The Lokpal bill...Slip slidin' away

”Last Thursday at the Harvard Square theatre, I saw my rock and roll past flash before my eyes. And I saw something else: I saw rock and roll’s future and its name is Bruce Springsteen. And on a night when I needed to feel young, he made me feel like I was hearing music for the first time” - John Landau, 1974.

I feel the same. I have seen the Lokpal past flash before my eyes. And it’s future. Unfortunately, that is where the similarities to John Landau’s memorable quote end. I have heard this music before, and it is revolting. When the Lokpal train was pulling out of the station, three months ago, I was one of those early sceptics mocking the ancient coal-fired steam engine at the front and the swanky fiberglass carriages behind. It looked comical. Some good, old-fashioned rabble-rousing for an aging , unelected and unelectable activist. I ridiculed the motives and the blind following that Anna Hazare was generating, the casual yo-dude-am-at-jantar-mantar-and-this-place-rocks attitude that seemed to be the defining trait of this entire movement. I put my feet up, and muttered something along the lines of “Go ahead and entertain me, you lab rats”. I apologize for that. Maybe, at that point, I was the lab rat. Who knows, I continue being one. (With apologies to Russell Crowe/Max Skinner from “A Good Year”). Somewhere along the way, after spending time acquainting myself with the issue, going through the life cycle of the anti-corruption bill (1966-1968-1971-1977-1985-1989-1996-1998-2001-2005-2008), my views changed. They had to. After all, the optics of the “core point” that Team Anna was raising, were pretty clear and convincing, once the haze of intellectual , argumentative hubris lifted from my eyes. [caption id=“attachment_35958” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“Anna Hazare|PTI”]  [/caption] Of course, it helped immensely that I had to visit the RTO office in Indiranagar Bangalore, in the interim, where I had the body-fat reducing pleasure of being made to run around and experience nine different touch-points. All because I dared attempt the unthinkable - getting the job done without a slimy broker with a bad accent and even worse body odor (dirty money stinks, and how!) leading me by my little finger. And finally, when I was at the “payment” window, all documents checked, signed and counter-signed (some in pink ink! Is that a code?) . They asked for a certain processing fee, which I duly paid (from my hard-earned white money), and I walked off with a receipt, smug at my own uprightness and newly discovered ability to fight the system. Well, the smugness lasted about half an hour. I had naively assumed that the receipt would be for the amount I had paid! It was not. I could have gone back, and fought for my rights (worth rupees one hundred & eighteen only) , but I had more important things to do. Back to Lokpal now. Somewhere around this time, the obfuscation and the waylaying commenced (see my earlier blogs), as our collective senses were mauled by all the psycho-babble emanating from various quarters. Team Anna had upset the sensibilities of intellectuals, politicians, the-other-civil-society, journalists, the-other-other-real-civil-society, lawyers, authors, really-civil-society, constitutional experts, unconstitutional experts and a few others whose professional-identity-placards-around-the-neck I don’t quite remember now. I don’t want to. We saw intellectualization nonpareil, irrelevancies galore and some seriously funny references to fascism. I recall some odes to democracy in there as well. Though my personal favorite was: “if they are civil society, are we uncivil society?”! That one cracked me up. Forever. Finally, I saw a column in a leading daily which somehow brought in the Hofstede framework as an explanation, argument and solution all rolled in one. To combating corruption in India, of course. That morning, other than being not impressed, I was not unconvinced that we had lost the plot. For years to come. When people start offering different views for the sake of sounding different, and start bringing in something like the Hofstede framework into this equation, it is game over. Like it has been for 45 years now. As I started hammering away at the keyboard, in the quiet of the night, I understood why this has gone on for 45 years. And even as I sign off, a little voice inside me tells me, this will go on for another 45. It has to. We are a democracy. When a debate gets sucked into the vortex of some serious egoistical chest-thumping and intellectual self-projection, it just about sounds the death knell on any position other than a status quo. What we possibly forget while we indulge in this intellectual auto-eroticism is that we were playing right into the hands of the political forces who have kept this bill at bay for 45 years. We want to sound different. We want to sound rational. We want to give angles which no one else has thought about so far. We want to get back at the front-runners of this entire movement because, hey, come on, they are just like us – and how can people who are just like us lead from the front without us throwing the monkey wrench into the entire gear-train? Yes, I am despondent….1966 till now is a long time for this nation to have waited for an effective and meaningful Lokpal Bill to be passed…..our elected representatives started working on it before I was born, and I am afraid, they will still be working on it, till after I am dead. I hear, they had a meeting of some sorts on this exact same point yesterday, and the early indicators look heartening. For them. Shining Path is one of Firstpost’s community bloggers - chosen to write for us from our audience community.