Then, suddenly, the Good Samaritan from Maharashtra appeared from nowhere to sweep everything before him. Of late, however, the surge in Hazare’s favour has subsided to some extent as misgivings about his seemingly authoritarian path came to the fore. But, before considering why this happened, it may be necessary to look at the NAC’s response. Reports suggest that, as before, it is falling back on a slew of proposed legislative measures to make its presence felt, including a bill on communal violence which takes the Congress’s trademark minority appeasement plank to a new height.

True, some of its earlier endeavours have much to recommend them, such as those relating to rural employment despite the pilferage and the failure to build durable assets, and the right to information. Similarly, it is now said to be focussing on the judicial accountability bill, protection of whistle-blowers bill, the right to services bill and so on. In doing so, however, it is forgetting that India is one of the most legislated countries in the world. There is law for everything, including the prevention of corruption.

But, as the inadequacies of the laws against dowry deaths or female foeticide show, legislations such as these make little impact on the ground. Not only that, even outfits like the khap panchyats have reared their ugly heads over the last one decade to add another socially sanctioned crime to the north Indian scene – that of the so-called honour killings where young men and women are killed for defying orthodox norms or parental diktat.

The explanation for the acceleration of this kind of social degeneration is that the laws are no longer a deterrent. And the reason why the laws have lost their bite is that they are not implemented either because the guardians of law and order can be bought off or because they turn a blind eye to any violations under political pressure. There is another reason, too, which has a deeper connotation. It is the decline in educational standards, which means that the young men and women who enter the public services – even the IAS and the IPS – are not motivated by the ideals of morality or the primacy of the rule of law. As the conduct of the IAS and IPS officers – apart from a few notable exceptions - during and after the Gujarat riots, or during the Nandigram agitation in West Bengal, showed, their allegiance is not so much to the Constitution as to the political masters.

If the flaws in the educational system have failed to produce upright individuals, the degeneration of politics has facilitated the entry of elements whose prime objective is to make money. As Dayanidhi Maran told a US official, according to Wikileaks, “when people get into power, they lose concentration and start focussing on making money”. As a result, the politicians have little hesitation in pandering to all the base instincts which lend themselves to hysteria – communalism, casteism and social and religious obscurantism. This combination of cynical politicians and unscrupulous officials ensures that no matter how many laws are written into the statute book, they will mostly be honoured in the breach.

Therefore, if the eminent persons in the NAC want to make a genuinely beneficial contribution to governance, they will be better advised to pay greater attention to administrative reforms rather than to the making of laws. The starting point has to be the police since it is the local thana which is usually the ordinary person’s first point of contact with officialdom. If the voluminous reports of the National Police Commission are anathema to the Congress because these were written during the Janata regime of the late 1970s, at least greater attention can be paid to the Supreme Court’s directives of 2006 calling for insulating the police from politics. If this basic step is taken, then the prime minister would not have to advise the bureaucrats to be honest and fearless in advising the political leadership, as he did on Civil Services Day earlier this month.

A few days later, he gave the same advice to the CBI while inaugurating the organization’s new building in the national capital. But, considering that a former Chief Justice of India, J.S. Verma, has quoted a CBI director as saying that “political interference” was customary for the investigating agency, it is doubtful if either the prime minister or his listeners expected his advice to be seriously followed. Like the laws which are routinely ignored, such platitudes are almost always for the record with no one among the ruling politicians or the bureaucrats bothering about their implementation in practice. (IPA Service)