Anna Hazare was not the only man in India who thought that enough is enough about corruption, corrupt political class, greed, and an army of political parties and regional parties, who have been in charge of country’s wealth, with nothing to show that there was actually a drop in the Below poverty line, and they had access to primary education, and employment in the Public education, affair and decent living, even after 65 years of people of India have given to themselves this Great constitution signed by the great, patriotic founding fathers.
Anna Hazare’s resolve to elect honest people whose first mandate would be to revolutionize the Parliamentary system by enacting laws that strip them of their immune privileges, inordinate power to pander to bankers and their ability to hide behind their offices as if they are above every other Indian?
How about we hold them accountable for all their actions and make everything they do transparent?
How about we the people get to vote on whether they have engaged in criminal behavior while in our employ? And, we the people get to determine their punishment by voting on the outcome of public trials of public officials!
And, while we're at it, how about we control the big banks once and for all so they don't caugh off money illegally to the big Corporates without equivalent guarantee and the regulators who are supposed to be minding the public's interest but in practice supporting the political class. Many of their accounts fall in the domain of Non Performing Assets and in order to make it performing assets, the Loans are re-scheduled.
What's at stake is whether gross criminal activity and reckless disregard for the public will continue to be whitewashed by regulators like the SEBI, TRAI, Insurance Ombudsmen and other quasi judicial bodies which are set up to be watch dogs but these bodies try to circumvent the crime by filing half-baked civil fraud charges with weak arguments so that the culprits go often scot free. We have allowed the legislators who are having the power to pass stringent Laws to make meek laws so as to protect the dishonest who have means to prolong the criminal cases filed in the Court of Law through well paid Advocates who preach puberty in public life and argue for these corrupt businessman, politician, bureaucrat and save him from any punishment. Honesty and transparency will be remembered on Oct 2nd of every year when the netas gather at Rajghat. There is a section of Indians, who are greedy, who uproot every law, trample on every institution, in their pursuit to become richer! Courts after Courts will acquit them, because the prosecution case is decidedly made weak, records will be mutilated, witnesses will be intimidated, and the guilty parties will neither admit nor deny wrongdoing. In the face of weak evidence, distortion, the case will fall. They will be at their best after getting exonerated by the Court of Law. And the government, instead of making a post mortem of what went wrong, will find fault with the judiciary! While all these will go on, our respectable fourth estate through continuous breaking news broadcast will confuse the issue by bringing experts who will opine everything under the sun except the case in question.
It's our God-given right, and we better exercise it before our ability to save ourselves from what we have become destroys the magnificent experiment our Founding Fathers and our heroic patriotic national leaders have fought for.
We are lying to ourselves if we do not believe that we are all part of this problem. It's not that most of us aren't honest. It's that we venerate money and wealth too much.
Rather than being disgusted by dishonest manipulators, liars and cheats, we excuse the less-than-obvious perpetrators as if their example of cutting corners to get ahead, as far ahead as possible, might clear a path for some of our own pursuits.
What have we become? Are we a nation of people with liberty and justice for all, or just a bunch of money grabbers stepping on each other's liberties to pursue self-centered happiness by becoming filthy rich?
Nearly half of all members of Congress are millionaires. Most of them have gotten much richer in office over the past five/ten years while the country has become much poorer. They do not have to prove their worth when salaries and allowances are increased, they get service entitlement, constituency allowance, medical allowance, telephone allowance, free motor car, gadgets, house, telephone, etc etc. They are expected to travel on “fact finding” trips not only to different destinations in India but also overseas.
We have been making Laws and breaking Laws by inserting inert dozen loopholes into whatever seemingly sensible laws exist presently. Politicians need money to fight the elections and their power comes from the office they hold. It is at this busy intersection that the Politicians collide with the Corporate by taking money to bequeath opportunities when they get into power later. There are many examples of rags from riches story amongst the political and business class.
We must ask ourselves whether we want an honest government or a government which obliges the Corporates through deliberate wrong acts. Whether it is noble to pretend that we are an honest country or to put our arms around the nexus of money and power that has corrupted our integrity, our morals, and our future, and by opposing them, crush them, is what all Indians should be actively debating.
We need to usher in a Government who are faithful to the ideologies of the Constitution created by our founding fathers, and sincere to the people who voted them to power. This change should happen in the nearest two election cycles, if we want to usher “Ram Rajya”
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