Hours after Anna Hazare threatened to go on another hunger strike from August 16, the Centre announced it was ready to formulate the Lok Pal Bill without the civil society’s help.
“We hope the Anna Hazare team will work with us to draft a bill. If they choose not to, we will still draft the Bill. There is a difference between what is desirable and what is possible. Other political parties also have a view and one has to respect the political process. A Bill is prepared by discussions, I have not heard of hunger strikes to formulate a Bill,” said Home Minister P Chidambaram, a member of the drafting committee.
Government representatives of the Lok Pal panel also claimed that even the civil society members were divided on the issue.
Last time when Hazare sat on a fast, a jittery UPA tried to placate him and accepted constituting a joint drafting committee with civil society representatives as its members. This time, after a series of verbal duels and show of differences, the UPA leadership is putting up a brave face.
The government made it clear that even if the draft Bill gets ready by June 30, there was no guarantee that it would be passed in Parliament in the same form, because the ruling UPA does not have the adequate numbers in the House for its smooth passage.
Hazare accused the government of “playing tricks” with the people of India, questioning the rationale behind sending two versions of the draft Lok Pal Bill to the Cabinet. “If you want to have two drafts, then what was the need for setting up a joint committee? The government wasted our time. We had our draft ready earlier and they too had theirs. Then why did they not bring this to the Cabinet earlier. The government is playing tricks.”
The government also refused to make the audio tapes of the proceedings public, questioning the rationale behind such a move. “The minutes of the meetings are recorded so we are not giving copies of the audio recordings of the proceedings. Do they want to splash these audio tapes on channels? These are serious discussions,” said HRD minister Kapil Sibal.
Government representatives of the panel said the fundamental differences with the civil group members were on the structure of the Lok Pal. Sibal argued that since there were over 40 lakh central government officials and the total employees of state governments were over 1.2 crore, it would not have been possible to bring everyone under the ambit of the Lok Pal.
“They have alleged that all government servants are corrupt. So the bureaucrats who will be transferred to Lok Pal would also be corrupt. They can’t have a change of heart overnight. With such a large number of people in government services, independent investigators would have to be brought from the existing agencies,” Sibal argued.
“Anna Hazare’s team members wanted a say in the departmental proceedings against a corrupt officer. If we are in power, then we should have the authority to carryout departmental inquiries, why would the bureaucrats listen to us if action has to be taken by people outside. We had agreed that investigations should be carried out by the Lok Pal and the body could also file chargesheets, but there were differences on department inquiries,” added Sibal.
