Me Anna Too!!

Three score and six years ago almost to the day, an allegorical novel was written about how pigs took over a farm from humans to govern themselves and slowly they changed.  What George Orwell described is an essential truth of human life.  Humans need pain misery and everything else in that category to live their life, remember the extremely convoluted speech of the architect in Matrix revolutions, the one with words like ‘ergo’?  Exactly!! 

We elect a bunch of representatives periodically to manage the day to day operations of our country and our country’s founders established a constitution as a framework for sustaining our way of life.  Somewhere along the way the ‘pigs’ forgot the ‘for’, ‘of’ and ‘by’ the people logic of a democracy.  There have been debates if the Anna is holding the democracy hostage, the govt. claims that the present revolution’s expectation is in violation of the constitution.

While I am no constitutional or legal expert, I feel that constitution along with prevailing moral code are processes that the elected representatives need to abide by, while the owners (people) need to follow them too but in extraordinary the owners can come together to change them.  While Anna has the demonstrated support of at least a few million people the ‘(S)ingh parivaar’ has only 552 plus their associates as supporters; rest of the Indians by keeping quiet can be considered as fence sitters, by this logic Anna wins by a land slide.

Of course one can argue on technicalities like if the higher judiciary and PM came under the lokpal, the lokpal will be bigger than both!  But I feel that’s too simplistic a view, if a lokpal focuses only on corruption related aspects and if there are certain procedures implemented to manage how the higher judiciary and PM are handled when they are still in office then there is no need for them to be exempted.  In US both Nixon and Clinton came close to impeachment, Nixon even had to resign.  Why should our PM be exempt?

The best part about this outpouring of support is its truly genuine nature, unlike the usually mockery of justice that we see this time the fate sided with the common folk to prevent all attempts to malign it.  We had congress spokesperson helping the cause by trying to tarnish Anna’s character, his army record, etc. which backfired.  We had the illustrious yoga guru try to capture headlines which backfired faster than one kapalbhati cycle, he is now trying to protect his quarter of billion dollar yoga/ayurved empire! Sri Sri ended up having to justify that while he himself doesn’t own even a car his ashram had capability to host few hundred people and their 25^th anniversary was being celebrated in Berlin!  Its almost like the stars are aligned towards honesty and they won’t tolerate corruption or enven people trying to milk the situation.

To express solidarity to the cause and also see the mass outpouring, I went to freedom park in Bangalore, It was a unique site where people came of their own accord painted their face with the tricolor shared their thoughts and decried corruption by sloganeering.  People were pouring in groups and consisted majority of young people.  I hope it was only cause they were more enthusiastic rather than the older people not supporting the cause as they felt they could get their job done (either side) without corruption!  I will do my bit to bring down corruption by not giving bribes so while Anna fights to bring in an enforcement law for the same.  Anna all the way!!