Sandeep Dikshit, a member of Parliament from East Delhi, actually wanted to go to the National School of Drama to become a professional theatre actor. He had studied at Delhi’s Modern School where theatre, elocution and debating are taken very seriously indeed. When he joined St Stephen’s College he became a member of the Shakespeare Society, intending to turn his hobby into his profession.
Fate decreed otherwise. He lost his father, an IAS officer, midway. Although as the grandson of Umashankar Dikshit, an important figure in the Congress politics of UP, the Dikshit family was well provided for, he took the Indian Rural Management Institute (IRMA) exam, cleared it and went to Anand instead.
At IRMA, he met the girl who would be his wife — Mona, an expert on microfinance. But he also forged connections with the world of non-government organisations (NGOs).
What Woodstock was to rock music in the 1960s, Bhopal is to India’s NGOs. It is where NGOs congregate not just for work but also to debate, discuss and swap notes. Dikshit, too, headed for Bhopal, working among panchayats in Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh to help them streamline their budgetary processes and build human development issues into their budgets.
Few people know – actually no one does – exactly how much money panchayats receive. What is more they receive money in tranches, in fits and starts. Every small strike in the secretariat, a slip up by a clerk, a wrong entry sends panchayats screaming for help: they can’t pay salaries, can’t plan ahead. Dikshit’s job was not to mobilise, organise, agitate… it was to plan, assist, ideate.
In the course of his work, naturally, he formed close partnerships in the NGO community, something he has nurtured over the years. When the Gujarat riots occurred, he found he could no longer morally justify to himself the asepsis of NGO work. He joined politics, first helping out Amma – Sheila Dikshit who had already become chief minister of delhi – and then contesting the Lok Sabha himself.
When the Anna Hazare mobilisation began, Dikshit made a few calls. If the government had brought him in at that stage, he would have explained to them the politics of NGOs. But he watched with concern and worry, Hazare’s arrest. He also noted that only Hazare had been arrested, not the other associates. When mutual friends suggested that Arvind Kejriwal wanted to meet somebody in the government, he hesitated. Access to Cabinet ministers Kapil Sibal and P Chidambaram was beyond his paygrade — but Law Minister Salman Khurshid was someone he could go to. Khurshid readily agreed to meet Kejriwal and the meeting took place at the residence of a government officer in a Delhi colony. One, and then a second, followed.
NGOs have an attitude to government peculiar to them and all their own. They believe that because they have given up – power politics, the gains of influence and so on – everything they say or do is right and morally just. In a lot of the cases, this is influenced by their source of funding. But the underlying sense of self-righteousness is enough to drive anyone who has had dealings with government processes crazy with frustration.
Some form of this was happening in the dealings Hazare and his team had had with the government. “Such a small thing – and you don’t even want to do this much,” Hazare supporters were prone to ask about complex government decisions. Dikshit, who had been on both sides of the fence understood the problem of communication. He tried to play the honest broker, conveying to the government what the NGOs were saying and informing the government on the NGO dynamic.
Everything would have ended peachy had talks ended in a resolution at that late night meeting at Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee’s office. The government explained that the solution to corruption was not a “one-size-fits-all” concept. The problem of fake degrees, for instance, could be resolved by delivering degrees in the dmat form for which a Bill was already in Parliament. Similarly, a Judicial Accountability Bill would be a starting point to end corruption in the higher judiciary. The time-line – what would be done when, the most important element for an NGO, because it needs to keep its supporters engaged, informed and convey a sense of achievement – had almost been agreed. But the government and Parliament’s patience was also stretched. So when Kiran Bedi began talking big, the talks broke down. Prashant Bhushan himself said it was back to square one.
How much that meeting set the Hazare team back, no one will be able to quantify. But, a lot. As a team, negotiations are possible only if there is mutual respect. If both sides look at each other with fear and loathing, how can negotiations continue?
But the process couldn’t be snapped either, because a man was on a fast and could die. Vilasrao Deshmukh was sent to Hazare, who said: “give me something in writing, I will break my fast,” From Hazare’s team the faces changed: Kiran Bedi was replaced by Medha Patkar. If the government had been clumsy, Hazare’s team had been obstinate. That had to change.
Younger ministers were brought into the picture. They wanted to learn. Watching Dikshit with other “young” MPs is interesting. They find his earnestness tedious. He feels he is an outsider (he is also rather shy). The government unbent to bypass some rules of Parliament. Hazare’s team agreed that everything relating to their Lok Pal Bill needed to be discussed by Parliament. That’s how a standoff was ended. Sandeep Dikshit played a small part in the making of history.
