Monday, August 22, 2011

Anna's struggle against corruption

Today Anna enters the 7th day of fasting fighting against corruption!! I thought of fasting today for supporting this issue, but just could not. Missing meal by one time in a day seems like such a huge deal. I am wondering how a man 75 years of age is doing this for the sake of the country...
The more disturbing thing about this is the paid media has started working again printing obscure articles against Anna's crusade against corruption. I was very tempted to post a comment on one such article written by Salil Desai in DNA India [Link here], but could not do that because it needs registration and access to all my personal information. In any case, let me analyze the article here. The author of the article is a filmmaker and a known govt. supporter. His arguments goes as below:

1) Common people in India are corrupt, so Anna's movement will not change anything unless we change ourselves.

My view: Agreed! Many people like to bribe for petty things like for a Police ticket, for any sarkari job etc. Suppose say, all of us will stop paying bribes, what will happen? Will it stop a mammoth scam like 2G spectrum scam/bofors scam/CWG scam/Housing society scam... No sir, it won't. Because there are 2 aspects to corruption in a country. One is corruption at a personal level and a corruption at a national level. By being clean you are cleaning your personal character, but this will not change much at the national level. Because the pople who make policies are different - are the so called elected leaders. Once they are elected they are safe for 5 years. Can you do anything to topple them? No you can't! They will continue to do what they like and most political leaders do exactly that. What common people would do if they have no choice to vote for? Have you thought about this? My previous article that explains Janlokpal in detail has a number of solutions. One has to really get into the bill to understand how it is going to work.

2) Common people in India are illiterate and have a herd mentality. They support Anna for the sake of supporting without realizing the consequence...

My View: I have not seen a much stupider statement than this before. The author says that the ones that support are illiterate. But I would challenge the author about how much he himslef knows about the bill? Does he have a solution as how to solve this problem, or he is just blabbering for the sake of blabbering.

3) Only 10% of the net users support Anna's movement, so it does not have a great support base.

My View: So, you are trying to dismiss the movement saying that it is not a populist movement and can be ignored. I am wondering what you would have done if all these supporters have not poured in the first place. Probably, Anna would have been dad by now. India is a great country and this type of selfless movement is only possible in India. because of sacrifice of few people we are enjoying a free India and because of Anna's sacrifice we will enjoy a clean governance. Do you have anything to say on this?

There are few other articles that makes an attempt to argue against Anna's method of tackling. I am not even willing to get into the details of those articles. One such article was written by Arundhati Roy and is a useless piece of article without any content. I would like to hear people' views on this. Jai Hind...

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