The voters’ revolt

For too long in so-called democratic and civilised societies, such as ours in Sri Lanka, those who have the responsibility to formulate and implement policy and their political masters – the bureaucracy and the politicians – have been successful in excluding everybody else, especially civil society representatives, from the process. They have had the freedom of the proverbial Wild Ass, or in colloquial terms, of the Mannar Donkey.

In democracies, at elections, periodically, the politicians contesting for power place manifestos before the gullible voting public, indicating what policies they will implement when elected. There is hardly ever any objective assessment of the economic credibility of the proposals.

After elections the politicians who have won and the bureaucrats do not ever refer anything back to the voters and implement what they jointly decide. The voters are totally disenfranchised and cannot do anything about the politicians and officials completely ignoring election manifestos until the next round of elections. The voters and civil society are totally alienated from policy making, implementation or evaluation.

Rare exception

The rare exception to this rule is where in states like California the voters can, through referendums, initiate legislation. In South Asia politicians after elections also commit another dastardly act, in crossing the aisle and supporting a set of policies diametrically opposite to what the voters elected them to implement.

Voters in most countries have no control over this, except in those few jurisdictions that they can through a referendum recall their elected member for betraying their policies, as in some American states. The other option is to vote out the incumbent at the next election, but for that the election must be free and fair, which in South Asia is a rare occurrence.

This total alienation of the voting public, in between often fraudulent, corrupt and violent elections and multiple crossovers of elected members, is the stuff of revolution in emerging and developing economies the world over.

This is compounded by the lack of the rule of law, accountability, transparency, prevalence of gross corruption, etc… the list is unending. What passes for a ‘democratic process’ is some nations is a laughable mockery of the concept.

The fundamental grouse which drives the ‘Arab Spring’ and the ‘Scorching Arab Summer’ we are witnessing is this. The dominoes have fallen, Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and Libya, with Syria and Bahrain hanging on by a whisker. The looting and rioting youngsters of Britain were conveying a similar message of alienation.

People’s power

However, recently, there have been two examples of people’s power emerging to take on the domination of policy making by politicians and the bureaucracy, which breathes fresh life, rejuvenates and gives hope to the concept of participatory democracy: One in India, in the Indian sub continent, the other in the United States on the American continent.

From the time of independence, India’s political class and the Babus, the administrators, have religiously promised India’s voting public that they will bring in legislation to create a Lokpal anti-corruption agency with wide powers to fight bribery and corruption resolutely.

For over four decades they have successfully avoided doing so, although draft legislation has been introduced in Parliament repeatedly. Corruption, bribery or giving ‘Baksheesh’ in Hindu and Urdu slang, to get the simplest thing done by a Babu or a politician, has become a way of life in India, especially for the poor and marginalised. Recently corruption of unprecedented proportions, hitherto unknown – it may have happened before, but it was not so much in the public domain – hit the public eye.

The Delhi Commonwealth Games, the 2G Spectrum allocations for mobile telephone technology and the allocation of apartments meant for families of fallen heroes of the Kargil conflict with Pakistan, to the families of politicians, bureaucrats and senior military men have hit the headlines.

The Aan Admi – ordinary Indian, the students, the burgeoning middle class, the professionals, the business community – was incensed and demanded action.

‘Cometh the Hour, Cometh the Man’

‘Cometh the Hour, Cometh the Man’ is an ancient proverb. The man was Anna Hazare; a retired Indian soldier from a small village in Maharashthra, Ralegan Siddhi. His unit was wiped out in the 1965 war with Pakistan and only Hazare survived. He had migrated to Bombay as a youngster, tried his hand at various business ventures and joined the Army when they failed. After the war Hazare, went back to his village and found it ridden with poverty, alcoholism and illiteracy in a barren landscape.

Putting on a Mahatma Gandhi cap, Hazare set out on a mission to transform the village. He implemented a series of projects to eradicate alcoholism, conserve water, build damns and percolation tanks, stockpile grain, develop a household dairy industry, plant trees and build schools and vocational training institutes.

He took on the curse of untouchability (of Dalits) head on, ending the ban on Dalits worshipping at the village temple and drawing water from wells which, hitherto, were upper caste wells. Four Dalit children from the school Hazare built have gone on to University and become doctors. In the mid ’70s the literacy rate in Ralegan Siddhi was only 15%, today it is 100%.

Hazare, although a Gandhian, was no chicken – when the illicit liquor distillers refused to cease operations, he got a group of village youth to destroy their illicit distilleries. Drunkards who were caught in public were brought to the village square and tied to a telegraph pole and beaten with Hazare’s canvass Army issue belt.

When questioned by a writer for the Readers Digest on the flogging of miscreants, Hazare said: “If you want change, it is sometimes necessary to be tough.”

Hazare’s work in the village won him India’s high civilian honour, the Padma Bhushan, and recognition by the World Bank. In 1997 Hazare used fast as a method of getting corrupt ministers to resign in Maharashtra and officials transferred out. He fasted for 12 days, in 2003, before the Maharashtra State chickened out and enacted a Right to Information Law.

Jan Lokpal Bill

With this background, Hazare surrounded himself with some high profile civil society activists, lawyers and respected retired public servants and drafted a Jan Lokpal Bill, setting up an independent anti corruption agency and presented it to the Government of India, demanding that it be enacted.

The Government at first did not take him seriously. The multitudinous corruption scams which were the top stories in India’s newspapers, radio and television, the hitherto unprecedented mass communication on Facebook and Twitter and by mobile phone text messaging created an up swell of unprecedented and unpredicted support for the Jan Lokpal Bill.

Thousands flocked to support Hazare at the Jantar Mantar grounds in Delhi, where Hazare began a fast until the Jan Lokpal Bill was enacted. Before Hazare could even work up a decent hunger, the Government capitulated and invited civil society members to sit on a Joint Drafting Committee with Ministers.

Then the Government tried a sleight of hand, by submitting a much milder bill, as the output of the Joint Drafting Committee, labelled “Joke Pal” by the Hazare Team, without including the Hazare Draft proposals to Cabinet and having it approved by Cabinet.

Politicians attacked Hazare personally, called him corrupt and the Government arrested him to pre-empt a second fast and locked Hazare and the team in Delhi’s Tihar jail with those who had been locked up for the Commonwealth Games and 2G Spectrum scams.  The people of India went berserk; the Government chickened and released Hazare, who refused to leave Tihar until he was allowed to undertake a fast, to ensure the enactment of the Jan Lokpal Law on his own terms.

Finally, the Babus and politicians chickened again and a compromise was reached to allow a 15 day fast at Delhi’s Ram Lila ground. While the fast was going on the Government tried to whittle down the Jan Lokpal Bill to make it virtually ineffective, but the Hazare Team and their supporters held fast – and finally the Prime Minster agreed that three drafts, the Government one, the Jan Lokpal one, and another NGO one would be tabled in Parliament and debated.

Both houses of Parliament unanimously passed resolutions supporting the Jan Lokpal principles and referring them to a select committee. The Prime Minister’s Office and the All India bureaucracies would come under the Lokpal but the Judiciary would be covered by another authority set up simultaneously.

Opposition MPs and even some younger governing Congress Party MPs have come out in support on the Jan Lokpal version. One young Government politician who attacked Hazare viciously earlier has given an abject apology before the TV cameras.

India lies on the cusp of achieving a momentous victory of ordinary people, forcing the political class to enact anti bribery legislation with teeth against the will of the politicians and Babus, which the political class and the Babus have successfully obstructed for over four decades. It is indeed a historical moment.

Howard Schultz’s campaign

In the United States of America, a campaign led by Howard Schultz, Starbucks chief executive that calls on top executives to halt political donations to Washington lawmakers is in many ways similar to Hazare’s campaign.

The deadlock between the White House, the Senate and the House of Representatives, that is between the Democrats and Republicans, in them being unable to agree on what terms to extend the borrowing limit and reduce the debt of the US government, has frustrated the American public to a degree hitherto unimaginable.

The Republicans desperately want the White House back; they will even sacrifice America’s stability to confine Obama to one term. The fact that Schultz’s campaign is gaining momentum is a sign of the deep frustration felt by some business leaders about political paralysis and dysfunction in the US capital.

Schultz said in a letter that more than 100 business leaders had signed on to a two-part pledge he unveiled last week, which seeks an end to political donations to incumbent lawmakers until a bipartisan debt reduction deal is agreed by Congress, and urges the executives to accelerate employment at their companies.

Among top executives who signed the pledge are Duncan Niederauer of NYSE Euronext, Walter Robb of Whole Foods, Myron Ullman of JC Penney, and Barry Sternlicht of Starwood Capital Group.

Schultz, the Chief Executive of the global coffee chain, Starbucks, is asking Congress to reach a debt reduction deal that would both address Government spending on expensive programmes such as Medicare and Medicaid and increase revenue, although the pledge is not specific about the kinds of tax increases an agreement should include.

“As many of our political leaders’ campaign and vacation, the US economy remains in a cycle of fear and uncertainty,” Schultz said. “I’m encouraged that many of you agree there is a way to break this cycle of fear.”

He added that the initiative represented an opportunity for organisations and businesses who share the goal of “putting country above partisanship”. While it is too early to say whether the pledge will ultimately cut into lawmakers’ coffers, Schultz’s activism is symbolically important because it exposes the growing dissatisfaction among business leaders with wrangling among lawmakers.

Gridlock in Washington

The sense of gridlock in Washington seemed to reach new heights this summer as the Republican-led House of Representatives and White House tussled over an agreement to increase the US debt ceiling.  A deal reached in the 11th hour saved the US from a default on its debts, but not before testing the US markets and voters’ faith in the Congress and President Barak Obama. Standard & Poor’s, the rating agency, downgraded the US in the wake of the debt ceiling debacle, and in part because it said it doubted the ability of the political system to confront the challenge of rising debt loads.

The US President is expected to unveil his own jobs plan in early September, as is Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts Governor and Republican presidential candidate.

The White House said last week that Obama talked to General Electric Chief Executive Jeffrey Immelt and Ken Chenault, the American Express Chief, on a conference call. The men co-chair Obama’s jobs council and are preparing a new push to increase the number of engineers that graduate from American institutions. The council is also discussing a plan to put more construction workers back to work through a programme to upgrade buildings to make them more energy efficient.

Schultz was driven by the frustration and the inaction of the political class in Washington DC, to take cognisance of the serious issues the USA was facing and come up with practical solutions without getting mired down in political crossfire. The business community felt that the inability of the political class in the US to steer the nation out of the debt crisis in a reasonable and responsible manner, jeopardised the future activities of US businesses.

The only way to make the political class feel the pain was to deprive them of their funding, without which you cannot campaign and you cease to be a politician! The business community is hitting the political class really where it hurts.

No other recourse

Anna Hazare and India’s civil society are also being driven by the absolute irresponsibility of their nation’s political class and the Babu’s, since independence, to take cognisance of the increasing rampant corruption and take steps to eradicate this cancer from the body politic.

It is well and good for constitutional pundits to pontificate that it is Parliament’s duty to legislate and that legislation cannot be enacted on the streets of Delhi or the corporate boardrooms of Wall Street, through public demonstration or protest.

But what recourse has the ordinary man, than to demonstrate and force Parliament to enact legislation through street demonstrations, fasts and holding back political donations, when for four decades the parliamentarians and administrators have consistently refused to enact a meaningful anti bribery law with teeth, or political bloody mindedness and partisan obstinacy cause gridlock in Washington DC?

In the same way, Schultz and his fellow entrepreneurial business men need a stable macroeconomic environment to carry out successful businesses, they cannot do so when the political class in the US though simple partisan political bloody mindedness refuses to bring down the public debt and increase the borrowing limit of the US Government. What alternative do they have but to hold back political donations to the politicians and starve them into submission and rational behaviour?

The head of one of the US’s top manufacturers, Caterpillar, Doug Oberhelman, also castigated the American political class. The CEO blamed politicians for their inability to find agreement over the debt ceiling. “It was a red herring of a problem that scares people. I am equally critical of both sides.” He labelled it “partisan squabbling” which overwhelmed the national interest and “sucked all the air out of Washington”.

Future for democracy

Both Hazare and Schultz are in essence doing the same thing, using public protest to energise a somnolent political class into action.

Analysts have reservations about building political campaigns around a single, solitary person. The architect of India’s constitution Dr. Ambedkar, the revered Buddhist Dalit leader, spoke of the dangers of using the ‘grammar of anarchy’ – fasts and street protests – against democratically-elected governments. But have the politicians in India and the USA behaved in a responsible, transparent, accountable and democratic manner, in both the instances, which have driven Hazare and Schultz to their direct action?

The future for democracy lies in the results they achieve. A democratic political process is too important to be left in the hands of only the political class. As George Bernard Shaw, famously said in his 1907 drama ‘Major Barbara’:

‘He knows nothing and  He thinks he knows everything.

That points clearly to a political career!’

Civil society, the business community, professionals and the community at large, the voters, must move to hold the political class accountable, 24 hours of the day, seven days of the week, and 365 days in the year. That is their duty and responsibility. Democratic responsibility is not limited to merely voting at periodic elections of questionable validity.

After 13 days Hazare ended his fast. He has set an ambitious future reform agenda, among them for electoral reform, a ‘Reject’ column in the ballot sheet when voters wish to reject all candidates contesting and a ‘Recall’ vote when voters disapprove of legislators’ behaviour. We need many more Hazares and Schultzs for democracy to be real. ‘Cometh the hour, cometh the man,’ indeed.