Lok Pall:

Lok Pall:

There is a pall over it all now.

Speakers on TV Channels want to know how the mantle of civil leadership fell on Team Anna.

Thiru Chidambaram wants to know whether Bills are drafted by Fasting anywhere in the world.

Maanyavar Sibal ji firmly believes that there are so many intricate issues that 10 members of the drafting committee, much less the 5 ‘civil’ members can not possibly arrive at a consensus but only discussible formulas.

There is the belief that the Bill must apply only to positions of Under-Secretaries andbelow.

There is a question about who ‘selects’ the Lokpal and members, on which criteria, and who is to oversee the Lokpal ?

God!

God won’t be too keen to be the oversight authority , I presume, given the pall of confusion so expertly woven by the intelligentsia of this wonderfully democratic country.

There will not be more than 2 points to be addressed, truth to tell. 1) Is the Lokpal desirable?; and 2) Should the Prime Minister of India and the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court be within the ambit of the Lokpal? If there is no agreement on these 2 points, there can not be a meaningful Bill.The PM within its ambit would automatically draw the cabinet of ministers and all members of the parliament within its scope. The same holds good for the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. One does not have to argue over the defence services, the administrative services etc. because they are directly under the executive power of the PM, and the legal scrutiny of the Courts of Law.

Only a clear NO to the inclusion of the 2 highest functionaries under the ambit of the proposed Lokpal gives rise to the nitty-gritty of who’s in, who’s out.

Who oversees the Lokpal? If a 7-member Constitutional Bench of the Supreme Court issues a majority verdict , the Lokpal shall have to accept that verdict in the case of political and civil men and matters. A three fourths majority vote of the Combined session of the parliament, in matters of justice, should hold good over the Lokpal—in case the Lokpal ‘s sentence is challenged at all. In both cases,the Lokpal must be given a mandatory hearing at either forum , as relevant. A media-trial, at all events be ruled out, but the scrutiny of the lokpal by either forum must be nationally televised.This will enable people to decide the course of the quinquinnial elections.

Instead of spelling out the purpose, the committee has manipulated itself into a complication over the modalities.

The committee’s intention is obfuscation. Who but morons would ,otherwise, ask for the credentials of the ‘leaders’ of the civil society? Obviously, when the parliamentary democracy or an imperial administration, or a dictatorship falters again and again in delivering a reasonable life for the people of the country, a Tiananmen Square, or the demolition of the Berlin wall, or the Tahrir square happens.

Lok Nayaks do not represent by elections or nominations. Jai Prakash Narain happened. Anna Hazare happened.

One Mohandas Karamchand happened... and he drafted an entire script for independence by fasting, forget a mere parliamentary bill.