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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | It’s complicated

It’s complicated

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published Published on Oct 24, 2011   modified Modified on Oct 24, 2011
-The Indian Express
 
When it burst into public consciousness earlier this year, the India Against Corruption movement appeared to be led by a team that instinctively understood each other, despite their differences. They came from a similar gene pool and had benefited from largely similar opportunities, they felt the same frustration with aspects of the state, they shared a common vocabulary, and the same burning priorities. They were united in their determination to enact a maximalist, under-thought version of the Lokpal bill, and anything that got in the way, like Parliament’s prerogative to draft and enact legislation after full debate, was roughly dismissed. Parliament was an empty abstraction to Team Anna, which imagined itself as speaking for “the people”. It presumed to prescribe a one-shot solution to all that ails the nation, and anyone who resisted, they said, was complicit in corruption.

Even that limited mission, led by a like-minded team, has foundered. Like it or not, they have had to move to Level Two — greater complexity has been thrust on them as they make decisions about the nature of their engagement. As new details emerged, of Arvind Kejriwal’s unpaid debt to the government, or Kiran Bedi’s unorthodox accounting, or the Bhushans’ properties and political views, they have had to contemplate ethical grey zones. Now, they appreciate the right to a fair hearing — a right that they would have denied others in their rush to judgment, their sense of moral superiority. Differences have cropped up, some personal, some ideological. It has been a demonstration of Team Anna’s own bankruptcy of ideas, its inability to hold together when confronted with a difficult thought. Personalities and egos are chafing, and several team members have openly expressed their disagreements with each other. For Team Anna, this should be lesson in what only liberal democracy can accomplish — the balancing of diverse opinion, with tolerance and freedom.

The rupturing of Team Anna’s superficial solidarities is also a reminder of the significance of much that they run down about representative democracy and the thoughtful, liberal institutions that undergird it. For all their contempt for Parliament, it is the one arena where an entire range of beliefs is accommodated and the friction of ideas is productive, where the desires of one ideological constituency are tempered by the encounter with another. The rise and ebb of India Against Corruption has only showed up, in greater relief, the rock-solid foundations of our democratic institutions.


The Indian Express, 24 October, 2011, http://www.indianexpress.com/news/its-complicated/864432/


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