The Telegraph; Tuesday , April 12 , 2011,
New Delhi, April 11: The Sonia Gandhi-headed National Advisory Council may relinquish its mandate to strengthen the Lok Pal Bill following Anna Hazare’s agitation and the joint drafting panel it has led to, a member of the panel said.
The National Advisory Council (NAC) had set up a working group with Aruna Roy as its convener to look at the possibility of adding teeth to the government’s version of the Lok Pal Bill.
The member said Sonia was now expected to take a call whether the panel should persist with its efforts on the bill, or leave it entirely to the joint drafting committee so that “duplication and clashes” can be avoided.
Apart from their reluctance to encroach on the joint committee’s turf, NAC members have reservations about the way Hazare and his advisers went about the issue.
When the NAC working group on the bill held its first official meeting on April 4, it had invited all the four Hazare associates who are now on the joint drafting committee as civil society representatives.
At that meeting, lawyers Shanti and Prashant Bhushan, Karnataka Lokayukta Santosh Hegde and RTI activist Arvind Kejriwal had held consultations with the NAC core group of A.K. Shiva Kumar, Mirai Chatterjee, Deep Joshi, Harsh Mander and N.C. Saxena.
The working group was to confer with them again on April 16 but that meeting now looks uncertain, a source said.
Sources said that when an NAC member had informally remarked at a previous discussion that civil society needn’t have resorted to the “spectacle of a dharna” to fight corruption, some pro-Hazare activists had protested and suggested they would not like to work with the panel again.
NAC members said they had a “problem” with the way Hazare’s agitation was carried out.
“It was certainly media-driven. More disturbing was the presence of pro-Hindutva elements and the support that Hazare himself (later) expressed for Narendra Modi,” a member said.
Hazare had yesterday admired Modi’s work to decentralise power in Gujarat but made it clear he wasn’t looking at the chief minister’s communal record.
An NAC member said the panel could not “pretend as though one (corruption) did not impinge on the other (communalism)”.
“If we are looking at corruption and transparency, we are also equally serious about combating communalism,” the member said.
Asked if the NAC saw the Hazare kind of agitation as a challenge to its relevance and authority, a member said: “The Lok Pal is one specific element in the campaign against corruption. It doesn’t cover the gamut of issues.
“We will take up administrative, electoral and police reforms, and stress the need for laws to check illegal accumulation of assets, and so on.”
As for the drafting of the Lok Pal Bill, one member said: “The processes of consultation must be genuine, widespread and inclusive and not override people’s concerns. We want a powerful Lok Pal but such an authority cannot just get after politicians. Corruption covers all aspects of society bureaucrats, doctors, and the like.”
Another member said: “The point is not about equal representation of civil society members with the ministers entrusted with drafting the bill. It is that the government must immediately announce its intention to bring a strong law based on wide public consultations.”
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