20 October, 2011

Revisiting the JanLokpal debate

For some organizational purposes, friends and myself from ITEC visited Justice Santosh Hegde, former Lokayukta and a core committee member in the "Team Anna", and I was looking forward to meet him in person after all the initial genuine work he did, and the intrigue grew subsequently after the media portrayed him as the lone anti-corruption crusader.

Warm, humble and sensible are the words adequate to define him.

During the course of our discussion, as I was hoping, the discussion did get routed into the Janlokpal debate.

If some of you have been closely watching the Janlokpal (the debate about the bill, not the TV drama!), the points of contention were about who would be brought into the ambit of the bill. And the media was chewing the cud over and over again about the PM being brought into the ambit of the bill. While more saner heads around were asking everyone else to look at the obvious miscreants, and pull the corporates and now the latest threats NGO's into the bill.

But, the media and NGO's both are run by the Corporatocracy, as is most of the Government itself. And the media has hushed up about these two aspects.

While I was certainly endorsing the idea of bringing the corporates and NGO's into the ambit of the bill, I had presumed that Mr.Santosh Hegde would have adhered only to bringing the PM into the bill (my ignorance), and making it 'stronger'. While we were more on making it 'stronger' and 'sharper'.

It came as a surprise today: The first thing he spoke about while discussing the Janlokpal bill was the fraudulence associated with majority of the NGO's, and how myopic the bill was without bringing in the Corporates into the bill.

His frustration about the NGO's and their parasitic nature of thriving on the misery of others was a lot more sensible than whatever TV appearances he's been making. The venting out against the Corporates with all the work that he's been doing is something that few people have given heed to.

It is intriguing to see how we are all made to believe that the real villain is our saviour.  That is, talking about the role of corporates, who are pretending to be
the nice guys, and acting as if they were the ones who could abolish
poverty (ex, recently the Coca Cola -NDTV school campaign!)...
Irony in the first place is that, it is because of such profit seeking monopolies, that the disparity globe across has grown to this extent.

Bottomline: Corporates need to be brought into the Janlokpal bill, if ever it is going to be implemented.

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