomfortably close to a close examination of the way the state governs its intransigent peoples. And that is why they stick to Case 1. Case 1 is corruption (as Hazare sees it) through and through, but the rage against it in Hazare’s tent does not seem to translate into even a modest reflection about Cases 2 and 3. In reality it is corruption of the ‘safest’ kind - easy to initiate, easy to end, easy to mask, easy to unmask and easy to be seduced by and easy to hate. This is the kind of corruption that translates into filmi dialogue, breaking news on TV and soapbox oratory. It requires little to explain it or to explain it away. But the overemphasis on Case 1 and its variants also means an underplaying of the significance of Cases 2 and 3. Does this tell us something about an inability to see and hear what is in front of one’s eyes, or is it actually a willingness to look away? Righteous indignation always troubles me. But selective and safe righteous indignation troubles me even more.

Let’s look at Case 3 more closely. Perhaps the body, the asset, that went missing in the fog of the AFSPA was never ‘clean’ enough, not patriotic enough, to begin with, to merit the attention of the newly constituted moral majority . If we are interested in the question of justice, we have to be interested in it even for those who can’t be legal all the time, or even ever. If we cannot discuss that possibility, then the talk of corruption sounds really hollow to me. Elsewhere, the connection between corruption, the AFSPA, and an atmosphere of impunity that does not allow mass protests of the kind that are held in Ramlila Maidan does get talked about. Here, for instance is a letter to Ramlila Maidan from the security ward of JN Hospital, Imphal, Manipur.

A Letter from Manipur

Irom Sharmila response to Anna’s invitation

23 August 2011, Tuesday

10.27am, Security Ward, JN Hospital

Respected Anna,

I whole heartedly welcome your invitation to join the anti corruption rally you are crusading. And yet I would like you to be convinced of the reality of my situation, that I cannot get the advantage of exercising my non-violent protest for justice against my concerned authority as a democratic citizen of a democratic country, unlike your environment. This is the problem I cannot understand.

My humble suggestion is if you feel seriously; please try to reach the concerned legislators (read authorities) to let me get free, like yours, to join your amazing crusade to root out corruption – which is the root of all evils. Or you can come to Manipur, the most corruption affected region in the world.

With full solidarity and best wishes.

Yours,

Sd/-

Irom Sharmila

Hunger Striker to repeal the draconian Armed Forces Special Powers Act

A society without bribes, need not be a society with better wages, or without encounter killings that exchange for cash and promotions. It could also just be a hungrier, more desperate and bleak society, especially if there remain large sections of the working poor, and the disenfranchised, who have no means to live a straightforward life, or die a dignified death and not be buried in an unmarked grave.

Some caveats (to my own argument) – of course I know that the corruption of those who occupy positions of power is based on privilege and violence. That it feeds like a dark cancer into the vitals of every process in our society. Of course I know that one needs mechanisms to inhibit the egregious abuse of power. And of course I know that legislation to rein in the arbitrary use of power by people entrusted with office and responsibility is a necessity. Of course I know that a bill is needed. And that eventually a bill will be passed. But the framing of laws and by-laws, and the fine tuning of the police powers of the state does not capture my imagination as the task that a new left , the kind that I would be interested in, in our part of the world, needs to be doing. Let this be done by those who dream of filling prisons with more offenders, not by those who dream of opening their gates.

Tasks and Legacies : Legalese and Militarese

The tasks of politics do not begin or end with the framing and passage of laws. The legacy bequeathed to us by the big tent of the Anna Hazare movement will not be simply a well drafted bill. it will also be a set of attitudes, a basket of sensibilities, things that are beyond the question of mere laws. Some of these attitudes and sensibilities fill me with delight, others fill me with dread. I am delighted by the new found sense of entitlement to public space, by the raucous,unruly asking of questions, by the improvisatory sense of a politics that is made on the fly, by the way in which (like in a good old time Hindi movie) brotherhood can be lost and found in a fair-ground. I think there are things to learn from the dynamism of a networked, agile political intelligence that has made itself known, sometimes spontaneously, during this campaign. There is reason to be delighted by the way in which the whimsical, the cranky, the odd, the queer - off-stage and in the crowds have created an elegantly awkward counter-weight to the dull earnestness of the do-gooders on stage. All these things are well worth holding on to. But I am not at all sanguine about the way in which the Anna Hazare campaign tries to create divisions based on morality and law over and above the categories of class and justice. To steal and to be corrupt when you are poor and weak is not the same thing as to grab privileges for yourself when you are rich and powerful. To focus one’s attention on dealing with corruption through a purely juridical-repressive-punitive mechanism (the institution of the Lokpal) is also to assume that all kinds of corruption can be viewed equally. The principle of equality before the law would ensure that a monomaniacal obsession with the law actually strengthens the status quo.

To combat the corruption of those who captain the ship of state with the letter of the law is something like trying to defeat the standing army of the state with the standing army of revolution. The centralization of power in the organs of the state is something that I think needs to be resisted at all costs, regardless of who wants to to the strengthening, regardless of whether it occurs in the name of fighting corruption, increasing GDP, strengthening capitalism or building socialism. It is time for us on the independent left to stop focusing on the state as the source and destination of all things good and bad in our society.

You might achieve a coup d’etat against corruption only to realize that the standing army of the revolution is now the standing army of the state and that the revolution is now, effectively a counter-revolution, at the very moment in which it succeeds. I do not believe that the administration of social surplus that the state is required to undertake in India can proceed without fear or favor. As long as social inequalities remain as sharp as they are, the very effort to administer an unequal society through ‘clean’ methods requires one to safeguard the rules of property.

I am not one of those who opine that ‘Team Anna’ ought not to be trusted because it is contemptuous of parliamentary procedure. There may be debates over timing, pace and whether a legislation brought in at a central level should be automatically operational in the states, but these are all questions about procedure. And in the days that follow, what we will see will be endless wrangling about procedure, not about content. The discussion will be about when and how to pass the bill, not about whether the bill furthers the question of justice. That seems to have been taken for granted already. It is this confidence that I find disturbing. This confidence cuts across the government-opposition-civil society divides.

Contrarian that I am, my reason for keeping my distance from Team Anna lies partly in the fact that they are all too wedded to legalese and parliamentary procedure. They are not dismissing parliament and standing committees, they are merely setting themselves up as the tribunes, as the permanently standing committees of very civil society. They are by no means ‘anarchists’, as some have suggested they are. Instead, they are the most vehement (even if ‘would-be’) custodians of law and order. They are lawyers, former law ministers, prison governors, bureaucrats, technocrats, saints, do-gooders, earnest men and women all.The kind I run a mile from when I see them arrayed so impressively. They mirror the legalese of the state, just as those who fight the state with people’s armies mirror the militarese of the state. Both are the state in waiting, and act as if they know they are. They are waiting to cleanse the state, in the name of what they both believe will be a better state. Is their ‘better state’ going to be more just ? Will it not uphold with equal alacrity, with even more intense passion, the law of property, the rule of capital, the marking of social assets and surpluses in terms of who controls them and who does not, even, who must not ? Will they not divide social surpluses into state and non-state actors without challenging the way in which social surpluses get produced, at what human cost, or even the rate at which they get produced. Do they, for instance, ever call for a reduction of the working day, or even a modest amelioration of production targets, even, the occasional modest rise in wage ? No, at the most, they tell us that a person working under NREGA must know how much they are entitled to get. (a goal with which I have no quarrel), as if to know what one’s wages are can adequately compensate for the fact that such a wage is not a living wage.

In this way, what tends to happen is that the fight for a change in the conditions of production, becomes subsumed under a fight for a living wage, a fight for a living wage, becomes subsumed under a fight for the right to information about the same paltry wage, the fight for a right to information about that paltry wage becomes subsumed under a fight for a Lokpal Bill, and finally the fight for a Lokpal Bill becomes a dispute over how long it will take to pass the bill, and who will form the standing committee that will scrutinize and assist in the passing of the bill. I am not suggesting that none of these fights are not worth fighting. Only, that I find something strange about pressurizing some imagined ‘left” into doing this fighting. Since this ‘left’ is being imagined into existence even as we speak, why not provoke it to fight for the maximum demands with economy and intelligence, rather than waste its time and scarce human resources fighting for minimal and steadily diminishing demands with maximal energy.

Here and Elsewhere

Everywhere in the world, in Cairo, Damascus, Tripoli, London, Madrid, Paris, Tel Aviv , Athens and Santiago, people are disputing the apportioning of the social surplus. They want more, or what they think they ought to be given and are in fact given less. This is what brings them out on to the streets. What is happening in Delhi is NOT exceptional. It is part of what is happening all over the world. There is nothing new about this dispute. It is after all, as old as class society. All struggles against power derive their existence from this basic fact. But there is something else going on in our time. For the first time since the twentieth century ended, capitalism finds itself in a situation of severe crisis. The diminishing share of social surplus is giving class conflict a very sharp intensity, it is also, at the same time creating the conditions for conflicts within ruling elites. There is ‘less’ of the ‘more’ going around and naturally, disputes over who can claim what are proliferating. A great deal (though certainly not everything) of the current talk about corruption is taking place under the shadow of a dispute within ruling elites about legal and extra legal claims on the appropriation of a diminishing social surplus.

The participation of an ‘independent left’ as a party to this dispute, without changing the terms under which it is framed, can only end in tilting the balance in favor of this or that faction of the ruling class. It cannot serve the purposes of a radical refashioning of social relations. And if it cannot do so, I do not see what end will be served by being cannon fodder for conflicts within capital. It is entirely another matter to countenance entering the fray as individuals, answering private calls of conscience against a venal crony-capitalism. And there may be a total justification in doing so, as private citizens. In fact ‘India Against Corruption’ functions best as a coalition of otherwise apolitical private citizens, that is its strength and its weakness. But a fight against crony-capitalism is not a fight against capitalism. Sometimes it can even be a fight for capitalism. As far as I understand, (but that could just be silly, dogmatic me) nothing that claims itself to be the ‘independent left’ has any business doing anything other than fighting capitalism, pure and simple. Choosing between this and that form of capitalism, making fine distinctions between legal and illegal appropriations of surplus value, need not be our function, let alone our goal.

If, despite all this, some on the left seek to join the fray for purely ‘opportunistic’ reasons, for the marketing of their specific agenda and as a public-relations exercise amongst a burgeoning constituency, I have no quarrel with them. But I do have a quarrel with dressing up such efforts in the costume of moral righteousness and revolutionary zeal. I think the cloak of moral righteousness sits more elegantly on moralists and those who want to improve society than it does on those who say they want to transform society.

If the transformation of society is our goal, then we have to work very hard to ensure that the terms of the discussion of corruption are also transformed. The big tent of Anna Hazare has momentarily brought in many people into the conversation who may or may not share everything that ‘India Against Corruption’ sets itself out to be. Some of them may see the corrosiveness of low wages and disappearances in places like Kashmir. We should keep a line open to them.

This does not mean we have to commit ourselves in any way to ‘Team Anna’. We should neither want to supplant their leadership, nor should we applaud them. We can choose to ignore them, as we can ignore the platitudes of all people who set themselves up as leaders. If we are interested in creating a society of free and equal people, without great men and leaders, we can also have the courage to turn our back on leaders of all stripes, including those who speak most loudly in our name.

Free Floating Signifiers, Whispers, Wages and Life

Anna Hazare, the apostle of non-violence who routinely calls for public executions, is a leader today because he acts as a free floating signifier. His fast makes for fast politics, just as a greasy snack makes for fast food. It can feed a sharp hunger but is guaranteed to give you indigestion after. He can be all things to all men, because he trades in a currency that is universally convertible, the currency of morality, and yet he is careful of where, with whom and how he wants to trade. He wants a government of good men,clean men, incorruptible men. I fear such a government, not because I like paying bribes, but because I fear the unwillingness of good men to doubt themselves. The incapacity to doubt oneself lies at the beginning of authoritarianism.

On the other hand I see the bribe, and the whole spectrum of behavior characterized as ‘petty corruption’ as the only means available to those without power to seek accommodation and tolerance in the face of the incredible violence and force of the state and capital. We have a predatory ruling class that wants to sweep away every blemish, every obstacle in its path. It wants to render all things and people transparent, visible, accessible to its power by unleashing catastrophes like the Unique Identification Database Scheme. It wants to create categories of the deserving and the underserving poor, which it will then apportion meagre benefits to in the name of a sham welfare state. it wants to reward the poor, not have them claim what is theirs by right. At the same time, it wants to do nothing by way of denting its own privilege. It wants to reshape a metropolis every day by ensuring that there will be no housing at all for those who are not privileged enough to pay the kind of rents that a city like Delhi demands from you. Remember, not so long ago a judgement had actually stated that those who squat on urban land are pick-pockets.

The fat cats will simply legislate themselves a monopoly over society’s resources through legal means, even as they ensure the passage of one, two, three, as many anti-corruption bills as takes their fancy. Their relentless accumulative drive does not need to be corrupt if the state is theirs to mould, and the state, remember, is always theirs. They can mount campaigns tomorrow to build big dams or fight wars of plunder with as much ease as the ones we have witnessed to cleanse society. They can do so in the name of cleansing society. And they will get all the time they need on television.

I would rather stand with the dirty, the shifty, the malcontent, the spoil-sport. Even if it is their last stand. And that is why I am still not celebrating with Anna Hazare. And I am not mourning either, because despite everything, I see in the present circumstances, an opening, the bare outline of a possibility. I would rather that the imagined, ‘independent left’ not offer the meagre glow of its ectoplasmic presence to a stage where the lights are burning way too brightly already, but I do hope that it (myself included) will find it possible to remain attentive to the opening and the possibility that now beckons us.

We can begin to whisper about wages, when they talk about bribes. We can talk about hunger when they talk about fasting. We can celebrate life when they rehearse their martyrdoms.

(This text is the expanded form of an informal address made to students of Jawaharlal Nehru University at the invitation of the Democratic Students Union at Tapti Hostel Mess, JNU on the night of August 25th, 2011. I am grateful to the questions that came from the JNU students after the talk and to conversations (and the occasional late night walk) in the last few days with Aarti Sethi, Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula, Iram Ghufran, Nivedita Menon and Aditya Nigam, they have helped me shape and clarify many of the thoughts expressed here.)

BiharWatch, Journal of Justice, Jurisprudence and Law

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