Anna may be right to suspect Rahul hand in Lokpal U-turn

Anna Hazare’s “guess”, that it was Rahul Gandhi’s hidden hand that changed the parliamentary standing committee’s views on bringing Class C government employees under the proposed Lokpal, is probably right. Earlier this week, the committee under Congressman Abhishek Manu Singhvi had more or less agreed that six million Class C employees – the bottom rung of the bureaucracy which includes peons and clerical staff, among others – should come under the ambit of the Lokpal Bill. But on Thursday, Singhvi unexpectedly reconvened the committee in the morning and got this consensus reversed. According to The Indian Express , Hazare said on Friday: “Rahul Gandhi must have influenced the standing committee to change its earlier decision. What else can be the reason for changing a decision?” ( Watch the Anna statement on video here ) Given the history of the government’s flip-flops on the Lokpal Bill – and its attitude to the Anna Hazare movement – there’s logic on his side. The fact is the underlying Lokpal battle is primarily about the First Family and Team Anna. [caption id=“attachment_147241” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“The activist suspects that the Gandhi scion is behind the Lokpal U-turn. Agencies”] [/caption] The war can be traced back to April 2011, well before Hazare’s Ramlila fast, when Sonia Gandhi and her partymen were angry over Team Anna’s Jantar Mantar success – which forced the government to agree to a joint drafting committee for the Lokpal. With the anti-corruption platform hijacked by civil society, attacks on Team Anna members began in right earnest – with the Bhushans being the first to be targeted. This prompted Anna to write a letter to Sonia Gandhi asking her if she approved of those personal attacks, including some by the unstoppable Digvijaya Singh. Sonia gave him a frosty reply , and churlishly claimed that the Lokpal was her baby. She told Hazare: “The Lokpal Bill was very much a part of the agenda of NAC (the National Advisory Council which she heads). As you know, the NAC working group on transparency, accountability and governance under the convenorship of Ms Aruna Roy held consultations on this subject on April 4 with several representatives of civil society…”. She also said: “I strongly support the institution of a Lokpal that is consistent with the practices and conventions of our parliamentary democracy.” Translated, all this meant: I want my Lokpal, not yours. But Sonia Gandhi soon took ill, and Rahul entered the picture. His finger-prints started appearing on the Lokpal Bill with his speech in the Lok Sabha on 26 August – at the peak of the Ramlila fast of Anna. Choosing to speak during zero-hour – which is not meant for debate or policy statements – Rahul took Sonia’s line forward and indirectly criticised Team Anna’s “tactical incursion” into the anti-corruption debate, which was “divorced from the machinery of an elected government.” The Gandhi scion warned: “Today the proposed law is against corruption. Tomorrow the target may be something less universally heralded. It may attack the plurality of our society and democracy.” According to Rahul, the anti-corruption movement was effectively an effort to “undo the checks and balances created to protect the supremacy of Parliament (and) sets a dangerous precedent for a democracy.” Rahul conveniently forgot that in our democracy it is the constitution that is supreme, not Parliament. In an effort to take the initiative away from Team Anna, he proposed a diversionary tactic and said the Lokpal should be a constitutional authority. He apparently hoped to delay things by making constitutional status for the Lokpal the war-cry – but it did not quite work. This history suggests that both Sonia and Rahul have, for some time now, been trying to steer the agenda away from Team Anna’s grasp – and have failed. This is why the last-minute move to take 6 million class C employees away from the Lokpal is significant. There seems to be a deep political calculation behind this. First, politically it makes no sense for the Congress to alienate such a large section of the bureaucracy – which is also a large voting bloc spread all over the country. Second, putting such large numbers under the Lokpal while keeping the PM himself out of it sounds like the head of government is shying away from responsibility. It would not have gone down well to say – I’m free, but you six million guys can stew in the Lokpal’s juice. Third, the concern for keeping the PM out – allegedly to avoid handicapping him when he has more serious national issues to deal with – is a actually thinly-veiled effort to see that Rahul himself is insulated from it if he makes it to the gaddi by 2014. Manmohan Singh never had a problem coming under Lokpal. Rahul does. Anna’s suspicion that there is a Rahul hand in all this is thus rooted in circumstantial probability.