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All those who dissent have the obligation to listen: Aruna Roy

-Express News Service

 

Maintaining that “the right to dissent” must always be accompanied by the “obligation to listen”, activist Aruna Roy has asked the Anna Hazare-led group to recognise and respect difference of opinions, whether within the civil society groups themselves, or with any other formations.

In an interview to The Indian Express Editor-in-Chief Shekhar Gupta for NDTV 24x7’s Walk the Talk programme, Roy, who is a member of the Sonia Gandhi-led National Advisory Council, said while she fully understood the impatience of the Hazare camp on bringing a strong anti-corruption legislation, it was important that this campaign did not become “offensive” and “dismissive of other opinions”.

“Unfortunately, in some of our public debates now, on the Lokpal Bill and also on corruption, we say that we have a right to dissent but we don’t have the obligation to listen. I think that a very important part of growth is the listening,” Roy said.

Roy, who led the campaign that resulted in the landmark Right to Information legislation in 2005, said the current debate on the Lokpal Bill had put “some of the things we take for granted” on test.

“One of them is that civil society formations would be very liberal formations. It would allow for differences, it would allow for negotiating spaces, there would be genuine desire to listen and change. Because if you don’t change, then that listening becomes a formal exercise, just as the government does to us very often. Between peer groups, there should be ability to shift some positions and accept some others. Everybody has to compromise,” she said.

Roy and her colleagues at the National Campaign for the People’s Right to Information (NCPRI) have come up with an alternative formulation for a new anti-corruption establishment. But that has not found favour with the Anna camp.

“Just as the government wants to dismiss the campaign (led by Anna Hazare), the campaign is using this to dismiss any (other) opinion. It is actually very funny. Government tells the campaign that if it opposes them, it is because the campaign is with the Americans or it is doing it with foreign money or whatever. The campaign tells us that if we do not agree with the formulation they make, then we are with the government, or we are with corruption or we are traitors,” she said.

Roy pointed out that the debate had not given adequate attention to the provisions of the Jan Lokpal Bill put forward by the Hazare camp. “What is it in the Jan Lokpal Bill that will perpetuate the system we are fighting and how much of it will combat the system we are fighting. This needs to be considered more seriously,” she said.

“The circularity of oversight — like the Jan Lokpal will look at the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court will look at the Jan Lokpal — is a problem. There might be collusion because of this,” she said.

Roy said the large bureaucratic structure that the Jan Lokpal envisages was also a problem. “The largeness of it by itself becomes an issue of corruption and accountability becomes a problem. Because it would carry the same diseases of a large government structure and it threatens to be, in power at least, as large as the government,” she said.