Skip to main content

Hazare Khwaishe

I do want to think of Anna as a force of good, I really do. An honest man who is able to inspire lakhs of people to come out on the streets in protest seems just the kind of leader I want to follow. Yet I fret. And suggest bravely, for free, that many things about the Lokpal Bill campaign make me deeply uncomfortable.

I've read the draft texts of both the government bill and the Jan Lokpal version, and I must say I do not find the government draft as unreasonable as is made out to be. I do not agree with some significant parts of it, but I have more differences with the Jan Lokpal than with the government version.

First, I dislike the process. Anna's fast is not a protest – it is an insistence on getting his way over others. He now wants bill passed (not just presented to parliament mind you – but passed) in a mere three weeks more; differing opinions be damned. Gandhi is known for his fasts, but he was protesting against an authority he had no way to participate in. Also, fasting was hardly the only thing Gandhi did – he also tirelessly worked to create a political movement and shape majority opinion – that was what finally overthrew the British. Anna has eschewed participation for obstinacy. He should be using his considerable crowdpull to get a movement started for people to become honest and stop paying bribes even at their own inconvenience (much like Gandhi persuaded a nation to boycott imported goods and stick to poorer alternatives). At the very least, he should convince parliamentarians to his version by threatening the biggest gun everyone in a democracy has access to – forcing people out of office at the ballot box.

Second, I'm uncomfortable with the Jan Lokpal's idea of a parallel system of prosecution. The Jan Lokpal bill draft allows for fairly severe punishments to be imposed without reference to courts (such seizure all property on the likelihood of prosecution, dismissal and unrestricted fines), and has no appeals process. Most disturbingly, for punishments not referred to court it is not obvious what the procedures for establishing guilt are, where the burden of proof lies or how the defendants can defend themselves. All geared to give everyone the warmfuzzies when directed against the deemed guilty, but these often have the nasty habit of coming back to nip the innocents or the merely morally suspect (remember Kenneth Starr?)

I also contend the notion that corruption is worse than (say) a decade ago – personal experience has almost entirely been the other way. Today, one is far more likely to get a gas connection, a passport, a train ticket without paying a single paisa in bribes (that's how I got all three recently) – something unheard of a decade ago. Even high level corruption is much harder to hide than before – notice Kalmadi's swift fall from grace.

I want a Lok Pal with a big reach and plenty of teeth, but I don't want to rethink via a backdoor a constitution that is not yet broken. I want much more debate than Anna wants to allow – we have lived with differing levels corruption for decades, some more months of debate is not going to destroy the country.

Instead of convincing us to become more honest and giving the honest a louder voice and moral high ground, Anna wants to frighten us with a bigger stick and less restraint on swinging it. Everyone, even the (mostly) honest, is afraid of a swinging stick; that, finally, is what makes me uncomfortable.

Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Outsourcing I–The "Why" Question

A little while ago, I was asked to give a presentation to CEOs on outsourcing. The audience wanted to know about adopting outsourcing for their companies; making use of its promise while avoiding its pitfalls. It seemed to me (unimaginatively, I must admit) that the whole thing boiled down to four fundamental questions - the why , the what , the who and the how . I decided to expand the presentation into a series of blog posts, one per question. The Why Question Why outsource? Given that a trillion-dollar industry has crowded a lot of people into Bangalore and made more than one driver rich, it seems a little late to ask this question. However, this isn't really about outsourcing being good or bad per se. Bloggers like us love to wallow in theoretical questions; companies usually want answers to more prosaic stuff. The question really is, why should a company be looking for an outsource partner ?   I've divided the universe into two simple flavours – Tactical and Str...
2 comments
Read more

The Economics of 'E'

Mass market retailing is an expensive business. Rents, staff, inventory – the average brick and mortar retailer struggles along with barely visible net margins (spontaneous dancing is known to happen at 5%). With thousands of stores, hundreds of warehouses and over two million employees, Wal-Mart has in the last five years managed a profit margin of just 3.5%. The story is no different for any other major brick & mortar retailer, American or desi. Cool-kid-on-block Internet retail, on the other hand, thumbs a nose at the old-fashioned ways and gives the distinct impression that it can do much better. There's just one small problem. The bellweather Amazon, for all its buzz, seems unfortunately to have done much the same (indeed, a little less at 2.48% over the same period); nor has any other sizeable virtual retailer done much different. What gives? The law of unintended consequences, that's what. Lets take two of the most discussed items – rent and inventory. Mind you, thi...
2 comments
Read more

Opening Windows

Walls between work and life have broken down. Companies have not noticed. Work and leisure used to be quite distinct once upon a time (and that wasn't so long ago either). Work was carried out at designated hours in the workplace, with tools that the employer provided; home was spouses, kids and paid vacations. Even where you carried work home, it usually meant a temporary exile to the kitchen table. Once, only artists and rockstars lived without such boundaries. This, of course, is long gone. Laptops and telecommuting started the blurring process a couple of decades ago, but things really went south with the advent of  the smartphone. Uniforms gave way to business formals, yielded to business casuals before finally jumping off the roof entirely when the flip-flopped dotcommers took over. Work texts were shoved between bites of dinner, treadmills served as venues for conference calls, angry birds flirted with corporate emails and social networking finally nailed all those coffins f...
2 comments
Read more