Civil Society

Ask yourself this question (and try to answer very honestly). Is it fair that your vote counts for no more in any election than the vote cast by your driver? Your maid servant? The chap who cleans your car? Or the vote cast by the squatter on the pavement just outside your apartment block?

All of them are less educated then you, indeed some of them are illiterates: strictly angutha chhap. They pay no taxes. They don’t have an original point of view on anything. They are the undeserving recipients of endless largesse from the Treasury, which you fill with Income Tax. They are shirkers who slack off after just a few hours of brainless, manual work while you toil endless hours and suffer sleepless nights for your employer. They don’t even understand the first thing about Democracy and Universal Suffrage which has given them privileges way beyond their natural station in life. At the very least, you fantasise about a more reasonable world where a vote like yours counts as equivalent to more than one of any of their votes. Perhaps you’ve imagined a system where votes are sized proportionate to the amount of tax that the elector pays.

You see the utter chaos and corruption that is rife in the Society and State that you inhabit and feel a sense of chronic helplessness, even impotence, that for all your organisational authority and economic contribution to community, you are but a mute spectator to all that is wrong around you. You are so frustrated, in fact, that you have no interest in participating in the electoral process. When the electoral rolls were last revised in your constituency at the time of the General Elections, you even made a sincere attempt to get your name registered but the damned process is so ineffective and tedious, involving sweating for hours in long lines outside a drab Ward Office and filling forms in the vernacular (that you don’t know, which leaves you wondering why they can’t offer the forms in English too) that you gave up.

From time to time, you receive email and Facebook appeals to sign some petition and you make it a point to append your name to causes that you find worthy. You forward them to your friends for their support. Every once in a while, you even donate to some of them.

You had been secretly longing for the day when someone would stand up to hold the authorities accountable. Who would have the charisma, the brio, the guts of steel to take on the venal and corrupt and get them to their heels. Who would offer tough prescriptions against all cancers that had seized our body politic and have the cojones to administer them. When suddenly, such a Crusader emerged. In a most unlikely garb.

A Gandhian Prohibitionist from an obscure village, Ralegan Siddhi, that Google Maps had to scramble to add, had decided to awaken the national conscience. He was a tireless fighter for probity in public life with a solid record of exposing corruption in Maharashtra’s political establishment and he had now decided to turn raise his sights. After CWG, Adarsh, Telecom and goodness knew how many others, he was no longer willing to remain silent. Wonder of wonders, he was proposing not just to fight the problem but actually offering a solution too. An Ombudsman, a Lokpal, he said, was just the ticket. An office that lay outside of the dirty and ethically compromised traditional three organs of Legislative, Executive and Judiciary. With plenipotentiary powers of oversight and, when justified, penalty.

He spoke directly to your heart. Here, you said to yourself, was a new freedom struggle whose time had, unfortunately, come. Here, you heard the news anchors, was India’s very own Velvet Revolution, its very own Summer of Discontent. The frail Masiha had revealed himself.

In Gandhian tradition, the Masiha launched a Satyagraha involving an Uposhan unto death. As the Government looked on, stunned by the rapid sequence of events, a million such as yourself were busy FB’ing, tweeting, texting, emailing one another and canvassing support for this man who spoke directly to your innermost self. A small band of selfless volunteers even gave up their day jobs and formed a platoon around the man. And then the Government blinked!

The new keepers of the national conscience had just agitated themselves the right to discuss a whole new piece of legislation with the government of the day. You were ecstatic.

And a new phrase was born. Civil Society. As distinct from? Criminal Society. Uncivil Society. The terms you had long used secretly in your mind to describe the debauchery and debasement around you. A society full of shining, clean, incorruptible men and women who would rejoice in the shining, clean, incorruptible age of Ombudsmanning to come.

A battle of attrition was about to begin. You can imagine the boxing rink. In the Red Corner, the flabby GOP Champion of Attritions, P. Muks; in the Blue Corner, the Untainted, the Unblemished, the Lean, Hero of Heroes, A. Haz.

Your pulse raced. Your heart threatened to go into arrhythmia. This was finally going to settle it. In favour of the smart, the sensible. The Incorruptible. Against the dross and filth that lay on the other side.

And then the battle actually began. Remember, P. Muks was a much scarred veteran of many campaigns. A. Haz was naive. A greenhorn to Muks’s Chhata hua Badmash. Closed door meeting followed In Camera session. From time to time, there were voices of indignant protest from either side but the parleys went on. Civil Society was staking its all and only a decisive victory would be enough to appease the collective hunger. Of Civil Society (remember?).

But it wasn’t so simple, was it?

Muks and his team dealt in Decades while Haz thought it was just a matter of Weeks, to the Independence Day 2011, no less, by which he could unfurl his victorious Parcham of Ombudsmania over the Lal Quillla.

And then everything started to go spectacularly ulta pulta. Meeting after meeting ended ‘inconclusively’ or worse. Lok wouldn’t have a Pal, or at least not the way Haz had planned it. We, the (deserving) people, wouldn’t have our Canaan.

Kejri wasn’t able to wal it off. Bhushan was unable to negotiate a Shanti that would satisfy you. Indeed, the voices of ‘Civil Society’ seemed to get progressively shriller and less Civil with every day that passed sans result.

And somewhere along that line, your mind, tuned as it was to collecting its order of burger with soda and large fries in about five minutes, was beginning to drift off to planning your next holiday in Switzerland. This painful, long-winded process was not what you had signed up for.

Your l’affaire was over.