There budget session of parliament is fast approaching. Hanging in balance is the UPA government’s commitment to pass its Lokpal bill – a ridiculously weak bill that no one but the Congress is in favor of Getting the “Jan Lokpal” bill passed is India’s Mission Impossible (MI). Each MI has a different feel to it. This one, in particular, is clearly an all-desi version packed with the rustic oratory of our MPs, juxtaposed with the evasive, smiling, smooth-talk of the Harvard educated types, the spirited social activists led by an intermittently fasting Gandhian, and, last but not the least, our silent babu-like PM.
Team Anna rallied the masses and raised hopes of a utopian tomorrow – one with a clean and independent CBI under an incorruptible Lokpal. But after an entire year of wrangling with the government, the UPA summarily “checkmated” the social activists and drove them into existential crisis while simultaneously reducing the Lokpal bill to a “Ghost Protocol.” At the moment, the activists will be happier with the “no bill at all” than the current version of the bill tabled by the government. None of the political parties wants the Lokpal bill. Even if individual politicians want it, they can’t do a thing about it because their “High Command” does not want it. But the country’s future is at stake. The politicians are out to maintain the status-quo in order to protect their corrupt practices and ill-gotten wealth. But Team Anna has accepted this mission and is not going to relent until their goals are met.
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Pakora Korner 