SAMJAUTA EXPRESS:UNWARRANTEDLINKAGE
The five acts of reprisal terrorism carried out by some angry members of the Hindu community against their Muslim fellow-citizens since 2006 need to be strongly condemned and those responsible arrested and prosecuted.
2. We owe the strong action against the guilty to ourselves and to the relatives of the targeted Muslims.
3. These deplorable acts were the outcome of anger among some members of the Hindu community over what they perceived as the ineffective response of the Government of India towards jihadi terrorism directed against our soft targets. These jihadi attacks were being orchestrated and co-ordinated by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).
4. All of us were angry over these acts and over the perceived failure of the Government to deal with them effectively.International law and UN resolutions on State-sponsored terrorism gave us the right to retaliate not only against the Pakistan-based organisations which were carrying out these strikes, but also against the State of Pakistan, which was repeatedly sponsoring such acts.
5. But the Government of India lacked the will to retaliate and the competence to stop the recurring terrorist strikes.It is under these circumstances that some members of the Hindu community decided to act on their own and retaliate.
6.Initially, they attacked our own fellow Muslim citizens and then the Pakistani nationals visiting their relatives in India when they allegedly carried out an explosion on board the Samjauta Express train in February 2007.
7. The history of terrorism has instances of such acts of reprisal by individual citizens dissatisfied with the official counter-terrorism response.We had seen it in Northern Ireland when some angry members of the Protestant community took the law into their own hands against their Catholic fellow-citizens.
8. Fortunately, better sense has prevailed and such reprisal attacks by individual members of the Hindu community against fellow-Muslims have stopped.The Government’s focus now should be on getting these five incidents investigated and prosecuted professionally.
9. There are two disturbing aspects to the follow-up action by the Government of India. The first is the seeming lack of a professional investigation, which has remained superficial and politically directed without any satisfactory evidence against organisations such as the RSS. To blame the RSS just because some of those arrested had an association with it would be as unfair as it would be to blame the Army just because some of those arrested were serving in the Army.
10.One has an impression that the investigation is being used as a political stick to beat the RSS with. The objective has become not the successful prosecution of the suspects, but the discrediting of the RSS.This would prove counter-productive.
11. The second disturbing aspect is our allowing Pakistan to project a linkage between the ISI-sponsored 26/11 terrorist strikes in Mumbai carried out by the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET) and the explosion in the Samjauta Express. Our over-anxiety to show extra sensitivity to Pakistan’s psychological pressure on the Samjauta Express incident is unwarranted. This over-anxiety was evident in the way our National Investigation Agency (NIA) hastened with the filing of the charge-sheet against the Hindus arrested on the eve of the talks between the Foreign Secretaries of the two countries in Islamabad.
12. Our investigation into the Samjauta Express incident is a stand-alone case unrelated to 26/11 in any manner. The Hindus whoallegedly carried out the explosion were not sponsored by the Indian State.They had no ideological agenda. To see a moral and legal equivalence between what happened on board the Samjauta Express in February 2007 and what happened in Mumbai for almost three days in November,2008 is a total distortion of the facts relating to Pakistan’s use of terrorism as a weapon against India.
13. Pakistan wants to project the terrorism sponsored by it against India since 1981 as part of an action-reaction syndrome. We are walking into that trap by relaxing the pressure on Pakistan to arrest and prosecute successfully all those involved in the 26/11 strikes and by succumbing to Pakistani pressure on the Samjauta Express incident. (27-6-11)
he book exposes three strands operating in today’s India — Islamic radicalism, Maoist and Marxist activism, and Dravidian and Dalit identity politics — all engaged in systematically breaking up the country, writes Saradindu Mukherji
This book has an eerie cover image taken from www.dalitstan.com, showcasing a map of the Indic region wherein its northern part stretching up to Assam is depicted in green as Mughalistan — Pakistan and Bangladesh included. The southern parts are called Dalitstan and Dravidistan. For the authors, such a holocaustic scenario seems a distinct possibility unless the process is immediately halted and neutralised.
Rajiv Malhotra and Aravindam Neelakandan expose three strands operating in contemporary India — Islamic radicalism, Maoist and Marxist activism, and Dravidian and Dalit identity politics — all engaged in systematically breaking up what the venerable Ram Swarup called a “shrinking and shrunken” India.
This book, however, deals only with the third dimension related to the Dravidian/Dalit ‘studies’, the ridiculous Afro-Dalit project that seeks to showcase the Dalits as ‘Blacks’ of India and non-Dalits as ‘Whites’. It also exposes the hypocritical roles of various American/European academic institutions and evangelical organisations, besides the NGOs and their collaborators in the media.
The entire gamut of the mechanism and ‘ideology’ to break the country is exposed in 19 well-researched chapters. “Breaking civilisation”, the authors say, is “like breaking the spine of a person. A broken civilisation can splinter, and the balkanised regions can undergo a dark metamorphosis.”
The book suggests that the Western imperialists have sought to undermine India by both ideological and institutional means. They used the Aryan invasion theory (now discredited), the Criminal Tribes Act 1871, caste-based Census, Indological studies, etc, to divide and rule the country. Surprisingly, while the British abandoned the caste-wise enumeration after a while, the present UPA Government has resumed it!
Despite criticism of Orientalists like Max Müller, Johann Gottfried von Herder, etc, for their loyalties towards Christian evangelists, several Indologists were also admirers of India’s ancient Hindu texts and civilisation. They stood apart from those during the Islamic rule, who merely destroyed/vandalised much of the country’s Hindu-Buddhist heritage. The presence of people like William Jones, despite their evangelical biases, along with the establishment of the Asiatic Society and the Archaeological Survey of India, helped restore the country’s past that contributed to the emergence of national consciousness. It would, therefore, be wrong to tar every strand of European scholarship with one brush.
The chapter, ‘Imperial Evangelism Shapes Indian Ethnology’, examines the true character of HH Risley (ICS), often projected by the less discerning as a “brilliant anthropologist”. He comes out as one who “morphed” jati-varna into a racial category. The authors cite BR Ambedkar convincingly demolishing the spurious racist theory based on the nasal index. “The measurements establish that the Brahmins and the untouchables belong to the same race. From this it follows that if the Brahmins are Aryans, the untouchables are also Aryans. If the Brahmins are Dravidians, the untouchables are Dravidians,” Ambedkar said.
The politics of Dravidian separatism gets more than six chapters. ‘Seminal’ contributions of evangelist-propagandist intellectuals like Brian Houghton Hodgson and Bishop Caldwell in creating an unhistorical divide between the Aryan north and the non-Aryan south are well explained. In this mischievous invention of Dravidian separatism, evangelists sought to de-Indianise and de-Hinduise the Tamil traditions. They distorted ancient Tamil texts like Thirukural and Shaiva Siddhanta by attributing them to Christianity. Though rejected by other Christian scholars of that time, it has been revived in our times by evangelical movements, aided and abetted by racist politicians in the country. In reality, all Shaivite hymns written in Tamil speak of Shiva as residing in the Himalayas.
The authors err in blaming only Pakistan for fomenting terror in India, overlooking the home-grown Islamic separatists/terrorists. Long before Pakistan was created, large tracts of the country had been Islamised/Arabised and massive conversion to Islam accomplished; moreover, Pakistan was created by “Muslim Indians”. Islamic jihad has been operating in India long before Western/evangelical intervention, and with much greater ferocity and success. Both the “Godhra carnage” and the “Babri demolition” are inadequately explained in historical terms.
The authors blame scholars like Martha Nussbaum, Lice McKean, Romila Thapar, Meera Nanda, Angana Chatterji, Christophe Jafferlot and Gail Omvedt for floating many academically unsound ideas that would strengthen anti-India forces. The book also exposes the dark sides of the American Government, the US Commission on International Religious Freedom, the United States Agency for International Development, Ford Foundation, Dalit Solidarity Network (UK) and many others. It is a fact that most ‘glorified’ scholars in social sciences have strong anti-Hindu and anti-India biases. India’s Nehruvian, pan-Islamic revivalists, Leftists and subaltern scholar-propagandists have long been party to this unholy alliance, and many of them are funded through the public exchequer.
The authors rightly assert that “the colonial constructs of previous centuries have transformed themselves subtly, yet persistently, today” and turned more radical than before through “institutional mechanism and networks”. After all, these academicians have “become tools in facilitating strategic Western interventions”. The book, however, fails to see that the Nehruvian state system with its blatant anti-Hindu bias was no less a culprit.
The country is being inexorably pushed towards a confrontation of unpredictable consequences as a result of the seeming reluctance of the Prime Minister to assert his authority and steer the country out of a messy situation in which it finds itself. This situation is characterised by a widening divide between the Government and large sections of public opinion on the issue of setting up a permanent and independent investigating and prosecuting machinery to be called Jan Lok Pal to deal with corruption.
2.The movement for setting up an independent and powerful Jan Lok Pal can no longer be dismissed as purely a movement spearheaded by a politically conscious and manipulative elite claiming to represent the so-called civil society. Growing sections of the people identify themselves with the objectives of the movement as a result of Anna Hazare, an anti-corruption activist with no political ambitions till now, assuming its leadership.
3. His fast and the surprising public response to it made the Government realise belatedly that it can no longer drag its feet on the demand for setting up such a machinery as successive Governments have been doing for nearly 50 years. A government rattled by the extent of the public response to the fast swung from one extreme of inaction to the other extreme of a series of ill-advised actions as a result of which the moral authority to steer the anti-corruption movement has slipped from the hands of the Government into the hands of some civil society activists headed by Anna Hazare.
4. The Government let itself be stampeded by the increasing public anger on the issue of corruption into recognising the questionable credentials of Anna Hazare and his close advisers as representatives of the civil society as a whole.They did not represent the civil society. They represented strong segments of non-governmental opinion which demanded immediate action on the Lok Pal issue.
5. There are many dimensions to the movement for the creation of a powerful and independent Jan Lok Pal such as the procedure for its constitution, its powers to investigate and prosecute the corrupt and its jurisdiction. Civil society in any democracy is not monolithic. Nor is the world of non-governmental opinion. There is always a plurality of centres of non-governmental initiatives, leadership and ideas.
6. A confused Government reacted to the growing public support to the movement headed by Anna Hazare in a manner that made the civil society appear to be monolithic and conferred on Anna and his small circle of advisers the right to speak exclusively on behalf of the entire non-Governmental society. The existence of a plurality of centres of opinion was lost sight of in the panic response to the growing public support for Anna’s fast. This plurality of centres existed not only in the non-governmental segment having no formal role in policy-formulation, but also in that segment, which was not governmental, but had a role in policy formulation in the form of different political parties and their elected representatives in the Parliament and the State legislatures.
7. As a result, the exercise to give shape and structure to the Jan Lok Pal mechanism came to be restricted to the Government or the State on the one side and an articulate, but over-projected segment of non- Governmental opinion which sought to reduce the exercise to one of forcing the Government to accept its point of view as representing that of non-Governmental India as a whole.
8. When the Government realised the inadvisability of such as exercise, its valid reservations on the manner in which Anna Hazare and his advisers were seeking to monopolise the national debate though they had no national following were sought to be misrepresented by Anna and his advisers as reflecting the Government’s unwillingness to create a powerful and independent machinery. Differences on important individual issues such as whether the proposed Lok Pal should have jurisdiction to investigate and prosecute the Prime Minister and members of the judiciary too have been sought to be misrepresented as additional arguments reflecting the Government’s opposition to the creation of a Lok Pal.
9.Non-governmental bodies act as advisers on policy-making. It ought to be left to the Government to decide which advice will be followed and which will be rejected. The Government has the right to reject or modify for valid and cogent reasons.It is so in all democracies.
10.Since independence, we have had dozens of non-Governmental groups----some permanent, some temporary--- which had advised various Governments on what policies should be followed. The Government did not always accept all their advice, even if it was given unanimously.
11. For the first time in our history, we have created a non-Governmental group which is trying to dictate policy to the Government. When any of its advice is rejected, it is threatening to take the issue again to the streets in order to force the Government to accept it. Anna Hazare has put the Government on notice that he would go on fast again from August 15 if a solution satisfactory to his group is not found.
12.No Government worth its salt can let itself be dictated by a segment of non-Governmental opinion. The Government has to reject firmly, but politely the pretensions of Anna and his team to be the custodian of the morals of our society as a whole. They have to have an important role in policy-formulation on anti-corruption issues, but as advisers with a restricted mandate and not as non-governmental dictators with a self-assumed, unrestricted mandate.
13. The Government has done well to initiate an exercise for consultations with the other political parties to reach a national consensus. It is incumbent on the other political polities to respond positively to the Government’s initiative. Any attempt to take advantage of the Government’s self-created difficulties will be short-sighted and could weaken democracy in the long-term.
14. Even while initiating this exercise, the Government should not burn its bridges with the Hazare team. It should try to give the new exercise a larger format by bringing in other non-governmental segments while not diluting the primacy of the Anna Hazare group.It should play the role of the first among equals, but not as the sole arbiter of the national debate on the Lok Pal issue.
15. The unfortunate rhetoric emanating from individual Ministers of the Government as well as from individual leaders of the Congress (I) should be lowered in order not to add to the heat and bitterness of the debate. There is a need for deft handling and political delicatesse which could come only from the Prime Minister and from no one else.It is time for him to take the debate to the people through the media as well as through direct interactions with the people during tours across the country.
16. If these steps are not taken, there could be a danger of the debate getting out of hand and leading to unpredictable consequences.
The five acts of reprisal terrorism carried out by some angry members of the Hindu community against their Muslim fellow-citizens since 2006 need to be strongly condemned and those responsible arrested and prosecuted.
2. We owe the strong action against the guilty to ourselves and to the relatives of the targeted Muslims.
3. These deplorable acts were the outcome of anger among some members of the Hindu community over what they perceived as the ineffective response of the Government of India towards jihadi terrorism directed against our soft targets. These jihadi attacks were being orchestrated and co-ordinated by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).
4. All of us were angry over these acts and over the perceived failure of the Government to deal with them effectively.International law and UN resolutions on State-sponsored terrorism gave us the right to retaliate not only against the Pakistan-based organisations which were carrying out these strikes, but also against the State of Pakistan, which was repeatedly sponsoring such acts.
5. But the Government of India lacked the will to retaliate and the competence to stop the recurring terrorist strikes.It is under these circumstances that some members of the Hindu community decided to act on their own and retaliate.
6.Initially, they attacked our own fellow Muslim citizens and then the Pakistani nationals visiting their relatives in India when they allegedly carried out an explosion on board the Samjauta Express train in February 2007.
7. The history of terrorism has instances of such acts of reprisal by individual citizens dissatisfied with the official counter-terrorism response.We had seen it in Northern Ireland when some angry members of the Protestant community took the law into their own hands against their Catholic fellow-citizens.
8. Fortunately, better sense has prevailed and such reprisal attacks by individual members of the Hindu community against fellow-Muslims have stopped.The Government’s focus now should be on getting these five incidents investigated and prosecuted professionally.
9. There are two disturbing aspects to the follow-up action by the Government of India. The first is the seeming lack of a professional investigation, which has remained superficial and politically directed without any satisfactory evidence against organisations such as the RSS. To blame the RSS just because some of those arrested had an association with it would be as unfair as it would be to blame the Army just because some of those arrested were serving in the Army.
10.One has an impression that the investigation is being used as a political stick to beat the RSS with. The objective has become not the successful prosecution of the suspects, but the discrediting of the RSS.This would prove counter-productive.
11. The second disturbing aspect is our allowing Pakistan to project a linkage between the ISI-sponsored 26/11 terrorist strikes in Mumbai carried out by the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET) and the explosion in the Samjauta Express. Our over-anxiety to show extra sensitivity to Pakistan’s psychological pressure on the Samjauta Express incident is unwarranted. This over-anxiety was evident in the way our National Investigation Agency (NIA) hastened with the filing of the charge-sheet against the Hindus arrested on the eve of the talks between the Foreign Secretaries of the two countries in Islamabad.
12. Our investigation into the Samjauta Express incident is a stand-alone case unrelated to 26/11 in any manner. The Hindus whoallegedly carried out the explosion were not sponsored by the Indian State.They had no ideological agenda. To see a moral and legal equivalence between what happened on board the Samjauta Express in February 2007 and what happened in Mumbai for almost three days in November,2008 is a total distortion of the facts relating to Pakistan’s use of terrorism as a weapon against India.
13. Pakistan wants to project the terrorism sponsored by it against India since 1981 as part of an action-reaction syndrome. We are walking into that trap by relaxing the pressure on Pakistan to arrest and prosecute successfully all those involved in the 26/11 strikes and by succumbing to Pakistani pressure on the Samjauta Express incident. (27-6-11)
he book exposes three strands operating in today’s India — Islamic radicalism, Maoist and Marxist activism, and Dravidian and Dalit identity politics — all engaged in systematically breaking up the country, writes Saradindu Mukherji
This book has an eerie cover image taken from www.dalitstan.com, showcasing a map of the Indic region wherein its northern part stretching up to Assam is depicted in green as Mughalistan — Pakistan and Bangladesh included. The southern parts are called Dalitstan and Dravidistan. For the authors, such a holocaustic scenario seems a distinct possibility unless the process is immediately halted and neutralised.
Rajiv Malhotra and Aravindam Neelakandan expose three strands operating in contemporary India — Islamic radicalism, Maoist and Marxist activism, and Dravidian and Dalit identity politics — all engaged in systematically breaking up what the venerable Ram Swarup called a “shrinking and shrunken” India.
This book, however, deals only with the third dimension related to the Dravidian/Dalit ‘studies’, the ridiculous Afro-Dalit project that seeks to showcase the Dalits as ‘Blacks’ of India and non-Dalits as ‘Whites’. It also exposes the hypocritical roles of various American/European academic institutions and evangelical organisations, besides the NGOs and their collaborators in the media.
The entire gamut of the mechanism and ‘ideology’ to break the country is exposed in 19 well-researched chapters. “Breaking civilisation”, the authors say, is “like breaking the spine of a person. A broken civilisation can splinter, and the balkanised regions can undergo a dark metamorphosis.”
The book suggests that the Western imperialists have sought to undermine India by both ideological and institutional means. They used the Aryan invasion theory (now discredited), the Criminal Tribes Act 1871, caste-based Census, Indological studies, etc, to divide and rule the country. Surprisingly, while the British abandoned the caste-wise enumeration after a while, the present UPA Government has resumed it!
Despite criticism of Orientalists like Max Müller, Johann Gottfried von Herder, etc, for their loyalties towards Christian evangelists, several Indologists were also admirers of India’s ancient Hindu texts and civilisation. They stood apart from those during the Islamic rule, who merely destroyed/vandalised much of the country’s Hindu-Buddhist heritage. The presence of people like William Jones, despite their evangelical biases, along with the establishment of the Asiatic Society and the Archaeological Survey of India, helped restore the country’s past that contributed to the emergence of national consciousness. It would, therefore, be wrong to tar every strand of European scholarship with one brush.
The chapter, ‘Imperial Evangelism Shapes Indian Ethnology’, examines the true character of HH Risley (ICS), often projected by the less discerning as a “brilliant anthropologist”. He comes out as one who “morphed” jati-varna into a racial category. The authors cite BR Ambedkar convincingly demolishing the spurious racist theory based on the nasal index. “The measurements establish that the Brahmins and the untouchables belong to the same race. From this it follows that if the Brahmins are Aryans, the untouchables are also Aryans. If the Brahmins are Dravidians, the untouchables are Dravidians,” Ambedkar said.
The politics of Dravidian separatism gets more than six chapters. ‘Seminal’ contributions of evangelist-propagandist intellectuals like Brian Houghton Hodgson and Bishop Caldwell in creating an unhistorical divide between the Aryan north and the non-Aryan south are well explained. In this mischievous invention of Dravidian separatism, evangelists sought to de-Indianise and de-Hinduise the Tamil traditions. They distorted ancient Tamil texts like Thirukural and Shaiva Siddhanta by attributing them to Christianity. Though rejected by other Christian scholars of that time, it has been revived in our times by evangelical movements, aided and abetted by racist politicians in the country. In reality, all Shaivite hymns written in Tamil speak of Shiva as residing in the Himalayas.
The authors err in blaming only Pakistan for fomenting terror in India, overlooking the home-grown Islamic separatists/terrorists. Long before Pakistan was created, large tracts of the country had been Islamised/Arabised and massive conversion to Islam accomplished; moreover, Pakistan was created by “Muslim Indians”. Islamic jihad has been operating in India long before Western/evangelical intervention, and with much greater ferocity and success. Both the “Godhra carnage” and the “Babri demolition” are inadequately explained in historical terms.
The authors blame scholars like Martha Nussbaum, Lice McKean, Romila Thapar, Meera Nanda, Angana Chatterji, Christophe Jafferlot and Gail Omvedt for floating many academically unsound ideas that would strengthen anti-India forces. The book also exposes the dark sides of the American Government, the US Commission on International Religious Freedom, the United States Agency for International Development, Ford Foundation, Dalit Solidarity Network (UK) and many others. It is a fact that most ‘glorified’ scholars in social sciences have strong anti-Hindu and anti-India biases. India’s Nehruvian, pan-Islamic revivalists, Leftists and subaltern scholar-propagandists have long been party to this unholy alliance, and many of them are funded through the public exchequer.
The authors rightly assert that “the colonial constructs of previous centuries have transformed themselves subtly, yet persistently, today” and turned more radical than before through “institutional mechanism and networks”. After all, these academicians have “become tools in facilitating strategic Western interventions”. The book, however, fails to see that the Nehruvian state system with its blatant anti-Hindu bias was no less a culprit.
The country is being inexorably pushed towards a confrontation of unpredictable consequences as a result of the seeming reluctance of the Prime Minister to assert his authority and steer the country out of a messy situation in which it finds itself. This situation is characterised by a widening divide between the Government and large sections of public opinion on the issue of setting up a permanent and independent investigating and prosecuting machinery to be called Jan Lok Pal to deal with corruption.
2.The movement for setting up an independent and powerful Jan Lok Pal can no longer be dismissed as purely a movement spearheaded by a politically conscious and manipulative elite claiming to represent the so-called civil society. Growing sections of the people identify themselves with the objectives of the movement as a result of Anna Hazare, an anti-corruption activist with no political ambitions till now, assuming its leadership.
3. His fast and the surprising public response to it made the Government realise belatedly that it can no longer drag its feet on the demand for setting up such a machinery as successive Governments have been doing for nearly 50 years. A government rattled by the extent of the public response to the fast swung from one extreme of inaction to the other extreme of a series of ill-advised actions as a result of which the moral authority to steer the anti-corruption movement has slipped from the hands of the Government into the hands of some civil society activists headed by Anna Hazare.
4. The Government let itself be stampeded by the increasing public anger on the issue of corruption into recognising the questionable credentials of Anna Hazare and his close advisers as representatives of the civil society as a whole.They did not represent the civil society. They represented strong segments of non-governmental opinion which demanded immediate action on the Lok Pal issue.
5. There are many dimensions to the movement for the creation of a powerful and independent Jan Lok Pal such as the procedure for its constitution, its powers to investigate and prosecute the corrupt and its jurisdiction. Civil society in any democracy is not monolithic. Nor is the world of non-governmental opinion. There is always a plurality of centres of non-governmental initiatives, leadership and ideas.
6. A confused Government reacted to the growing public support to the movement headed by Anna Hazare in a manner that made the civil society appear to be monolithic and conferred on Anna and his small circle of advisers the right to speak exclusively on behalf of the entire non-Governmental society. The existence of a plurality of centres of opinion was lost sight of in the panic response to the growing public support for Anna’s fast. This plurality of centres existed not only in the non-governmental segment having no formal role in policy-formulation, but also in that segment, which was not governmental, but had a role in policy formulation in the form of different political parties and their elected representatives in the Parliament and the State legislatures.
7. As a result, the exercise to give shape and structure to the Jan Lok Pal mechanism came to be restricted to the Government or the State on the one side and an articulate, but over-projected segment of non- Governmental opinion which sought to reduce the exercise to one of forcing the Government to accept its point of view as representing that of non-Governmental India as a whole.
8. When the Government realised the inadvisability of such as exercise, its valid reservations on the manner in which Anna Hazare and his advisers were seeking to monopolise the national debate though they had no national following were sought to be misrepresented by Anna and his advisers as reflecting the Government’s unwillingness to create a powerful and independent machinery. Differences on important individual issues such as whether the proposed Lok Pal should have jurisdiction to investigate and prosecute the Prime Minister and members of the judiciary too have been sought to be misrepresented as additional arguments reflecting the Government’s opposition to the creation of a Lok Pal.
9.Non-governmental bodies act as advisers on policy-making. It ought to be left to the Government to decide which advice will be followed and which will be rejected. The Government has the right to reject or modify for valid and cogent reasons.It is so in all democracies.
10.Since independence, we have had dozens of non-Governmental groups----some permanent, some temporary--- which had advised various Governments on what policies should be followed. The Government did not always accept all their advice, even if it was given unanimously.
11. For the first time in our history, we have created a non-Governmental group which is trying to dictate policy to the Government. When any of its advice is rejected, it is threatening to take the issue again to the streets in order to force the Government to accept it. Anna Hazare has put the Government on notice that he would go on fast again from August 15 if a solution satisfactory to his group is not found.
12.No Government worth its salt can let itself be dictated by a segment of non-Governmental opinion. The Government has to reject firmly, but politely the pretensions of Anna and his team to be the custodian of the morals of our society as a whole. They have to have an important role in policy-formulation on anti-corruption issues, but as advisers with a restricted mandate and not as non-governmental dictators with a self-assumed, unrestricted mandate.
13. The Government has done well to initiate an exercise for consultations with the other political parties to reach a national consensus. It is incumbent on the other political polities to respond positively to the Government’s initiative. Any attempt to take advantage of the Government’s self-created difficulties will be short-sighted and could weaken democracy in the long-term.
14. Even while initiating this exercise, the Government should not burn its bridges with the Hazare team. It should try to give the new exercise a larger format by bringing in other non-governmental segments while not diluting the primacy of the Anna Hazare group.It should play the role of the first among equals, but not as the sole arbiter of the national debate on the Lok Pal issue.
15. The unfortunate rhetoric emanating from individual Ministers of the Government as well as from individual leaders of the Congress (I) should be lowered in order not to add to the heat and bitterness of the debate. There is a need for deft handling and political delicatesse which could come only from the Prime Minister and from no one else.It is time for him to take the debate to the people through the media as well as through direct interactions with the people during tours across the country.
16. If these steps are not taken, there could be a danger of the debate getting out of hand and leading to unpredictable consequences.
