 |
 |
|
| Vol. 4, Issue 5 May 2012 |
|
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Reporting & Essays |
|
|
Reportage |
The Insurgent
|
| How Arvind Kejriwal, the architect of Anna Hazare’s anti-corruption campaign, brought the rage of an indignant nation to the government’s door |
|
Published : 1 September 2011 |
| |
|
|
SAJJAD HUSSAIN / AFP PHOTO |
|
| Arvind Kejriwal burns a copy of the Lokpal Bill during a
protest on the outskirts of New Delhi.
|
|
|
|
| S |
HORTLY AFTER ANNA HAZARE broke his fast-unto-death on 9 April, a group of young people encircled a small man with a black moustache at Jantar Mantar and began shouting the famous pre-independence slogan: Inquilab Zindabad! (Long Live Revolution!). He continued walking toward a group of cars when a young man wearing a red bandanna |
pushed through the crowd, blocking his way and screaming out, “Sir, don’t call off the fast. Repeat the revolution.” The man returned the smile, and slid into the car.
This man was Arvind Kejriwal, a 43-year-old social activist from East Delhi. Though Hazare is the recognised face of an anti-corruption campaign that began with his fast on 5 April, Kejriwal is the architect of the movement—the man journalists swarm to, seeking an interview. At press briefings, he often sits next to Hazare and helps the self-styled Gandhian handle tough questions: Kejriwal whispers into Hazare’s ear or scribbles key points on a piece of paper lying between them. When questions are posed to Kejriwal, he responds like an impassioned professor explaining a complicated problem—piling detail upon detail with the supreme confidence that his answer is the correct one. His essential message never changes: only a powerful independent anti-corruption agency, with wide-ranging authority and minimal government interference, can cure the plague of graft—and anything less will fail.
The ideas that would eventually lead to the Jan Lokpal Bill—and plans for a mass mobilisation to support it—had been on Kejriwal’s mind at least since September 2010, when public frustration with the inept preparations for the Commonwealth Games erupted into fury over evidence of widespread corruption. India’s middle classes, who already saw the event as a tremendous waste of money, were further enraged when the Games delivered nothing but international embarrassment and a multi-million rupee scam. Kejriwal, however, saw an opportunity to mobilise public opinion against corruption, and began to plot the course that would lead “Team Anna” into a high-profile showdown with the ruling United Progressive Alliance coalition. He spent his days consulting with experts and prospective allies, from lawyers to bankers to former bureaucrats and religious leaders, as well as his colleagues in the National Campaign for People’s Right to Information (NCPRI). He devoted his nights to drafting and revising a bill to create a new Lokpal: an independent body vested with the extraordinary powers—to investigate, prosecute and sometimes even judge—that Kejriwal thought necessary to prevent any politician or bureaucrat from obstructing the agency’s work.
| ZUBAIR DARZI FOR THE CARAVAN |
 |
Manish Sisodia, who has been Kejriwal’s closest associate for more than a decade, described Arvind as “courageous and clear-headed”.
|
Though Kejriwal is attentive to the cultural causes of corruption—he told me that “greed and the downfall of moral values” played a role—he believes a failing enforcement system is ultimately to blame. “If you talk of corruption in administration,” he explained, “the issue is a lack of adequate deterrence. There is zero risk in corruption here—it’s a high-profit business.” In short, while bad people may commit fraud, good systems can stop them. It’s a point Kejriwal—who owns a car but takes the Delhi Metro almost every day—likes to illustrate with a transit parable he’s often used at press conferences. “If you travel by Indian Railways, you’ll see chaos, confusion and corruption everywhere,” he told me. “But if you travel by Delhi Metro, you’ll see everything in order. It is not because good people travel by Metro, it is because Metro has a right system in place.” And the Lokpal, Kejriwal continued, “is that right system, which will set this country in the right direction.”
Last autumn, many of Kejriwal’s Metro journeys took him to Noida, where he spent hours discussing the finer legal points of the Lokpal Bill with Supreme Court lawyer Prashant Bhushan and his father Shanti Bhushan, a former Union law minister who was the first to propose the idea of a Lokpal in a bill submitted to Parliament in 1968. Kejriwal usually left these meetings with a copy of the draft bill covered in red ink and marked up with notes and questions; he would dutifully revise the document and email it back to the Bhushans, often that same night. “Basically he was doing all the work,” Prashant Bhushan told me, “I was being only consulted, so it was an easy task, and he gets it quickly.”
By the end of October, Kejriwal had begun to circulate a draft of his bill among “like-minded people”—and to work with those who responded positively, including Kiran Bedi, the Ramon Magsaysay Award-winning police officer-turned-activist, and the former Supreme Court justice Santosh Hegde. “I was just trying to find people who were known for fighting corruption,” Kejriwal told me.
One such person was Anna Hazare. By December, when the group now calling itself India Against Corruption (IAC) sent a draft of its Lokpal Bill to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and demanded a “total overhaul of the anti-corruption delivery system”, Hazare was among the signatories. After several months passed without any response from the government, Kejriwal and Bedi flew to Maharashtra in February to meet Hazare. “Anna Hazare was convinced that this was a good solution to corruption,” Kejriwal told me. “He had a successful history of fighting corruption, one case after another.”
During the visit, Kejriwal recalled, “Anna called a meeting of his workers from all across Maharashtra, and he asked everyone, ‘Should I sit on fast?’ They all agreed.” In a tiny room at the Sant Yadavbaba temple in Hazare’s village, Ralegan Siddhi, he and Kejriwal sat and planned the fast-unto-death Hazare would stage in April at Jantar Mantar; they deliberately selected a date that would fall between the end of the Cricket World Cup and the start of the Indian Premier League.
| RAMESH SHARMA / INDIA TODAY GROUP / GETTY IMAGES |
 |
Shanti Bhushan, a former Union law minister, was the first to propose the idea of a Lokpal in 1968.
|
“He even discussed the days of the week,” one member of Kejriwal’s team told me. “His calculation was that the fast must continue through Saturday, because he knew the working class could join them only on weekends—and that is exactly what happened.” The team member added that, before returning to Delhi, Kejriwal told Anna: “Instead of the Gandhi of Maharashtra, we’ll make you the Gandhi of India.”
Kejriwal works out of an apartment-sized office in East Delhi, a 10-minute walk from the Kaushambi Metro station in Ghaziabad. His staff consists of a few paid employees and a rotating cast of volunteers, who are usually wearing India Against Corruption T-shirts and working purposefully at about half a dozen outdated computers. It feels a bit like an old government office, with basic furniture, dim lighting, tall stacks of pamphlets and newspapers and framed pictures of Anna Hazare and Mahatma Gandhi decorating the walls; retired bureaucrats and journalists drop by during the day to share their suggestions with Kejriwal or his closest associate, Manish Sisodia.
Each morning, Kejriwal walks through the office, assigning the staff and volunteers tasks for the day; in the run-up to Hazare’s fast on 5 April, he read aloud to them the Hindi slogans he’d devised for banners and posters, seeking feedback and suggestions. Kejriwal explained that “each and every line of our communication material is discussed, because the final material has to be very sharp”—he has an acute sense for what it takes to persuade and mobilise the public. Before the April fast, Kejriwal and his staff went so far as to test their message by printing an assortment of prospective pamphlets in small batches. They distributed each version of the pamphlet at a different bus station in Ghaziabad so they could study the public response.
Kejriwal can be a demanding manager, but he’s respected rather than feared. “I’ve never seen him lose his temper,” said Sneha Kothawade, who joined Kejriwal’s team in December. If someone makes a mistake, she added, “his only scolding will be, ‘I’ll do it myself.’” When Kejriwal is upset or unhappy, he retreats into his own office and closes the door to signal he doesn’t want to be disturbed. But if he senses morale is low, he’ll come out and order patties or ice cream for the entire staff. If he’s in the middle of a conversation at the office—even some light banter with a chaiwallah—he won’t break it off to answer a phone call. When he talks strategy with his staff, he refers often to Gandhi’s mobilisation tactics and the need for self-restraint.
But when he’s in front of a camera, Kejriwal has a hard time restraining his own flair for provocation. Though he’s quick to walk back his most inflammatory statements, he clearly loves to stir the pot by attacking the government and insulting the entire political establishment. “If the Lokpal bill was passed,” he said at one press conference, “half of the MPs would go to jail.” And at another: “All the politicians are thieves—throw them to the vultures.” Prodded by his colleagues, Kejriwal has tried to soften his blows: he recalled that at one event, after declaring that “all judges are corrupt”, he rushed to correct himself when Prashant Bhushan forcefully whispered “Not all of them!” into his ear.
When I asked Kejriwal if these outbursts were deliberate, he gave a regretful look and confessed that his anger sometimes got the better of him—though he insisted that the media had often blown his remarks out of proportion. “On TV, these things are taken to extremes,” he said. “What I mean is that there is a general perception of corruption, so I say these things.” To Lokpal sceptics, Kejriwal’s dismissive jabs at elected officials suggest a movement with no respect for democracy and no desire to compromise—but Kejriwal’s confrontational approach clearly resonates with the movement’s fervent supporters, who admiringly call him an “anti-corruption crusader”.
Manish Sisodia, a former television journalist who has been Kejriwal’s top lieutenant for more than a decade, described him as “courageous and clear-headed”, and so obsessed with his work that he only sleeps four hours a night. “Without that kind of madness,” Sisodia continued, “how else would it be possible to build a massive campaign like this from zero?”
Even Kejriwal wasn’t prepared for the massive outpouring of public support for Hazare’s fast in April: he expected a few hundred people and had asked Sisodia to hire a tent according to his estimate.
The night before the fast began, Kejriwal and Hazare stayed at Kiran Bedi’s house in South Delhi. Bedi recalled that while Hazare retired early, Kejriwal hardly slept. “I heard him coughing all night,” Bedi told me. “It was so loud that I started to worry.” The next morning, after a small breakfast—a cup of milk and plain toast—the three set out for Jantar Mantar, where roughly 500 people gathered by the first afternoon. On the second day, however, the crowd began to swell to massive proportions, and the media turned its cameras on Hazare; one TV channel, Headlines Today, deployed five crews on rotation to provide 24-hour coverage.
| | | |
| |
|
|
|
|
Readers' Comments |
Total Comments
|
|
Payal Bhanderi
28 February 2012
02:21 PM
|
|
Hats off to you sir. I am always with you. god should give you lots of strenght.
|
|
|
|
thouqeer
28 January 2012
12:57 AM
|
|
Hats off to you sir.........
|
|
|
|
AMAR JANI
23 January 2012
01:50 PM
|
|
All thanks to ARVIND KEJRIWAL that a movement so strong has taken place in our time. There is absolutely nobody like him. We salute you sir. We are with you sir.
|
|
|
|
panchanan jena
21 January 2012
08:24 PM
|
|
Superb and stupendous... a real hero in the name of Arvind Kejriwal whose candid statement has once again brought into force the power and courage of a morally-electrified anti-corruption crusader...Inquilab Zindabad..
|
|
|
|
Rattan Lal Hangloo
21 January 2012
06:31 PM
|
|
Every layer in the system from top to bottom is corrupt there are few exceptions who have to grow to overwhelm that uncorrupt space and that can be done by strengthening Team Anna - the only answer.The universities should have provided answers to the problems of country but unfortunately they are also infected with the virus of corruption.Happiness is possessing the strength of character to make good choices.Team Anna has done it let us be part of that.The corrupt people do not understand that they will not eat a golden bread or silver rice but why do they indulge in it is just unending greed which has enslaved them.Let us all be withTeam Anna to free the system and these slaves.
|
|
|
|
Rishav Agarwal
21 January 2012
05:10 PM
|
|
One of the most well researched and documented articles I could find! Thank You Mehboob Jeelani!
|
|
|
|
Deep Shukla
21 January 2012
04:30 PM
|
|
Wow.. Excellent Article... Amazing Story of the Nationl's real HERO.... Thanks ARVIND KEJRIWAL
|
|
|
|
Carrieann
22 November 2011
05:07 PM
|
|
There's nothing like the relief of finding what you're looknig for.
|
|
|
|
nrtayade
7 November 2011
03:42 PM
|
|
When i have gone through the writings of your own thoughts i couldnot believe that you have studied well and movement against corruption should continue as it is against the corrupt persons and these persons should be punished as per law and the constitutional framework.
My sincere thanks to your and your team members.
wish you and your team members best wishes and congratulations.
|
|
|
|
Arun
27 September 2011
05:07 PM
|
|
Superb effort!! How can u write so well and in this depth?? Wish I could write like this man..!!
|
|
|
|
arushi sharma
24 September 2011
11:46 PM
|
|
sir , you have done a very good effort. i pray to God let this effort should bring a fruit in the form of a jan lokpal bill.I admire your efforts. god should give you a lot of strength so that you can provide good services for the country and its people. one more thing government should be made aware of the inflation of food products and medical care provided by civil hospital is not appropriate.Basic necessities are not fulfilled by the country, how government claims INDIA AS SUPER POWER. PLEASE READ THIS
|
|
|
|
Govind
22 September 2011
11:37 AM
|
|
Well researched article.
There seems to be a subtle humor in the article. The way Arvind is portrayed here is clearly of mischief.
However, What we definitely need is the likes of more Arvind Kejrival. One revolution is clearly not enough!
Critics do nothing but for criticism and cynicism. They forget to act!
|
|
|
|
Ankita
20 September 2011
08:32 PM
|
|
Very Inspiring. Arvind Kejriwal is the best!!
|
|
|
|
Firoz
20 September 2011
01:31 AM
|
|
Mehboob, this is a fantastic article. Excellent research and insights. Thanks so much.
|
|
|
|
Suryakant Sharma
19 September 2011
01:37 AM
|
|
Thanks...the person who has written above article...very inspiring article . Janlok Bill should pass & implemented as earlier as possible...& give a strong lesson all corrupt politician & government officers....I am with you Mr. Kejrival...Go ahead..
|
|
|
|
| 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 ... |
|