Bad Precedents & Totalitarian Temptations !

 

BY R.K. MISRA

A loophole in the law is like a bee in the political bonnet. A plug and play passion manifests when chasing power, and a stomp and strangle obsession when securely seated.

A politician in power is a designer who learns to dress a loophole before a law is clothed. Even loopholes big enough to drive trucks through. The journey of the Lokpal law in India and the Lokayukta Act in Gujarat is a case in point.

However, what drew immediate attention to the extent of the malaise infesting the political woodwork was a recent report in a national daily that the Lokpal, in the five years of its functioning, has ordered investigation in just 24 cases and granted sanction for prosecution in six only. The rejection rate of complaints, over this period of time stands at around 90 per cent and largely for not being in the correct format.

Has India gone magically corruption-free under the Narendra Modi-led BJP government? The government in August 2021 told Parliament that the falling figures of complaints received by the Lokpal (1427 in 2019-20,110 in 2020-21) was proof that there was little to complain about against the present government. The answer though lies elsewhere.

According to Transparency International, India ranked 93 out of 180 countries on the corruption perceptions index for 2023.The index calibrates on a scale of 0 to 100 with the former denoting very corrupt and the latter very clean. Data apart, the average citizen dealing with the nuts and bolts of the system from the cop on the road to the ‘patwari’ in the village and the ‘babu’ in the Secretariat has bitter tales of palm-greasing to say. The higher you go, the larger the stakes. Changes in governing parties have made little difference on the ground.

India’s first ombudsman which is provisioned to probe allegations of corruption against former and serving Prime Ministers, union cabinet ministers, members of parliament, public and civil servants alike had been long in the works.

The Lokpal and Lokayukta Bill,1968 was first introduced in the fourth Lok Sabha when Mrs Indira Gandhi was the Prime Minister and nine times thereafter including twice in 2011 but fell through. The Lokpal Act was finally passed in 2013 during the tenure of the Congress-led UPA. It came into force from January 16, 2014.

The passage of the Bill was a sequence to a protracted agitation on an anti-corruption platform led by Anna Hazare. The setting up of an overriding constitutional authority (Lokpal) became the converging focal point of the stir. It is common knowledge that the BJP and even the RSS had pooled the might of its cadre to provide support to it. In fact, the perceptions created by this agitation played no small a role in catapulting a Narendra Modi -led BJP government to power at the Centre in 2014.

As subsequent sequence of events point out, once in power the new government, apparently, seemed in no hurry to appoint a Lokpal despite the admonitions of the Supreme Court of India.

Lawyer-activist Prashant Bhushan who played a major role in relentlessly pushing for judicial intervention is on record that the present government did not want to have any kind of anti-corruption ombudsman but were finally forced by the Supreme Court to appoint a Lokpal. Interestingly, two former Gujarat cadre IAS officers figure as members, I.P.Gautam who has completed his term and Pankaj Kumar, still a member.

Interestingly, though the Lokpal Act was passed in 2013, the country’s first Lokpal, Justice P. C. Ghosh, was appointed over five years later only on March 19, 2019, along with eight other members. Justice Ghosh completed his tenure in May 2022 but his replacement Justice A.M.Khanwilkar,a retired judge of the Supreme Court was appointed almost 22 months later to succeed him as the second Lokpal in March 2024. All along there seemed to be no hurry in filling up a post that had seen a nationwide upsurge with the then opposition- and now the party in power- an intrinsic part of it!

It was a template that had been cast earlier. Gujarat was without a Lokayukta for almost a decade during Modi’s tenure as chief minister. Though the appointing body was headed by the chief justice of the High Court, the appointment failed to materialise until Governor Kamala Beniwal finally chose retired Justice R.A.Mehta for the job.

The Modi government promptly knocked the doors of the judiciary but kept losing right up to the Supreme Court. It even sought to change the entire process of appointment of the Lokayukta and had a Bill passed in the Vidhan Sabha which gave the chief minister primacy of place in the appointment of a person who was empowered to probe him. The effort floundered at the altar of the Governor who rejected it in 2013. Even the curative petition seeking a review of the apex court order seeking chief minister’s say in the appointment of Lokayukta was dismissed by a five member bench. Though the judiciary, at the highest level upheld the appointment, retired Justice Mehta declined to take up the post citing the plea that it had got mired in too much controversy.

All bad precedents begin with justifiable measures and end in totalitarian temptations.

This syndicated news column was published in the Orissapost and Lokmat Times newspaper editions dated  January 28 and 30 , 2025 respectively. Their links are given below:-

https://odishapostepaper.com/edition/5202/orissapost/page/8

https://epaper.lokmat.com/articlepage.php?articleid=LOKTIME_NALT_20250130_6_2

 

 

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