Some Stray Thoughts

Some Stray Thoughts

Let me confess at the outset itself that these thoughts were haunting me for quite a while. I was afraid of being labelled as an alarmist prowling around with ideas that are wild and figments of imaginations of a mind with a perverted point of view. At last I have decided to give vent to them as I felt that keeping them to myself is rather an act of cowardice on my part. So here it is;

Lord Acton a famous British Jurist had rightly said and I quote “power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely” unquote.

Now a day the media is agog with one thing; and that is Team Anna and the Lokpal bill. There is no doubt that all right thinking people of this country want to join hands with Anna Hazare on his earnest efforts to create a system called Lokpal.

It is said and rightly so that our institutions such as the Parliament, the Judiciary, and the office of the Prime Minister are slowly sinking in to a cesspit of corruption and we are very much concerned about it. In order to remedy this a group of people under the leadership of Anna Hazare joined hands and are agitating in a peaceful Gandhian way  to force the hands of the present government to bring about a bill which will encompass every institution in this country in its ambit to be controlled and policed. This bill if passed as they desire will create another super institution with absolute powers called Lokpal; and there comes the rub. Are we sure that in our eagerness to eradicate something we are not creating a monster of Dr. Frankenstein?

To drive my point home let me take you to the 18^th century France. The deteriorating economy of the country, as the result of fiscal mismanagement and the long years of feudal oppression had long been testing the public’s patience. Ultimately the king was forced to summon the ancient assembly. The oppressed group, the peasants and wretched manual labours, generally called the third-class, people of France ironically who paid maximum tax, could not exercise anything through this assembly, and had finally decided to break away and enforce their right. Ultimately then it was a kind of no holds barred situation. Maximilian Robespierre an ex judge who had previously relinquished his office as a Judge, because he was reluctant to condemn a person whom he knew was innocent came to the leadership. What witnessed then was the metamorphosis of a person. A judge who could not order one man to the gallows due to his conscience; Robespierre during his regime known as the ‘reign of terror’ had ordered hundreds of thousands of people guillotined. He expounded a new maxim “virtue, without which terror is destructive; terror, without which virtue is impotent.”   

This reign under Robespierre continued and many executions were held to stop any counter revolution taking place. Finally Robespierre himself was guillotined by his own people leaving the country rudderless till another autocrat named Napoleon Bonaparte took over the rule of France. In his own words Napoleon declared that “I found the crown of France in the gutters of Paris and I took it with my sword.” After taking over France he famously said that “France has more need of me than I have need of France”, no doubt.

To imagine that Anna or for that matter any one following him will become another Robespierre is rather farfetched I know; and that is why I for warned that I may even sound an alarmist. But that is not the point. If the institutions of this country about which we are very proud of; after sixty years can be marred with corruption who can vouch that the Lokpal will also not turn out to be the same in the course of time? 

A renowned Jurist of yester years writes in a popular English daily, and bats for an all powerful Lokpal bill. Though he accepts that the Judiciary in our country is the watchdog of any erring executive and people had full faith in it; he laments that Judiciary itself is very corrupt and no action is being taken. He recommends even a militant (sic) movement against corruption. He recommends that “the Judiciary and the Prime Minister shall be under Lokpal”. What comes to mind is a long forgotten Hindi Film song in which the protagonist laments that arson can be extinguished by a good shower; but if the shower itself gets fire who can after all extinguish it? If you can vouch that it can never happen so be it and I accept the label; the label of an anarchist.

Before I conclude let me again quote Lord Acton.

“And remember, where you have a concentration of power in a few hands, all too frequently men with the mentality of gangsters get control. History has proven that”.