India Against Corruption

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India Against Corruption
Type	People's Movement
Focus	Anti-corruption
Area served	India
Key people	Anna Hazare, Arvind Kejriwal
Website	http://www.indiaagainstcorruption.org.in/

India Against Corruption (IAC), along with Team Anna, was a populist anti-corruption movement in India. It sought to mobilise the masses in support of their demands for a less corrupt society in India. It was headed mostly by middle-class professionals and lawyers and was particularly prominent during the anti-corruption protests of 2011 and 2012, the central point of which was debate concerning the introduction of a Jan Lokpal bill. The popular movement is distinct from a pressure group campaigning for Right to Information that bears the same name.

Those involved with the IAC core committee eventually diverged to form the Aam Aadmi Party and Jantantra Morcha.

Rise

Alison Brysk, a professor of political science, notes that the IAC popular protest movement began in a year when there were also major protests about corruption in countries such as Russia (sometimes called the Snow Revolution) and the US (Occupy Wall Street). She also says that the Arab Spring protests that began in late 2010 were "initially sparked by corruption - not regime change". Brysk believes that "Regardless of limited policy outcomes, each of these citizenship movements succeeded in communicating a political critique of social problems that had been seen previously as a consequence of tradition, abusive individuals, self-correcting markets, or bad luck. They were all movements that relied heavily on symbolism."

The official position of figureheads in the IAC movement was that it had no formal organisation beyond a 24-member core committee. In 2011, the mostly middle-class organisers of IAC determined to launch a campaign to mobilise the masses in support of a demand that they hoped would help to bring about a corruption-free India. Their proposal was for the creation of a Lokpal (ombudsman) who would have powers to arrest and charge government officials accused of corruption. They approached Ramdev, a populist yogi with millions of supporters among the middle-classes of small-town India, to be the figurehead for this campaign. His connections to the right-wing Sangh Parivar threatened to damage the credibility of what was nominally an apolitical movement. He was soon replaced by Anna Hazare, a veteran social reformer with a history of undertaking fasts in support of his causes. Hazare, too, brought a large support base with him, described by Meera Nanda as being largely "from urban middle-classes and idealistic youth". The urban sophistication of Hazare, compared to Ramdev's rusticity, attracted high-profile support for the campaign from Bollywood stars, the internet-savvy, and mainstream English-language news media. He, too, struggled to disassociate himself from Hindutva symbolism: hence, support from non-Hindus was less forthcoming.

Mahendra Prasad Singh, another professor of political science and a former Director of the Indian Council for Social Science Research, sees some similarity between the Hazare-led IAC movement and campaigns of the 1970s for which Jayaprakash Narayan was the figure-head. The significant difference, he says, is that rather than using "conventional means of political mobilisation, mainly thrived on the private electronic and social media, supplemented by mass congregation in cities".

Historian and commentator Ramachandra Guha has questioned the image that has been portrayed of IAC and of Hazare. Acknowledging that Hazare had previously been successful in campaigns for infrastructure reforms at the local level in his native Maharashtra and that the IAC campaign of 2011 had an impact, Guha doubts the claims that the 2011 and 2012 protests overwhelmingly engaged the masses. He notes that liberals were concerned with a perceived anti-democratic rhetoric while socially oppressed communities, such as the dalits and Other Backward Classes, were worried that the Hindu-led movement would undermine the gains they have made through legislative reforms, such as those resulting from the Mandal Commission. He considers that the attention given to the protest by 24-hour news channels and internet resources has masked the realities, such as that popular participation at the Jantar Mantar and Ramlila Maidan protests in Delhi was a fraction of that evidenced in Kolkata in 1998 when 400,000 marched in an anti-nuclear movement. IAC and Hazare in particular piggy-backed on and gained from discontent surrounding some coincident corruption scandals involving the government. These scandals, such as the 2G spectrum scam, were high-profile examples of the corruption that is claimed to be endemic in Indian society at all levels but Guha believes the IAC solution — the Lokpal — was a "simplistic" reaction.

Divergence

Those at the head of IAC became known as Team Anna. In late 2012, there was a split in the IAC movement caused by differences of opinion among the central figures regarding its lack of practical success and how much this might have been due to its unwillingness to be directly engaged in the political system. An IAC survey had suggested that direct involvement in politics was preferable, leading to Arvind Kejriwal and some others splitting to form the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) in order to cause change from within the system. Hazare rejected the survey findings.

Hazare had announced that he was disbanding Team Anna in August 2012, around the time that the divisions were coming to a head. In November 2012, after the split, he said that he was forming a new Team Anna, that it would retain the label of India Against Corruption and that its members were discussing other societal issues that they might address.

The new Team Anna, sometimes referred to as Team Anna 2.0, was preparing to tour the country from 30 January 2013, coinciding with the death anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi. When that day came, Hazare announced that he had formed Jantantra Morcha, a campaigning group that included the previously-named members of Team Anna 2.0 and which he considered to be a replacement for IAC but with a broader agenda.

Notable people

Notable members of IAC/Team Anna prior to the breakaway of the Aam Aadmi Party were:

Following the split with the AAP, notable members were:

Sarbajit Roy (National Convenor)

Sarbajit Roy is a prominent Freedom of Information activist and public interest litigation advocate, notable for successfully opposing some of India's largest corporates in the regulatory domain. He is also the current National Convenor of India Against Corruption anti-corruption movement. Sarbajit Roy was a "bad boy" in the early 1980s when he notably wrote India's first computer viruses. An engineer from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science Pilani in 1980, Roy has the triple distinction of having filed the first Right to Information (RTI) request, the first RTI Appeal and the first RTI Complaint under India's Right to Information Act.

Roy is well known for being the first activist to bring state conferred monopolies under the scope of India's Freedom of Information hitherto applicable only to Government agencies.

Actions by Roy

STBs don't meet BIS norms

In December 2003, Sarbajit Roy approached the Supreme Court saying that 2 million recycled Humax Cable TV set top boxes being sold in the market for CAS did not meet the safety norms set by the Bureau of Indian Standards and did not have BIS certification. Sarbajit Roy approached the Supreme Court after the senior officers of Delhi Police were unsure of their jurisdiction to register the FIR on his complaint that flimsy STBs containing fatal voltages as high as 4000 Volt were being sold to consumers without the mandatory BIS certification. Senior police officers however said, "We don't know what to do with the complaint. The matter has to be resolved at government level. It is the policy makers and BIS which has to take care of the matter". The Supreme Court allowed the few existing CAS installations to continue and granted leave to Roy to intervene again in case the government revived the scheme. The STB manufacturer refused to accept back the defective STBs causing a huge loss to the importers. A similar story published in the Pioneer newspaper, got its editor Chandan Mitra sued for defamation along with Roy, which motion was eventually dismissed.

BPO Hacking

Sarbajit Roy was the applicant in the Karan Bahree case where a reporter from The Sun newspaper alleged in 2005 that India was an unsafe destination for BPOs as confidential data of UK citizens was being hawked on CDs. In his application Roy stated that to the contrary British banks routinely sent their confidential data on their defaulting customers (especially credit card defaulters) to shady call centres located in India operating without proper safeguards or regulation and the Sun story was an attempt to defame legitimate Indian BPOs. Although Roy's complaint was later dismissed in 2007 because he was not the owner of the affected computers, the case resulted in significant tightening to India's Information Technology Act to "minimise data theft to make sure that the (IT industry's) security standards are internationally recognised."

Right to Information

No bar on voluminous requests for information

Although the RTI Act specifically provides that information has to be provided in the form requested unless it would disproportionately divert the resources of the public authority, unfortunately some departments have been using this provision to deny citizens access to information. This issue was the subject of the first complaint filed with the Central Information Commission (CIC) by Sarbajit Roy. After hearing the parties the CIC held that the Act does not authorise a public authority to deny information even if the information sought is voluminous.

Regulatory actions (Electricity sector)

On Dec 3 2006 the Central Information Commission ruled in Roy's case that the 3 private electricity distribution utilities (Discoms) of Delhi are public authority required to entertain applications under the Right to Information Act. This RTI ruling put the DISCOMS and their regulatory agency DERC at loggerheads with the DISCOMS saying they would rather provide information through the DERC and not be brought under the RTI while the DERC said the DISCOMS were taking recourse to technicalities to get away from the RTI. The DISCOMS challenged this decision before the High Court claiming that they are privately owned and managed companies and did not meet the criteria mentioned in the RTI Act. The High Court referred the matter back to the Central Information Commission with the advice that the matter be heard once again by the full bench and an opportunity be given to the DISCOMS to present their case. After conducting more hearings the CIC arrived at the unanimous decision that the DISCOMS were indeed substantially financed by the Government of Delhi because assets of huge monetary value had been handed over to the DISCOMS when the original public sector power utility was privatized and split into multiple entities. The DISCOMS challenged this order before the High Court for a second time, with the same result.

Quashing "CIC Management Regulations 2007"

In 2010, a court case Roy initiated triggered the revising of India's Right to Information law, as the Delhi High Court declared the existing regulations as illegal in his case. This has led to protests among RTI activists. and disrupted the work of the Central Information Commission and caused at least 2 RTI Information Commissioner to stop work till the CIC decided to appeal it in the Supreme Court and "save itself from administrative chaos".

Unique Identity Authority of India held to be public body

On 18.November.2009 on a complaint from Roy, India's FOI regulator held the UIDAI to be a public authority liable to disclose its working to the public. Roy had alleged that the UIDAI, a controversial body headed by Nandan Nilekani to collect and store biometric IDs of Indian citizens, was fully operational, whereas the Indian Government contended that it never existed and had only a skeletal staff. After this decision was announced the UIDAI was ejected from their offices in the middle of the night and had to seek new accommodation.

References

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