The reason is that some of the members, like the Magsaysay prize winner Arvind Kejriwal, seemingly have a high moral notion of their obligation to eliminate corruption. Anna Hazare himself may have a similar sense of mission. But his age, sobriety and familiarity with popular causes is likely to play a temporizing role. Even then, he has taken upon himself the task of modifying the Gandhian method by saying that unlike the Mahatma, who advised restraint in both word and deed, Anna Hazare will not mind using combative rhetoric even while eschewing physical violence.

It is difficult to say whether this fine distinction can be maintained. Gandhi himself failed when a mob turned violent in Chauri Chaura in 1922, forcing him to call off the civil disobedience movement. Whether Anna Hazare will succeed in ensuring that the tenets of Gandhi and Shivaji run parallel to one another during the movement, as per his wishes, will only be known in the future. But it is a risk which only the exceptionally courageous will want to take.

As is obvious, therefore, the difficulties of running the committee may arise more from its activist members than from among those on the government side such as P. Chidambaram, Veerappa Moily, Kapil Sibal and Salman Khursheed, apart from Mukherjee, who are all seasoned campaigners in the matter of negotiating the labyrinthine byways of official rules, and in persuading others to see the correctness of their position, especially when they politely reject a proposal.

It is not impossible, therefore, that after some time, the activists will find it nearly impossible to push through their case to empower the ombudsman in ways which have not been thought of earlier. It does not take much perspicacity to see that this question will prove to be the sticking point. As the present version of the Lokpal bill shows, the government wants the ombudsman to refer his findings on cases of corruption among the MPs to the Lok Sabha Speaker or the Rajya Sabha chairman. Under the proposed arrangement, the ombudsman has no powers of prosecution.

Since the activists are bound to insist on investing the Lokpal with powers of both investigation and prosecution, turning it into some kind of a “supercop”, while the government is expected to oppose the move, it is not easy to see how an agreement can be reached. The restricted time-frame, which calls for the tabling of the bill during the monsoon session, and its passage by parliament by August 15, will make the task of reaching an agreement all the more difficult.

The government probably hopes that differences among the activist members, and also between them and the civil libertarians outside, will make its task easier. Even the eagerness shown by parties like the BJP at present may cool down when it becomes apparent that am excessively powerful Lokpal will be a danger to the entire political class and perhaps also to the democratic system.

There is little doubt that the BJP’s present shrill condemnation of corruption is intended to push the Congress into a corner and is not unlike the kind of “posturing” which it affected during its opposition to the nuclear deal, as the Wikileaks have revealed. It is obvious that a party, which has stood by B.S. Yeddyurappa even after calling his land deals “immoral”, though not “illegal”, and whose obstructionist tactics made the Karnataka Lokayukta Santosh Hegde once resign in despair, will not favour a Lokpal who combines the powers of the police and the CBI.

But more than the political parties, it is the civil rights groups, both inside and outside the committee, which are likely to make the task of compromise difficult by raising demands bordering on the outrageous. This threat will be posed by social workers like the Maoist sympathizer, Swami Agnivesh, who has little faith in the present constitutional system. Baba Ramdev is another, who ignored Anna Hazare’s advice to keep politics out of his campaign by making sly digs at the people of “foreign origin” and at cricket. Then, there is Kejriwal who is not apologetic about pursuing blackmailing tactics.

Agnivesh, it may be recalled, is on record saying that the country is “being held hostage by elected representatives. I don’t believe in parliamentary politics or representative democracy. We need grassroots democracy”. It goes without saying that this is the voice of extremism, either of the left or the right, and has an innate bias towards summary justice by “kangaroo courts”
(IPA Service)