Saturday, September 17, 2011

[HumJanenge] Tainted Dented Painted Narendra Modi’s Advertisement - Exclusive

Tainted Dented Painted Narendra Modi's Advertisement  - Exclusive  

 

Modi specialize in fabricating news and shining propaganda.

 

Sadbhavna: - It was not just Modi directed riots in Gujarat but also Modi –

 

1. Dispatched three batches of 2200 sevaks to Ayodhya for Yagya who traveled free in reserved railway compartments indulged in all kinds of 'Misbehavior'.

 

2. 2200 sevaks ran away when confrontation started at Godhra station that led to fire to a coach. Modi then ordered 'REVENGE'.

 

3. But most important – BJP government was hostile to Muslims, Christians and neighbor Pakistan attacking Mosques and Churches throughout 1998-2004 NDA rule at center.

 

4. Actually within days of takeover BJP exploded 5 nuclear explosions to intimidate neighbor and minorities, Pakistan retaliated with 7 nuclear explosions.

 

5. From 1998-2004 Indo-Pak border was in battle ready situation.  

 

6. This also led to Kargil war.

 

Biggest Failures: - Vibrant Gujarat events and signing of $950b MoU was biggest flop show along with failure of SSNNL project to bring just 6.56% of new command under irrigation reported by CAG.

 

Biggest Corruptions: - Gujarat Petroleum on the payrolls of RIL didn't develop Deendyal Discoveries to let Mukesh Ambani monopolize Gas Operations. Together since 1999 they caused $500b production loss by hoarding on to Oil & Gas reserves in over 30 large blocks.

 

Economy: - Even after including value additions of refineries and such big projects that benefit little to Gujarat, it ranks below Haryana, Maharashtra, Kerala and in net SGDP one rank lower behind Himachal.

 

Stagnant Food Production: - Gujarat ranks 13th in Foodgrains Production at 6.4 million tones and there is no improvement in food production, per capita foodgrains production has declined from 1998 level. Bt Cotton introduced accidentally in Gujarat is the only show piece of Gujarat. Milk plants in Gujarat export milk products leaving vegetarian Gujaratis malnourished. Gujarat is very poor in Egg, Fish and Meat consumption. YK Alag claimed Gujaratis consume more of Fruits & Vegetables.

 

Poor Standard of Education: - Even after lowering admission criteria to lowest level – over 40% to 50% Engineering & Medical seats could not be filled. Quality of education has declined since RSS cadre took over education in Gujarat at all levels.

 

Gujarat Generators Low PLF: - CAG reported Gujarat backed down 30 Billion Units to let private companies make money operated at 65% PLF compared to many states exceeding 90%.

 

Tata Nano Failed: - In four years Tata Nano plant had failed to run at optimum capacity. Actually Nano sales had declined sharply. Modi gamble to fund Nano had backfired. Farmers in Gujarat are uniting against Modi demanding market price for the land acquired.

 

Surat Floods 25,000 crores Damage: - Ukai Dam was filled up in July itself and lost ability to absorb flood. Modi introduced Check Dams that contribute to flood Gujarat.

 

Most Polluted: -  Gujarat is the most polluted state in the world. Only one Industrial Estate out of 183 has all three Effluent Treatment Plants, Solid waste Management Plants and Sewerage Treatment Plant reported CAG.

 

Ravinder Singh

September18, 2011

 

His Advertisement

 

Gujarat - Celebrating a decade of Peace, Harmony and Brotherhood

 

Collective Efforts, Inclusive Growth

 

Glimpses of Gujarat's Progress

 

• Gujarat, with just 5% of the country's population and 6% of its geographical area, contributes to 10% of India's GDP

 

• Sowing the seeds of a second green revolution, with nearly 10% annual Agricultural growth over the past decade

 

• Quantum jump of 10.17 % in literacy rate from 69.14% in 2001 to 79.31% in 2011

 

• Massive fall in dropout rates from 20.93% in 2000-01 to a meager 2.09% in 2010 among primary school students

 

• Uninterrupted 24X7 power supplied to all 18,065 villages of Gujarat under Jyotigram Yojana

 

• Leads the country in employment generation for the 7th consecutive

Year

 

• Gujarat poised to become the Global Auto Hub creating large scale employment opportunities

 

Mission Mangalam - Over 20,000 crore investment pledged for economic empowerment of more than 2 lakh women self help groups

 

Vanbandhu Kalyan Yojana - Special focus on empowering scheduled tribes, over Rs.15,000 crores invested for upliftment of tribal families

 

Sagarkhedu Yojana - In an unprecedented effort, over Rs.11,000 crore allocated for uplifting 60 lakh people belonging to coastal communities

 

• Over 4,500 crores distributed at 350 Garib Kalyan Melas directly benefiting more than 45 lakh people

 

• Gujarat's unique Grievance redressal system, SWAGAT Online which provides direct access to Chief Minister, wins the prestigious 2010 UN award for enhancing Transparency, Accountability and Responsiveness in the Public Service Category and much more.

 

Development of Gujarat for Development of India

 

Narendra Modi

Chief Minister, Gujarat

RE: [HumJanenge] Use of stadia in Delhi for holding fasts/public meetings.

I fail to understand there is constant drama against Modi & BJP about 2002 Godhra reaction to burning of train loads of activists who were returning after demolishing the Babri Masjid but no one talks about carnage against the Sikhs in retaliation to Killing Indira Gandhi as a reaction to desecration of Golden Temple.
Why can we not look forward do some thing good for those who suffered rather than rake up passions.
U P Mathur
Veteran

--- On Sat, 9/17/11, Akhilesh Mathur <acm1939@hotmail.com> wrote:

From: Akhilesh Mathur <acm1939@hotmail.com>
Subject: RE: [HumJanenge] Use of stadia in Delhi for holding fasts/public meetings.
To: humjanenge@googlegroups.com
Date: Saturday, September 17, 2011, 2:16 PM

Why not. When stadia can be used for circus and other tamashas why not for these tamasha.


Date: Sat, 17 Sep 2011 10:06:26 +0530
From: mk.singhal@yahoo.co.in
Subject: [HumJanenge] Use of stadia in Delhi for holding fasts/public meetings.
To:

Modi is on 3 day fast in a big university auditorium in Ahmedabad to promote harmony from Sep 17 to 20. 
In Delhi, a large no of stadia were constructed/modernized for Commonwealth Games only a short time ago. Why can these stadia not be given out to NGOs for holding fasts/protest meetings when needed, as they provide ideal place for such purposes. No tents are thus needed  nor any additional lights or fans, no toilets, water supply, dining places etc are needed. Security needs are minimal. 
Thus, Nehru stadium would probably have been a better place for Baba Ramdeo or Anna's fast than Jantar Mantar or Ramlila grounds. The stadia, developed at such huge costs, are in any cases lying unused most of the time.
Would we like to take a lesson for the future.
mksinghal

Re: [HumJanenge] Kejriwal - A SHORT BIOGRAPHY IN COTROVERSY

We do not knw if the well written article in is truth or not, but it will definitely be a reference point in times to come. These matters are an on going process and maybe its to early to sit in judgment on them. 
Secondly, privatization does not seemto be so abhorrent and if good check mechanisms are available.It can be beneficial in the long run.We hve seen it is very difficult to penetrate the so called govt run systems.
Regards.
On Sun, Sep 18, 2011 at 5:13 AM, Sarbajit Roy <sroy.mb@gmail.com> wrote:
Dear Mr Gaba

You have RIGHTLY stated some points.

1) Arvind Kejriwal cannot be a patriot since he is massively funded by foreign agencies and by dubious babas and swamis with foul antecedents.

2) For about 8 years Arvind Kejriwal was fooling the Govt of India with his "leave without pay" nautanki and acting as a SPY for foreign agencies..

3) As somebody who was apart of the Delhi RTI scene since early 2000's, I can assure you that the facts in the "biography" are either completely false or suitably "airbrushed". For instance in the Delhi Jal Board case Arvind Kejriwal was only one of the pawns of a French Company (Degremont) to misuse RTI to privatise Delhi's water. The truth about the Delhi Jal Board incident is 180 degrees to what they are projecting. As Goebels famously said - repeat a lie a million times and a million people will believe it.

Sarbajit




On Sat, Sep 17, 2011 at 12:38 PM, Prem Gaba <premgaba@hotmail.com> wrote:

 DEAR FRIENDS,
 
WHAT A  CV OF  A SIMPLE MAN- 
 
A must read study in dedication & single minded drive  with a Aim in mind. A study in dedication, NO repeat NO matter which side you are on as long as you are on India's side. 
I know a few of us will rightly  find holes/negative points/questionable source of donations/his service as an IT commissioner/as an IIT engineer & so on. 
 Each of us have weak points & do committ mistakes .No one  is   perfect . There was Godse  who thought so strongly against Mahatama Gandhi ji that he  shot him dead.
But I donot think any one  can question  his dedication, patriotism  & devotion to the cause he is fighting for .
 
Warm regards
 
Prem Gaba
 



Re: [HumJanenge] Kejriwal - A SHORT BIOGRAPHY IN COTROVERSY

Dear Mr Gaba

You have RIGHTLY stated some points.

1) Arvind Kejriwal cannot be a patriot since he is massively funded by foreign agencies and by dubious babas and swamis with foul antecedents.

2) For about 8 years Arvind Kejriwal was fooling the Govt of India with his "leave without pay" nautanki and acting as a SPY for foreign agencies..

3) As somebody who was apart of the Delhi RTI scene since early 2000's, I can assure you that the facts in the "biography" are either completely false or suitably "airbrushed". For instance in the Delhi Jal Board case Arvind Kejriwal was only one of the pawns of a French Company (Degremont) to misuse RTI to privatise Delhi's water. The truth about the Delhi Jal Board incident is 180 degrees to what they are projecting. As Goebels famously said - repeat a lie a million times and a million people will believe it.

Sarbajit



On Sat, Sep 17, 2011 at 12:38 PM, Prem Gaba <premgaba@hotmail.com> wrote:

 DEAR FRIENDS,
 
WHAT A  CV OF  A SIMPLE MAN- 
 
A must read study in dedication & single minded drive  with a Aim in mind. A study in dedication, NO repeat NO matter which side you are on as long as you are on India's side. 
I know a few of us will rightly  find holes/negative points/questionable source of donations/his service as an IT commissioner/as an IIT engineer & so on. 
 Each of us have weak points & do committ mistakes .No one  is   perfect . There was Godse  who thought so strongly against Mahatama Gandhi ji that he  shot him dead.
But I donot think any one  can question  his dedication, patriotism  & devotion to the cause he is fighting for .
 
Warm regards
 
Prem Gaba
 


Re: [HumJanenge] Protest against killing of RTI Activists.

Some protest must be undertaken in Bhopal and Madhya Pradesh too.

--- On Sat, 17/9/11, rajeev kumar <yadavrajeev_2005@yahoo.co.in> wrote:

From: rajeev kumar <yadavrajeev_2005@yahoo.co.in>
Subject: Re: [HumJanenge] Protest against killing of RTI Activists.
To: humjanenge@googlegroups.com
Date: Saturday, 17 September, 2011, 4:05 PM

Go ahead!

Regards,
Rajeev Yadav,
National President,
(B.Sc., M.B.A., L.L.B., P.G.D. Human Rights),
Adhikaar the rights path,
+919811242471.
www.adhikaar.in
.

--- On Wed, 7/9/11, Anand acf <acfanand@gmail.com> wrote:

From: Anand acf <acfanand@gmail.com>
Subject: [HumJanenge] Protest against killing of RTI Activists.
To: "humjanenge" <humjanenge@googlegroups.com>, "hrm" <hrm@yahoogroups.com>, "rti4emp yahoo" <rti4empowerment@yahoogroups.com>, "rti4empowerment" <rti4empowerment@googlegroups.com>, "rti_india@yahoogroups.com" <rti_india@yahoogroups.com>, "rti4ngo" <rti4ngo@yahoogroups.com>, "rti_india-normal" <rti_india-normal@yahoogroups.com>, "rtigroupaligarh" <rtigroupaligarh@googlegroups.com>, "rtimahilamanchup" <rtimahilamanchup@yahoo.co>, "citizens-action-forum" <citizens-action-forum@googlegroups.com>, "vishva-kannada-samaja" <vishva-kannada-samaja@googlegroups.com>, "antibriberycampaign" <antibriberycampaign@yahoogroups.com>, "basavaraj itnal" <basavarajitnal@gmail.com>, "dalitfoundation@vsnl.net" <dalitfoundation@vsnl.net>, "INDIARTI" <INDIARTI@yahoogroups.com>, "Invites" <invites@yahoogroups.com>, "JN jayashree" <jnjayashree62@yahoo.com>, "Jagrut Nagrik Manch" <jagrutnagrik@yahoogroups.com>, "Karamyog" <karmayog@yahoogroups.com>, "kannada2" <kannada2@yahoogroups.com>, "kria" <kria@yahoogroups.com>, "Kathyayini Chamaraj" <kchamaraj@gmail.com>, "SHASHI KUMAR.A.R." <rudreshtechnology@gmail.com>, "kria" <kria@yahoo.com>, "mallikarjun ls" <mallik.ls@gmail.com>, "manorights" <manorights@gmail.com>, "Manish Sisodia" <msisodia@gmail.com>, "Geeta Menon" <mahila_21@yahoo.co.in>, "Mathews Philip" <mathews.ashok@gmail.com>, "mahadhikar" <mahadhikar@fastmail.fm>, "niranjan.initator" <niranjan.initiator@gmail.com>, "Edwin, OpenSpace" <edwin@openspace.org.in>, "payaganeshpatrike" <payaganeshpatrike@gmail.com>, "right2food" <right2food@googlegroups.com>, "Child Rights Trust" <crtindia@yahoo.co.in>, "Ram S Pejawar" <pejawar.ram@gmail.com>, "umapathy subramanyam" <umapathi.s.rti@gmail.com>, "K T Satheesh Gowda" <kts_gowda@yahoo.com>, "viji thilak" <vijayathilagam@gmail.com>, "Urban Research Centre" <urcblr@gmail.com>, "umashankarc" <umashankarc@yahoo.com>, "Urvashiriti" <urvashirti@yahoogroups.co.in>, "Vidya Dinker" <vidyadinker@gmail.com>
Date: Wednesday, 7 September, 2011, 8:30 PM

Dear friends RTI Activists of Bangalore are protesting aginst killing
of RTI Activist Shiela Masood, Bhopa, Madhya Pradesh tomorrow.

Date: 08-09-2011
Time: 10:00 AM
Venue: Mahatma Gandhi Stature, M.G, Road, Bangalore

Pleae Joint and also bring other Activsts.

Regards

--
Anand S.
Coordinator, Anti Corruption Forum
Bangalore 560 085.
Cell No. +91-98450-39699

Re: [HumJanenge] National Advisory Council (NAC) of India: What it is and what it should be?

It is absolutely true what Jagdish Nauni & others have written here about NAC. Please note that Ms. Aruna Roy has neither prepared nor submitted any draft of Lokpal Bill as being projected including by the govt. She only made out few points but those were not in interest of strong Lokpal Bill but just to dilute it as suited to the government hence IAC members had their differences with her. It is beyond any doubt that most of NAC members are for the Govt interest only as selected. 
Mukund Parikh, V.P. Up-nagar Mumbai,
Bhrashtachar Virodhi Jan Andolan Nyas: Anna Hazare


From: jagdish nauni <jagdishnauni@gmail.com>
To: humjanenge@googlegroups.com
Sent: Sat, 17 September, 2011 10:20:22 PM
Subject: Re: [HumJanenge] National Advisory Council (NAC) of India: What it is and what it should be?

NAC, in its present form is primarily to give legitimacy to the decisions of Madam Sonia Ganghi and her proxy-the present govt of India, and hood wink the public that these decisions are the voice of Public. In the recent case of the Lokpal Bill of Anna,When the UPA Govt was playing games with Anna's team Ms. Aruna Roy presented her, Lokpal Bill just to mislead the Pubic.In order to create confusion other wise her version could have been discussed earlier with Anna Team. Aruna Roy is a reputed activist and has the RTI to her credit but she will lose credibility by.such actions .
 
Jagdish nauni                                                                                                                   
 On Fri, Sep 16, 2011 at 10:04 PM, vudathala nandagopal <nandav1942@hotmail.com> wrote:
Dear all,
There is an urgent need to identify one lakh very honest and upright persons from the society, preferably retired personnel with impeccable records and proven integrity to be part of any organisation / agenda of Shri Anna team. These personnel need to be given a I.D.Card who would be watch dog for NAC or any other organisation. and given specific tasks and to report to Lokpal leader. all these one lakh or more people need to dec lare their assets and liabilities and these will be in public domain and any misdeed of these personnel could be brought out by other volunteers and strict action be taken against such personnel.

Date: Fri, 16 Sep 2011 16:37:57 +0530
From: coljpn@yahoo.co.in
Subject: Re: [HumJanenge] National Advisory Council (NAC) of India: What it is and what it should be?
To: humjanenge@googlegroups.com

NAC is nothing but a body to give official strength to Sonia Gandhi to be super PM.it is only for her ego satisfaction etc.in fact it is doing no work n no monitoring of their social agenda since there is no social agenda there is only a chor agenda to looto this nation on the name of welfare scheme since non of the scheme is producing any positive result.maximum money sanctioned for social schemes goes in the pocket of the party n its ministers n political workers of the party.

--- On Thu, 15/9/11, M K Singhal <mk.singhal@yahoo.co.in> wrote:
From: M K Singhal <mk.singhal@yahoo.co.in>
Subject: [HumJanenge] National Advisory Council (NAC) of India: What it is and what it should be?
To:
Date: Thursday, 15 September, 2011, 9:56 AM
National Advisory Council (NAC) of India: What it is and what it should be?
The National Advisory Council (NAC) of India is an advisory body set up to monitor the implementation of the UPA government's manifesto, the Common Minimum Programme(CMP). It is also informally called as UPA's Planning Commission for social agenda. It is a brainchild of Congress party president, Sonia Gandhi who is also it's chairperson  and hence holds the status of a cabinet minister. The members of this council are nominated by PM in consultation with the NAC chairperson. The funds for the functioning of this council are provided from the budgetary allocation for the Prime Minister's Office. The NAC has often been criticized by opposition parties and scholars as not in keeping with India's constitution, and that it is actually an alternative, unelected cabinet. 
Thus, in its present form, it is an advisory council that seeks to involve citizen groups in the planning and monitoring of govt schemes at govt cost. Since the ruling party head is NAC head and all NAC members are selected and appointed by PM and NAC head, NAC actually only tries to reinforce govt views in the garb of citizen views.
In my opinion, the idea to have NAC as an advisory body for planning and monitoring of govt schemes (including laws) is very good. But it's constitution needs to be changed so as not to have political party heads and their chosen members but to have well known social workers like Anna and others as it's head and other members and to let them give their free, frank and unbiased suggestions on the various laws that the govt may have framed or may be contemplating to frame and on the desirable planning and monitoring of projects. The NAC could naturally hold seminars etc, get research studies carried our as necessary and hold referendum, as necessary before firming its views in any matter which should then emerge as the real citizen's views in any matter.
Reader views are invited on this subject.
This could form the basis for citizen participation in governmental activities.

Re: [HumJanenge] National Advisory Council (NAC) of India: What it is and what it should be?

NAC, in its present form is primarily to give legitimacy to the decisions of Madam Sonia Ganghi and her proxy-the present govt of India, and hood wink the public that these decisions are the voice of Public. In the recent case of the Lokpal Bill of Anna,When the UPA Govt was playing games with Anna's team Ms. Aruna Roy presented her, Lokpal Bill just to mislead the Pubic.In order to create confusion other wise her version could have been discussed earlier with Anna Team. Aruna Roy is a reputed activist and has the RTI to her credit but she will lose credibility by.such actions .
 
Jagdish nauni                                                                                                                     
 

 
On Fri, Sep 16, 2011 at 10:04 PM, vudathala nandagopal <nandav1942@hotmail.com> wrote:
Dear all,
There is an urgent need to identify one lakh very honest and upright persons from the society, preferably retired personnel with impeccable records and proven integrity to be part of any organisation / agenda of Shri Anna team. These personnel need to be given a I.D.Card who would be watch dog for NAC or any other organisation. and given specific tasks and to report to Lokpal leader. all these one lakh or more people need to dec lare their assets and liabilities and these will be in public domain and any misdeed of these personnel could be brought out by other volunteers and strict action be taken against such personnel.



Date: Fri, 16 Sep 2011 16:37:57 +0530
From: coljpn@yahoo.co.in
Subject: Re: [HumJanenge] National Advisory Council (NAC) of India: What it is and what it should be?
To: humjanenge@googlegroups.com


NAC is nothing but a body to give official strength to Sonia Gandhi to be super PM.it is only for her ego satisfaction etc.in fact it is doing no work n no monitoring of their social agenda since there is no social agenda there is only a chor agenda to looto this nation on the name of welfare scheme since non of the scheme is producing any positive result.maximum money sanctioned for social schemes goes in the pocket of the party n its ministers n political workers of the party.

--- On Thu, 15/9/11, M K Singhal <mk.singhal@yahoo.co.in> wrote:

From: M K Singhal <mk.singhal@yahoo.co.in>
Subject: [HumJanenge] National Advisory Council (NAC) of India: What it is and what it should be?
To:
Date: Thursday, 15 September, 2011, 9:56 AM

National Advisory Council (NAC) of India: What it is and what it should be?
The National Advisory Council (NAC) of India is an advisory body set up to monitor the implementation of the UPA government's manifesto, the Common Minimum Programme(CMP). It is also informally called as UPA's Planning Commission for social agenda. It is a brainchild of Congress party president, Sonia Gandhi who is also it's chairperson  and hence holds the status of a cabinet minister. The members of this council are nominated by PM in consultation with the NAC chairperson. The funds for the functioning of this council are provided from the budgetary allocation for the Prime Minister's Office. The NAC has often been criticized by opposition parties and scholars as not in keeping with India's constitution, and that it is actually an alternative, unelected cabinet. 
Thus, in its present form, it is an advisory council that seeks to involve citizen groups in the planning and monitoring of govt schemes at govt cost. Since the ruling party head is NAC head and all NAC members are selected and appointed by PM and NAC head, NAC actually only tries to reinforce govt views in the garb of citizen views.
In my opinion, the idea to have NAC as an advisory body for planning and monitoring of govt schemes (including laws) is very good. But it's constitution needs to be changed so as not to have political party heads and their chosen members but to have well known social workers like Anna and others as it's head and other members and to let them give their free, frank and unbiased suggestions on the various laws that the govt may have framed or may be contemplating to frame and on the desirable planning and monitoring of projects. The NAC could naturally hold seminars etc, get research studies carried our as necessary and hold referendum, as necessary before firming its views in any matter which should then emerge as the real citizen's views in any matter.
Reader views are invited on this subject.
This could form the basis for citizen participation in governmental activities.

[HumJanenge] How to stop Benami Transactions which is the main source of use of black money.

Benami transactions are being practised in India since long. Benami transaction is one in which a property is purchased in the name of one person but its consideration is paid by some other person. The former is only a nominal owner while the later is the real owner. Legal recognition to benami transactions was accorded by The Transfer Of Property Act, 1882. Since benami transactions were resulting in large scale use of black money, a Benami Transactions Prohibitions Act (BTPA) was passed by Govt Of India in 1988. It empowered govt to confiscate benami property. But it was never implemented property.  Only recently, Bihar started implementing it to curb corruption. Can someone advise as to how could govt be pressurised to implement BTPA 1988 effectively, may be by filing a writ in appropriate court. It would be a great deterrant in our fight against corruption.
mksinghal

Re: [HumJanenge] National Advisory Council (NAC) of India: What it is and what it should be?

Very refreshing and exciting idea, Vudathala. Not sure if this is just a thought or there is organizational backing on it, but if it is taken forward, I think it will provide a great spinal support to the movement that Anna-ji and his team (and for that matter Baba Ramdev) is building.
 
And if I go by expereince of US (after WW-II) possibly the people from military can perform this job the best.
 
Regards,
Devendra Tripathi
Cell: +1(408)416-1848
From: vudathala nandagopal <nandav1942@hotmail.com>
To: humjanenge@googlegroups.com
Sent: Friday, September 16, 2011 9:34 AM
Subject: RE: [HumJanenge] National Advisory Council (NAC) of India: What it is and what it should be?
Dear all, There is an urgent need to identify one lakh very honest and upright persons from the society, preferably retired personnel with impeccable records and proven integrity to be part of any organisation / agenda of Shri Anna team. These personnel need to be given a I.D.Card who would be watch dog for NAC or any other organisation. and given specific tasks and to report to Lokpal leader. all these one lakh or more people need to dec lare their assets and liabilities and these will be in public domain and any misdeed of these personnel could be brought out by other volunteers and strict action be taken against such personnel.
Date: Fri, 16 Sep 2011 16:37:57 +0530From: coljpn@yahoo.co.inSubject: Re: [HumJanenge] National Advisory Council (NAC) of India: What it is and what it should be?To: humjanenge@googlegroups.com
NAC is nothing but a body to give official strength to Sonia Gandhi to be super PM.it is only for her ego satisfaction etc.in fact it is doing no work n no monitoring of their social agenda since there is no social agenda there is only a chor agenda to looto this nation on the name of welfare scheme since non of the scheme is producing any positive result.maximum money sanctioned for social schemes goes in the pocket of the party n its ministers n political workers of the party.

--- On Thu, 15/9/11, M K Singhal <mk.singhal@yahoo.co.in> wrote:

From: M K Singhal <mk.singhal@yahoo.co.in>
Subject: [HumJanenge] National Advisory Council (NAC) of India: What it is and what it should be?
To:
Date: Thursday, 15 September, 2011, 9:56 AM

National Advisory Council (NAC) of India: What it is and what it should be?
The National Advisory Council (NAC) of India is an advisory body set up to monitor the implementation of the UPA government's manifesto, the Common Minimum Programme(CMP). It is also informally called as UPA's Planning Commission for social agenda. It is a brainchild of Congress party president, Sonia Gandhi who is also it's chairperson  and hence holds the status of a cabinet minister. The members of this council are nominated by PM in consultation with the NAC chairperson. The funds for the functioning of this council are provided from the budgetary allocation for the Prime Minister's Office. The NAC has often been criticized by opposition parties and scholars as not in keeping with India's constitution, and that it is actually an alternative, unelected cabinet. 
Thus, in its present form, it is an advisory council that seeks to involve citizen groups in the planning and monitoring of govt schemes at govt cost. Since the ruling party head is NAC head and all NAC members are selected and appointed by PM and NAC head, NAC actually only tries to reinforce govt views in the garb of citizen views.
In my opinion, the idea to have NAC as an advisory body for planning and monitoring of govt schemes (including laws) is very good. But it's constitution needs to be changed so as not to have political party heads and their chosen members but to have well known social workers like Anna and others as it's head and other members and to let them give their free, frank and unbiased suggestions on the various laws that the govt may have framed or may be contemplating to frame and on the desirable planning and monitoring of projects. The NAC could naturally hold seminars etc, get research studies carried our as necessary and hold referendum, as necessary before firming its views in any matter which should then emerge as the real citizen's views in any matter.
Reader views are invited on this subject.
This could form the basis for citizen participation in governmental activities.

[HumJanenge] Spurious Awards, Bogus Campaigns, Sunita Narain CSE Lost Credibility

Spurious Awards, Bogus Campaigns, Sunita Narain CSE Lost Credibility

 

CSE under Sunita Narain had gradually lost her credibility that her Rs.50 crore a year NGO CSE has come down to de-rate Indian Judiciary. In the capital itself where she is located since 1982 she completely failed on all fronts she often claim credits for PILs filed by Mehta and others and won so many Spurious Awards based on bogus claims.

 

This manipulator Sunita Narain got equivalent of Nobel Prize 'Stockholm Water Prize' for actually promoting Rainwater Harvesting that don't work, I have been campaigning for 7-8 years that RWH structures don't work and cost of capital harvesting structures is Rs.1500 per kiloliter that generally don't work to just Rs.10 per kiloliter for Renuka Dam that shall serve 100 years or more.

 

Water supply in Delhi is worst in the world – water pressure is practically zero, every consumer has to install in line booster pump and storage tanks. In rural India we are told to install septic tank 100 feet from hand pump but in Delhi Sewage Lines and old leaking Water Lines providing intermittent supply run within 2-3 feet of each other.

 

'In 2005, the Centre and she were awarded the Stockholm Water Prize, considered the Water Nobel for work on building an informed public opinion on the need for decentralised water management and rainwater harvesting.'

 

There is no let up in Fly Ash in air in Delhi even though IP and Rajghat Coal fired stations were shut down for almost a decade. Every time there is light shower Fly Ash deposits can be seen on cars released by Badarpur Thermal Plant.

 

There is no progress in Sewage & Drainage released in to Yamuna by Haryana that is source of potable water supply.

 

Pollution level in Delhi is very high because of rapid growth of automobiles in Delhi and also diesel cars.

 

Average mileage of recently introduced Marcopolo CNG buses is 2 kilometer per kg against 5 kilometers per kg for Tata buses.

 

Fare charged by AC buses or Delhi Metro is more than Airline Fares in per kilometers.

 

In ten years she tested and found 'Pesticides' in Coca Cola only but not in our DJB water supply. Finally DJB on its own recently admitted its water supply is contaminated and consumers had install Water Purification units.

 

http://www.tribuneindia.com/2005/20050608/main7.htm

http://cheminova.dk/download/Indien/cancer_study_report.pdf

She took blood samples of professional pesticide sprayers and announced Punjab has 15-605 times more pesticide in their blood than Americans. Cotton area in Punjab is barely 5% of gross cultivation where pesticides were extensively used prior to introduction of Bt Cotton. Cancer study found firstly Bikaner that grows no cotton has higher Cancer rate than Bhatinda district of Punjab famous for Cotton cultivation and secondly Urban population has higher cancer rate than rural cotton growing area.

 

CSE has gone down in to pits here – questioning the Credibility of Supreme Court Judges but not telling us about her Gross Failures, Incompetence, Manipulations and Anti Multinational Agenda – more importantly not taking any patent since 1982 wasting over Rs.2000 crores of public aid in today's money with interests.

 

CSE securing all the Donations and AID through frauds.

 

90% of the problems we have in India are due to incompetent NGOs like CSE who waste $3b of aid every year and run politicized campaigns.

 

Ravinder Singh

September17, 2011

 

http://www.downtoearth.org.in/content/fine-line-judges

The fine line for judges

Issue: Sep 30, 2011

 

Judges have recused themselves in a number of cases but there are no clear guidelines on what constitutes conflict of interest

 

Last week just as Swiss pharmaceuticals giant Novartis was set to begin its final arguments in the Supreme Court against the rejection of a patent for its cancer drug Glivec (see 'Evergreen Novartis', Down To Earth, September 1-15) there were two swift and stunning developments. A letter was written by five activists complaining to the ministers of law, commerce, health and family welfare about Justice Dalveer Bhandari, one of two judges hearing the case.

 

The complaint was that Justice Bhandari had been attending international conferences on intellectual property (IP) matters organised by the Intellectual Property Owners Association (ipoa), a lobby group of the world's top IT and pharmaceutical companies of which Novartis is a member. The letter was written on September 5 and a report in The Times of India quoting from it appeared the next day. Within hours Justice Bhandari had recused himself from the case.

 

Recusal is to remove oneself as a judge in a particular proceeding, usually because of conflict of interest. However, no reasons are given when a judge recuses himself. This was the case last month when Justices P Sathasivam and A K Patnaik recused themselves from hearing the corruption charges against dmk Member of Parliament Kanimozhi. Recusals in IP cases, though, tend to be more interesting if not controversial for several reasons, not least because global giants are involved in these suits. Justice Bhandari is the second Supreme Court judge to recuse himself from the Novartis case, the first being Justice Markandey Katju. In both cases, the views expressed by these judges on IP laws, one in a Supreme Court journal and the other in a presentation made at the International Conference of Judges hosted by ipoa, had a bearing on their decision—voluntary in the case of Katju—to remove themselves from the Novartis case.

 

What the drug giant has been challenging is a crucial section (3d) of India's patent law that bars drug companies from patenting new forms of a patented substance unless it can prove gains in efficacy. This is aimed at preventing IP owners from extending their patents through incremental innovations that do not add much value. It is part of India's attempt to balance the rights of patent holders with public healthcare interests related to access and affordability of medicines in a largely poor country. The law in that sense is unique in many ways.

 

Justice Bhandari is a keen proponent of IP laws and had attended a UN conference on the subject even in the 1990s. Going by the article that the activists' letter has cited, the judge believes that "there is urgent need to educate the masses regarding importance and benefits of protection of IP Rights" and that pharmaceutical and other patent holders from developed countries "have bounden duty and obligation to educate people" by organising seminars, symposia and debates. The more contentious part of this otherwise pedantic article is his exhortation that "they must make all efforts to ensure that all countries are persuaded to enact proper laws". Would this imply that India did not have "proper laws"? Or was it a general recommendation that he was making? He also thinks the World Intellectual Property Organization has a signal role to play in this crusade.

 

Justice Katju's world view on IP appears to be the exact opposite. In the 2004 article written just before India introduced product patents as required by the World Trade Organization, he writes: "A balance has to be struck between the need to give monetary inducements to new inventions and making available these inventions to the broad masses in the underdeveloped countries at affordable prices." The larger backdrop to this controversy is the sophisticated lobbying that has been taking place in India over the past seven-eight years to "educate" judges on the benefits of IP protection. It's not just IP owners but also American law schools which are involved in the exercise to superimpose the developed world's model of IP protection on India's more balanced laws (see 'Insidious India Project', Business Standard, March 4, 2010). This column has been regularly highlighting the implicit dangers of such indoctrination (see 'Why do judges need to be 'sensitised'?', Down To Earth, August 15, 2010).

 

But the question here is whether either of these articles has an appearance of bias that would influence judgement. While the jury is out on this, what is clear is that we need more comprehensive guidelines on judicial transparency in determining issues of conflict of interest. It cannot be just a declaration of their wealth. It also has to be a listing of the facilities (free hospitality for spouses, for instance), gifts and honorarium that judges receive while attending conferences and lectures. What is equally important is for everyone to know who the organisers are and what their agenda is. In many a case the judges themselves are clueless on this.

 

Latha Jishnu

 

Senior Editor, Down To Earth.  Her concerns relate to the way power structures in society – business corporations, governments and lobbies – impact the lives of the powerless.

 

Sunita Narain

 

Sunita Narain has been with the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) since 1982. She is currently the director general of the Centre and the director of the Society for Environmental Communications and publisher of the fortnightly magazine, Down To Earth.

 

She is a writer and environmentalist, who uses knowledge for change. In 2005 and again in 2008 and 2009 she was included by US journal Foreign Policy as one of the world's 100 public intellectuals. In 2005 she was awarded the Padma Shri by the Indian government. She has also received the World Water Prize for work on rainwater harvesting and for its policy influence in building paradigms for community based water management. In 2005, she also chaired the Tiger Task Force at the direction of the Prime Minister, to evolve an action plan for conservation in the country after the loss of tigers in Sariska. She advocated solutions to build a coexistence agenda with local communities so that benefits of conservation could be shared and the future secured. She is a member of the Prime Minister's Council for Climate Change.  As well as the National Ganga River Basin Authority, chaired by the Prime Minister, set up to implement strategies for cleaning the river.

 

Narain began her work in the early 1980s, as a co-researcher with Anil Agarwal, an eminent and committed environmentalist who gave the country its environmental concern and message. In 1985, she co-edited the State of India's Environment report, which built an understanding in the country on why India is so important for the poor. With Anil Agarwal she learnt that environment and development are two sides of the same coin and that for the millions of poor, who live on the margins of subsistence, it a matter of survival. In 1989, learning from the successful initiatives of people to manage their environment, Anil Agarwal and she wrote Towards Green Villages advocating local participatory democracy as the key to sustainable development. She has continued to research and write about how environment must become the basis of livelihood security of people in the country. She has also linked issues of local democracy with global democracy, arguing that every human being has an entitlement to the global atmospheric common.

 

Building CSE

 

She has devoted time to build the capacities of the CSE so that it can function as an independent and credible institution, influencing public opinion and advocating change. Today, with over 120 full time staff, it is actively engaged in a variety of programmes spanning issues of water management, to rating of industries in terms of the environmental performance and training. CSE is an institution, which believes in the need to use knowledge to bring about change. In other words, it is about "working India's vibrant democracy". The challenge for CSE is to raise concerns and to participate in seeking answers and more importantly, in advocating for the answers to become policy and then practice.

 

Combating air pollution

 

Air pollution is an extremely serious problem, which damages the respiratory system and can lead to mortality as well. Narain, working with her colleagues at CSE, has been actively engaged in advocating for air pollution control. She believes that the answers to the growing problems of pollution will be in reinventing the growth model of the Western world so that we can leapfrog technology choices and find new ways of building wealth, which will not cost us the earth. It is in this context that Narain and her colleagues advocated for the introduction of Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) in Delhi, to reduce air pollution. The successful implementation of CNG in buses in the capital has lead to substantial reduction in air contaminants and has become a model for the rest of the world.  As a member of the statutory body, set up under the Environment Protection Act and under mandate from the Supreme Court, the Environment Pollution (Prevention and Control) Authority for the National Capital Region, she continues to monitor and implement strategies for reducing pollution in Delhi and in other cities across the country.

 

Making water everybody's business

 

Water is clearly most important asset for the country. For Sunita Narain it is an issue of great passion as she devotes time to research and advocate for the need to change the paradigm of water management in the country. She began work in this area with her colleague, Anil Agarwal, as she discovered the fascinating ingenuity of communities to harvest rainwater across the country. Research lead to their book, Dying Wisdom and then later a book entitled, Making Water Everybody's Business. Since then she has continued to build an understanding of the need for water security, using rainwater harvesting to augment resources and pollution control to minimise waste. She believes that her biggest contribution would be to build a strong and vibrant movement for water literacy in the country. In 2005, the Centre and she were awarded the Stockholm Water Prize, considered the Water Nobel for work on building an informed public opinion on the need for decentralised water management and rainwater harvesting.

 

It is in this context that Narain has argued that the National Rural Employment Guarantee Programme public funds to create public assets with the labour of poor people. And the opportunity lies in using such labour to build assets: drought relief for relief against drought. Today, the national rural employment programme is already the world's biggest ecological regeneration effort – just under a million water bodies being dug, desilted or renovated by people. Now we must make sure these water bodies are not just holes in the ground, but will capture the next rain and recharge the aquifer. Her work to build awareness on this issue continues.

 

Food and water safety

 

In 2001, CSE set up a state of art laboratory to analyse contaminants in water and food so that it could undertake science for ecological security. In 2003 and 2004, under Narain's direction, the Centre analysed bottled water and then carbonated beverages for pesticide content. The aim of the study was to understand the extent of contamination of our groundwater and food systems and to use this research for reform. The study lead to the setting up the Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) on pesticide residues in and safety standards for soft drinks, fruit juices and other beverages. The JPC gave its report in February 2004, endorsing the findings of CSE on pesticides in carbonated beverages and recommending wide ranging reform in food safety for the country. The report of the parliamentarians has become an important milestone in building a new and more vibrant regulatory system to ensure that contamination in food and water is minimised and does not compromise human health. Narain's research has also helped to build a strong public opinion in favour of reform, particularly, regarding the contamination of groundwater, the drinking water source of millions of people across the country.

 

Climate Change: working for an effective and equitable regime

Narain began work on climate change in the early 1990. In 1991, she co-authored Global warming in an unequal world: A case of environmental colonialism, which played a critical role in establishing the principle of equity in the framework convention on climate change. Since then she has continued to work in building awareness and consensus about the need for an effective and equitable climate change agreement. She has researched and authored publications on different aspects of the climate regime – from aspects of negotiating positions to critiques of various trading mechanisms and options for mitigation and adaptation. In 2008-09, she served as a member of the Swedish government's high level commission on the need for adaptation and its links with development. 

 

Contact: 
Phone:+ 91-11-29955778 
E-mail: sunita@cseindia.org

 

Re: [HumJanenge] Surviving the skirmish


We have the enemy with in that too paid by the public ex checker, how this country can be saved is doubtful n difficult.
--- On Sat, 17/9/11, Manu <moudgilmanu@gmail.com> wrote:

From: Manu <moudgilmanu@gmail.com>
Subject: [HumJanenge] Surviving the skirmish
To: "HumJanenge Forum People's Right to Information, RTI Act 2005" <HumJanenge@googlegroups.com>
Date: Saturday, 17 September, 2011, 9:04 AM

A story on how activists can avoid being targeted when seeking
information under RTI (it's a summarised version, for full story visit
http://www.goimonitor.com/story/getting-informed-and-surviving-skirmish)


Shehla Masood is the latest of the activists who have fallen to
revengeful attacks against those who seek to reveal corruption by
using the RTI Act. Last year, 28 attacks on RTI activists were
reported from across the country which included 10 murders. And while
all this goes on, authorities perform lip service promising strong
action against the guilty and better security to whistle blowers.
Needless to say the going is getting tougher for those fighting to
make official information public.

What can be a government's policy is such a situation? Earlier this
year, Advocate H.C. Arora, the president of RTI Activists' Federation
Punjab, filed a PIL in the Punjab and Haryana High Court on the issue
of protection to RTI activists. In response, the Punjab government
formulated a policy under which a whistle-blower activist can approach
the concerned District Magistrate or Commissioner of Police who will
make an inquiry into the threat perception with help of intelligence
wing and district police within 48 hours of receiving the application
and provide security in case the request is found to be genuine.

It still needs to be seen to what extent this policy can help.
However, Arora feels there could not be a better response from the
state government. "I think the policy drafted is quite reasonable
since high-level officials have been given the task of inquiry. I hope
it serves the purpose well," he says. Till then self-protection as
suggested by Harinesh Pandya, an RTI activist from Gujarat, can be of
good help. Pandya feels it's the individual action of RTI activists
that cost them dear. "When you know your RTI application has a
potential to expose a scam, it's better to have more than one person
submitting identical applications. It's easier to target a single
person but the vested interests won't be able to deal with a group. No
police can provide security to each and every RTI whistle blower and
hence we need to devise such self-protective methods," he says.

Pandya also has a suggestion for the government: disclose the
information suo moto. "The information sought by any RTI petitioner
can be put in public domain by the authorities. This way applicant is
not the sole bearer of the information and hence can escape the
pressure tactics," he adds. Pandya's non-profit group, Janpath, runs a
helpline for RTI whistle blowers that voice records their complaints
and forwards them to the state information commission. While the
complainant is encouraged to lodge a complaint or FIR at nearest
police station, the information commission also asks the concerned
district DSP to look into the matter. "The involvement of information
commission in the whole process ensures prompt action by the police,"
explains Pandya.

The project has done well in Gujarat but involvement of local groups
and RTI activists would be required for the concept to succeed in
other states. As is true for any battle, defence is the best attack
when it comes to ensuring information disclosure.

Re: [HumJanenge] INDIA AGAINST CORRUPTION LUCKNOW-FIGHT FOR JUSTICE TO SUNIL DWIVEDI

It is sad n it happens every day in this country, I advise u people at Lucknow at least to collect to-gather n raise a voice against these gunda activities to get the real culprit punished.

--- On Sat, 17/9/11, upbeulko@gmail.com <upbeulko@gmail.com> wrote:

From: upbeulko@gmail.com <upbeulko@gmail.com>
Subject: [HumJanenge] INDIA AGAINST CORRUPTION LUCKNOW-FIGHT FOR JUSTICE TO SUNIL DWIVEDI
To: iac-lko@googlegroups.com, iacup@googlegroups.com, iac-movement@googlegroups.com
Cc: IAC@-.Mumbai, HumJanenge@googlegroups.com
Date: Saturday, 17 September, 2011, 11:22 AM

Dear IACians, we had a wonderful pan india movement agnst corruption n for passing janlokpal bill thru out the country n lko was no exception. But whether corruption can be eradicated or even controlled thru these mass actions alone?when we are faced with some concrete example.we r dumbfounded n the whole support for such campaigns seems to evaporate.
One of our volunteers sunil dwivedi, a bright student pursuing MBA from BBD, standing by roadside on 7th sep  with his bike without petrol is crushed by a drunken driver and his backbone is fracured.lower limbs paralysed.lko doctors give up n he is shifted to spinal injury surgery centre delhi.yet the drunken driver sudhir.son of a high profile trade tax dy commissioner lko one SC Ram is let off by police at thana level after filing a very weak FIR agnst unknown ,his car removed from accident sight without any investigation.no medical of driver to prove his drunken ness.father is pulling strings,many influential persons being on his back, filed a counter FIR on 10th agnst sunil n his unknown friends alleging they were conducting lootmar,rahjani n snatched gold chain, cash etc from driver sudhir. We have met higher ranking police officials but with little success.while sunil is fighting for his life in delhi hospital,his friends living in constant fear of being lifted in the dead of night,tortured,made to confess a crime that never happened.
As IACians we need to shake high n mighty out of slumber n demand justice for sunil by arresting driver, impounding his vehicle, charge him under proper sections for causing grievous injuries thru drunken driving n get him stringent punishment n seek proper compensation for sunil,the victim.
I call upon all like minded persons to put up pressure thru media n approach susri mayawati,CM,chief secretary,DGP,Governor etc for justice.will send u their email addresses shortly,if posbl otherwise any one of the group plz provide as am in a train to mumbai.more information can be had from Saurabh Upadhyay 8009664058 our another lko coordinator-rkagrwal coordinator lko
Sent from BSNL with my BlackBerry® smartphone

Re: [HumJanenge] Protest against killing of RTI Activists.

Go ahead!

Regards,
Rajeev Yadav,
National President,
(B.Sc., M.B.A., L.L.B., P.G.D. Human Rights),
Adhikaar the rights path,
+919811242471.
www.adhikaar.in
.

--- On Wed, 7/9/11, Anand acf <acfanand@gmail.com> wrote:

From: Anand acf <acfanand@gmail.com>
Subject: [HumJanenge] Protest against killing of RTI Activists.
To: "humjanenge" <humjanenge@googlegroups.com>, "hrm" <hrm@yahoogroups.com>, "rti4emp yahoo" <rti4empowerment@yahoogroups.com>, "rti4empowerment" <rti4empowerment@googlegroups.com>, "rti_india@yahoogroups.com" <rti_india@yahoogroups.com>, "rti4ngo" <rti4ngo@yahoogroups.com>, "rti_india-normal" <rti_india-normal@yahoogroups.com>, "rtigroupaligarh" <rtigroupaligarh@googlegroups.com>, "rtimahilamanchup" <rtimahilamanchup@yahoo.co>, "citizens-action-forum" <citizens-action-forum@googlegroups.com>, "vishva-kannada-samaja" <vishva-kannada-samaja@googlegroups.com>, "antibriberycampaign" <antibriberycampaign@yahoogroups.com>, "basavaraj itnal" <basavarajitnal@gmail.com>, "dalitfoundation@vsnl.net" <dalitfoundation@vsnl.net>, "INDIARTI" <INDIARTI@yahoogroups.com>, "Invites" <invites@yahoogroups.com>, "JN jayashree" <jnjayashree62@yahoo.com>, "Jagrut Nagrik Manch" <jagrutnagrik@yahoogroups.com>, "Karamyog" <karmayog@yahoogroups.com>, "kannada2" <kannada2@yahoogroups.com>, "kria" <kria@yahoogroups.com>, "Kathyayini Chamaraj" <kchamaraj@gmail.com>, "SHASHI KUMAR.A.R." <rudreshtechnology@gmail.com>, "kria" <kria@yahoo.com>, "mallikarjun ls" <mallik.ls@gmail.com>, "manorights" <manorights@gmail.com>, "Manish Sisodia" <msisodia@gmail.com>, "Geeta Menon" <mahila_21@yahoo.co.in>, "Mathews Philip" <mathews.ashok@gmail.com>, "mahadhikar" <mahadhikar@fastmail.fm>, "niranjan.initator" <niranjan.initiator@gmail.com>, "Edwin, OpenSpace" <edwin@openspace.org.in>, "payaganeshpatrike" <payaganeshpatrike@gmail.com>, "right2food" <right2food@googlegroups.com>, "Child Rights Trust" <crtindia@yahoo.co.in>, "Ram S Pejawar" <pejawar.ram@gmail.com>, "umapathy subramanyam" <umapathi.s.rti@gmail.com>, "K T Satheesh Gowda" <kts_gowda@yahoo.com>, "viji thilak" <vijayathilagam@gmail.com>, "Urban Research Centre" <urcblr@gmail.com>, "umashankarc" <umashankarc@yahoo.com>, "Urvashiriti" <urvashirti@yahoogroups.co.in>, "Vidya Dinker" <vidyadinker@gmail.com>
Date: Wednesday, 7 September, 2011, 8:30 PM

Dear friends RTI Activists of Bangalore are protesting aginst killing
of RTI Activist Shiela Masood, Bhopa, Madhya Pradesh tomorrow.

Date: 08-09-2011
Time: 10:00 AM
Venue: Mahatma Gandhi Stature, M.G, Road, Bangalore

Pleae Joint and also bring other Activsts.

Regards

--
Anand S.
Coordinator, Anti Corruption Forum
Bangalore 560 085.
Cell No. +91-98450-39699

RE: [HumJanenge] Use of stadia in Delhi for holding fasts/public meetings.

Why not. When stadia can be used for circus and other tamashas why not for these tamasha.


Date: Sat, 17 Sep 2011 10:06:26 +0530
From: mk.singhal@yahoo.co.in
Subject: [HumJanenge] Use of stadia in Delhi for holding fasts/public meetings.
To:

Modi is on 3 day fast in a big university auditorium in Ahmedabad to promote harmony from Sep 17 to 20. 
In Delhi, a large no of stadia were constructed/modernized for Commonwealth Games only a short time ago. Why can these stadia not be given out to NGOs for holding fasts/protest meetings when needed, as they provide ideal place for such purposes. No tents are thus needed  nor any additional lights or fans, no toilets, water supply, dining places etc are needed. Security needs are minimal. 
Thus, Nehru stadium would probably have been a better place for Baba Ramdeo or Anna's fast than Jantar Mantar or Ramlila grounds. The stadia, developed at such huge costs, are in any cases lying unused most of the time.
Would we like to take a lesson for the future.
mksinghal

[HumJanenge] Kejriwal - A SHORT BIOGRAPHY IN COTROVERSY


 DEAR FRIENDS,
 
WHAT A  CV OF  A SIMPLE MAN- 
 
A must read study in dedication & single minded drive  with a Aim in mind. A study in dedication, NO repeat NO matter which side you are on as long as you are on India's side. 
I know a few of us will rightly  find holes/negative points/questionable source of donations/his service as an IT commissioner/as an IIT engineer & so on. 
 Each of us have weak points & do committ mistakes .No one  is   perfect . There was Godse  who thought so strongly against Mahatama Gandhi ji that he  shot him dead.
But I donot think any one  can question  his dedication, patriotism  & devotion to the cause he is fighting for .
 
Warm regards
 
Prem Gaba
 


 

 Its a Long Read  but its worth knowing about a guy who may well be a guiding force in our lives in the future

  

--------------------------------

How Arvind Kejriwal, the architect of Anna Hazare's anti-corruption campaign, brought the rage of an indignant nation to the government's door 

By MEHBOOB JEELANI

Published : August 2011 

 

20 August 2011 

 

SHORTLY 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. 

 

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.

 

"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. 

 

From the dais, Hazare entertained the crowd with patriotic songs and irreverent jokes about politicians. Backstage, Kejriwal guided the campaign: feeding stories and tips to reporters, comparing his protest with Tahrir Square, drafting press releases and handling the increasingly tense phone calls from Congress party aides, who insisted he call off the agitation. Each time, he refused, and by the fourth day the Government of India bowed to his demand to convene a Lokpal drafting committee split evenly between Team Anna and Union cabinet ministers. Hazare called off the fast, and Kejriwal announced "a victory for the people of India". 

 

Whether the victory belonged to the people of India or merely to Team Anna, Kejriwal's elation was short-lived. He kept up his hard line through nine rounds of talks in the drafting committee—insisting, among other things, that the prime minister and judiciary come under the Lokpal's jurisdiction—and the negotiations ended in deadlock on 22 June. "Inside, the ministers would tell him, 'In public you should say the meetings are going well,'" Prashant Bhushan told me. "But he wouldn't listen to them. He would come out and brief the media about everything that was discussed inside." 

 

After the final drafting committee meeting, Kejriwal called a press conference along with Hazare and the Bhushans. He declared that the government was "killing the baby before the baby was born," and Hazare threatened another fast in Delhi on 16 August if the government failed to bring a strong Lokpal bill before Parliament. The ministers had accepted fewer than a dozen items from Team Anna's 71-point agenda, and now, Kejriwal continued, "they are not going to introduce Lokpal but Jokepal in the Parliament." 

 

Confrontation had put Team Anna, however briefly, on equal footing with the cabinet, but the negotiating table was a tougher playing field than public opinion. To keep his Lokpal draft alive, Kejriwal had to go back to the people—and steer his movement toward another collision with the government. 

 

ONE SECRET OF KEJRIWAL'S success may be the stark contrast between his public and private demeanour. A firebrand before a crowd or a camera, he's mild-mannered and introverted in person, a combination that inspires passion in audiences and confidence and respect from his close colleagues and allies. Short and compactly-built, with neatly-parted black hair and a trimmed moustache, he still looks a little boyish at 43. He has no personal story of extraordinary suffering at the hands of corruption. What led him to quit his job as a senior bureaucrat and become an activist wasn't anger or bitterness; it was the loss of his own faith in government after a decade in its service. 

 

Kejriwal was born in 1968 to a middle-class family in the Hisar district of Haryana. His father, Gobind Ram Kejriwal, is a retired electrical engineer. A quiet child, Kejriwal attended a Christian missionary school in Sonipat, where he displayed a natural aptitude for mathematics and scored high marks. He spent most of his childhood surrounded by books—so much so, his father told me, that when guests came to the family's one-bedroom apartment, Arvind would avoid them and study in the bathroom. 

 

After finishing school in 1985, Kejriwal decided he wanted to study at one of the prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT). His father advised him to apply to other state engineering colleges as a backup, and enrolled him at Kurukshetra University. But Kejriwal refused to even consider it: he skipped the Kurukshetra entrance exam altogether. 

 

"When I asked him why he did that, he said 'I will go to IIT only,'" Gobind told me. "If he starts chasing something, just believe it that he'll get it." 

 

Kejriwal qualified for admission to IIT Kharagpur and finished a degree in electrical engineering in 1989. After graduating, he was hired as an assistant engineer (design) at Tata Steel in Jamshedpur; he said he enjoyed the job and admired the honesty of his co-workers, but after three years he left Tata to return to Delhi and prepare for the Civil Services Examination. 

 

"He actually wanted to join police," Gobind Kejriwal said. "I don't know why he wanted that. I've never intervened in his life, not even when he was a child." 

 

Kejriwal didn't qualify for an Indian Administrative Service rank, but he scored enough to enter the Indian Revenue Service (IRS). At the training course in Mussoorie, he met his future wife, Sunita, and after passing out, they both joined the Income Tax (IT) Department in Delhi as assistant commissioners. 

 

As Gobind describes it, his son settled uneasily into life as a bureaucrat. Unlike the other officers he worked with, Kejriwal refused to use peons; he cleaned his own desk and emptied his own dustbin. He avoided office parties and other social gatherings, preferring to sit at a nearby tea stall. (Later in our conversation, Gobind also explained that Kejriwal doesn't celebrate his own birthday or those of his two children.) 

 

"He was a calm officer," said Javed Ahmed Khan, one of Kejriwal's batchmates who serves as additional commissioner at the Delhi IT office. "He would spend most of his time in his room. Many officers didn't like him for that." 

 

In time, Kejriwal came to dislike most of his colleagues in return, thanks to his discomfort with what he has described as a culture of corruption. He began to realise nothing got done in his office without bribes and kickbacks, and by 2000, his frustration had reached a boiling point. Kejriwal started exhorting unhappy citizens who had been poorly served by his corrupt co-workers to file petitions against them in court. That same year he secretly started Parivartan (meaning "change"), a nonprofit organisation devoted to government transparency—and put up posters in public areas of the office that read: "Are you facing a bribe problem? If you do, contact Parivartan." The organisation helped people obtain their old-age pensions without paying bribes, and filed complaints against income tax officers who colluded with tax evaders. 

 

At first, Kejriwal kept his role in Parivartan a secret—officially, Manish Sisodia headed the organisation. But the success of the nonprofit further sapped Kejriwal's interest in his day job; at the beginning of 2001, he took a two-year study leave, with pay, from the IT department and devoted himself fulltime to Parivartan. After reading in the newspaper about the Right to Information (RTI) campaign being waged by the NCPRI, Kejriwal went to meet Shekhar Singh, one of the group's founding members, and asked to volunteer. 

 

"He said he wanted to work," Singh told me. "He looked so impatient—he reminded me of my younger days, when there was nothing I wanted more than a benign dictatorship in this country." 

 

For two years, Kejriwal travelled to villages across north India to mobilise support for an RTI law. Drawing on his own experiences, he told people that government officials deliberately engineered delays to force the payment of bribes, and argued that a strong RTI law would expose corrupt practices. 

 

In 2004, Kejriwal launched an experimental project in one East Delhi neighbourhood, Nand Nagri, to test ways to hold government officials accountable. Kejriwal formed a committee consisting of 10 local residents who were trained to scrutinise the activities of the member of the legislative assembly (MLA) from their constituency. The committee then demanded public consultations over everything from road paving to drainage repair. 

 

Rakesh Senger, a child rights activist who worked with Kejriwal in Nand Nagri, said the goal of the project was to "give people some sense of power right from the mohalla level." In the end, however, a rift formed among the committee members, dissolving the project, but its means and ends offer a neat summation of Kejriwal's activism. "We wanted to create a situation," Senger told me, "that would make government officers feel people are watching them." 

 

At the end of 2004, Kejriwal used Delhi's newly-implemented RTI law to obtain 9,000 pages of documents concerning a proposal to privatise the city's potable water agency, the Delhi Jal Board. The records revealed that the World Bank had manipulated the bidding for a contract to plan the privatisation. After Kejriwal discovered that the privatisation proposal involved massive tariff hikes as well as cuts to free water for poor families, he led protest demonstrations that helped stall the project indefinitely. 

 

Kejriwal extended his two years of paid leave from the IT department by another two years, this time without pay, and by 2005, he had run out of ways to avoid returning to government service. It was time to decide whether to be a social activist or a commissioner rank officer. Unsurprisingly—and much to his family's dismay—Kejriwal chose activism. According to Kejriwal's parents, his wife worried that he'd resigned too young to be eligible for any pension or gratuity. 

 

"It was not surprising," Kejriwal's mother, Geeta Devi, told me. "But we couldn't say anything, because he had gone very far in social work." 

 

Kejriwal's secured position in the Indian government hadn't exactly kept him silent during his four-year leave, but his departure swept away what few inhibitions remained. In July 2006, Kejriwal organised a two-week RTI awareness event at an indoor stadium in Delhi; every day, he stood at a counter for up to 10 hours, fielding questions from students, young lawyers and activists, and encouraging every visitor to file RTI applications. On the final day of the event, as Sisodia recalls it, Kejriwal was resting on a staircase when his phone rang. After a short conversation, he stood up and walked over to Sisodia. "He squeezed my shoulder," Sisodia said, "and whispered into my ear, 'I'm getting an award.'" Kejriwal had been given the Ramon Magsaysay Award, widely described as Asia's Nobel Prize, for Eminent Leadership—"activating India's right-to-information movement at the grassroots" and "empowering New Delhi's poorest citizens to fight corruption by holding government answerable to the people". 

 

"After a few minutes," Sisodia continued, "he was back at his counter as if nothing had happened." 

 

But as far as Kejriwal was concerned, each year brought less cause for celebration, while his displeasure with the government grew steadily more intense. The campaign for a national RTI act had been a great success, but in practice it had fallen far short of his hopes. For the better part of a decade, he had pushed for greater transparency, confident that the exposure of government malfeasance would put a massive dent in corruption. Citizens had indeed used RTI to uncover scams across the country, but it was clear to Kejriwal, who scrutinised the data on RTI implementation and interviewed information commissioners and hundreds of activists, that politicians and bureaucrats had found new methods to hide information and stall requests. Even those whose guilt was exposed too often evaded punishment, while cases of harassment and outright violence against citizens filing RTI requests grew in number: by the end of 2010, at least 10 RTI activists had been murdered. 

 

In Kejriwal's mind, a new diagnosis began to take shape: stronger laws had no impact without stronger enforcement, and only a fool could expect the corrupt politicians and bureaucrats to punish their own kind. 

 

JUST A KEJRIWAL'S INTEREST in the Lokpal Bill grew out of frustration with the implementation of RTI, his first efforts at crafting a bill took place under the aegis of the NCPRI. In early September 2010, Kejriwal was appointed to head a five-member drafting committee, but after the first few meetings, there was little support for his move to bring the

judiciary under the purview of the Lokpal. The other members pointed to the existing Judiciary Standards and Accountability Bill tabled in Parliament, but Kejriwal refused to relent and the meetings soon came to a halt. 

 

Venkatesh Nayak, a senior member of the NCPRI who sat on the drafting committee, suggested that Kejriwal had never considered deviating from his own predetermined vision for the Lokpal. "I think he's a person in a major hurry and sometimes it could be problematic," Nayak said. "We told him, let's not mix up everything in one bill, and he would say 'I will take it into consideration.' But he never did, which means he had his own plans, and he knew exactly what he was doing." 

 

Undeterred, Kejriwal continued to refine his own draft, and went searching for new prospective allies. In October, before Kejriwal had teamed up with Anna Hazare, he travelled to Uttarakhand to meet yoga guru Baba Ramdev, a televangelist and Ayurvedic tycoon with an enormous international following who had floated (and then quickly retracted) plans to launch his own political party earlier in 2010. Kejriwal met Ramdev in an auditorium on the campus of Ramdev's sprawling yoga institute, and persuaded him to participate in a joint anti-corruption rally in Delhi. "I heard him telling Swamiji Maharaj, 'I have a lot of information about why they don't want to get rid of corruption,'" said Acharya Virendra Vikram, who heads the Delhi office of Ramdev's Bharat Swabhiman Trust. "Swamiji responded, 'I am with you.'" 

 

At the rally on 14 November 2010, thousands of people, many of them Ramdev's supporters, gathered outside the Parliament Street police station in central Delhi. Kejriwal was among the first people to speak. "We wrote a letter to Manmohan Singh," Kejriwal said. "We told him we abhor the Central government, we hate many state governments, but we love our country." 

 

The crowd was spellbound. Kejriwal continued for about 30 minutes, making his argument that India needed a law to secure the integrity of other laws; he castigated the corruption of the ruling government, and said that the then-telecommunications minister, Andimuthu Raja, had stolen "25 percent" of the country's annual budget in the 2G scam. After leaving the stage to a round of riotous applause, Kejriwal sat through the rest of the rally on the sidelines, against a backdrop covered with the pictures of Indian freedom fighters. 

 

"He smartly used our platform and then turned his back at a crucial time," Vikram told me, with a rueful smile. 

 

Before it became apparent that Anna Hazare's April fast at Jantar Mantar would attract thousands of supporters, Kejriwal thought he might have to depend on Ramdev to turn out a sizeable crowd. (In fact, the social activist Subhash Agrawal, one of Kejriwal's earliest allies, complained that Kejriwal had sidelined serious long-term activists, who tend not to have millions of fans, in favour of celebrity gurus like Ramdev and Sri Sri Ravi Shankar.) 

 

By the second day at Jantar Mantar, Kejriwal knew he no longer had to worry about drawing an audience. So when a Congress spokesman began to claim that right-wing religious parties were orchestrating the movement, Kejriwal decided to part ways with Ramdev to preserve the credibility of his 'apolitical' line. On the last day of the fast, when Ramdev took the stage with Ram Madhav, a top Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh leader, Kejriwal panicked and called an emergency meeting with Hazare at the nearby office of the secular religious activist, Swami Agnivesh, another staunch supporter of the fast. 

 

"Arvind said 'We should save the situation'," Agnivesh told me. "He wanted Madhav out. We told him to calm down but he didn't listen to us. He sent a message to Ramdev to tell Madhav not to sit on the dais. Ramdev didn't agree, and he left." 

 

Kejriwal's confidence peaked: the outpouring of public support and the nonstop media attention had put Team Anna at the centre of a national debate, and even the government looked to be on the back foot after caving in to their demands for an evenly-split drafting committee. One corporate house offered to donate 10 million to the IAC, but Kejriwal declined the offer. 

 

As Kejriwal and his colleagues took up what seemed like permanent residence in Delhi's television studios, they were unfazed by the growing chorus of criticism—much of it coming from other social activists. Aruna Roy, one of the founding leaders of NCPRI, memorably called Team Anna's Lokpal "a Frankenstein's monster that will devour all of us". 

 

"I think Arvind's feeling is nobody is serious about the bill," Shekhar Singh told me. Singh, who first brought Kejriwal into the NCPRI in the early 2000s, addressed the subject of his former colleague with considerable reluctance. "The problem is Arvind is not in agreement with what the majority of us feel should be the profile of the Lokpal. So he feels that he's the only one who has a clear idea of what it should be." 

 

At the end of June, I met Kejriwal as he was leaving a government guesthouse in South Delhi, accompanied by Anna Hazare and Kiran Bedi. He had forgotten about the scheduled interview I had arrived to conduct, but when I introduced myself, he quickly motioned me into Manish Sisodia's car, which followed Hazare and Kejriwal back to East Delhi. 

 

The drafting committee exercise had already ended in failure, and Kejriwal and Team Anna were making the rounds to drum up support for the Jan Lokpal from other political parties. Sisodia excitedly explained that they had just emerged from a meeting with Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, who had promised to introduce a strong Lokpal Bill in his state. "Inki to phateygi ab (The politicians will get screwed now)," Sisodia proclaimed as we slid into the car. "If Nitish does that, automatically others will feel pressure." 

 

We came to a stop in Mayur Vihar in East Delhi, and entered a large concrete apartment block, where Kejriwal had rented a three-bedroom flat for Hazare. A tall, dark-skinned man opened the door and led us into the drawing room, where bowls of chopped salad had been set out on the table alongside plates of rice and dal. Brand new cutlery, cups, towels and dustbins sat unused in plastic bags on the floor in one corner of the room. Manish tapped on one of the doors, and Kejriwal briefly emerged before turning into a toilet to wash his hands and feet. He had agreed to an hour-long interview, but first he wanted to finalise the text for a pamphlet with Sisodia, who was sitting on the floor with a computer on his lap. Kejriwal sat down next to Sisodia and pointed at the screen. "Here I was thinking something should come," he said. "No no, don't erase ration card corruption. Keep it simple." Kejriwal scratched at his head, absorbed in thought and looking for words. "Yes, driving licence corruption," he said. "Good, this is punchy." 

 

"How much time do you want?" he asked me. And then, "Can I have some food first?" 

 

As the food was served, Hazare emerged from his bedroom without his iconic Gandhi cap; he had a shaved head, and two faint furrows ran across his forehead. He, too, sat on the floor, and turned toward Kejriwal. "I shouldn't have praised Nitish Kumar—I think Lalu will not support us now," Hazare said, referring to the legendarily corrupt former Bihar chief minister. 

 

"OK," Kejriwal said, almost shouting Hazare down. "We'll talk about it some other time." 

 

Hazare didn't speak another word after that, eating his plate of rice and dal in silence. When Kejriwal finished eating, he lay back on the floor and fell asleep. I tried to start up a conversation with Hazare, but Sisodia insisted on answering on his behalf. 

 

About 30 minutes later, Kejriwal jolted upright, as if waking from a startling nightmare, and turned immediately to Sisodia. "How about 'Government Lokpal is a Betrayal'?" he said, like a man who dreams only of political slogans, before answering himself: "No, leave it for a while." 

 

 

 

Now Kejriwal looked at me. "I am sorry I am wasting your time. Let's do it now." 

 

Kejriwal's frustration with the drafting committee was still evident, eight days after the final meeting; the government had been insincere all along, he argued, and had no intention of debating or discussing the merits of Team Anna's bill. "They would agree on whatever they had decided beforehand," he said. "[Union Home Minister Palaniappan] Chidambaram was the most vocal—he would argue out each and every line. But there was no way to persuade them to change their stance on anything; we presented arguments, and they merely announced the decisions they had already reached." He seemed generally dejected by the experience, and particularly disappointed that his preparatory research—regarding the lessons from other countries with ombudsmen, among other things—had all been a waste. "We didn't know the outcome was pre-decided," he said. "We went in with all our honesty." 

 

He argued that getting the law through Parliament was always going to be difficult, and returned, albeit calmly, to his familiar television firebrand tone. "They are passing a law against themselves, not a law to alleviate poverty or something," he said. "If it becomes the law, many of the parliamentarians themselves will go to jail, so they will naturally be strongly against it." 

 

"Why are you doing all this?" I asked. 

 

"Why am I doing this?" His eyes widened with a hint of indignation. "I am a citizen of this country and my tax money is being looted by corrupt politicians and you are saying, why am I doing this?" 

 

A moment later, his cellphone rang. It was one of his activists, based in Mumbai, and Kejriwal gave him instructions for a new round of demonstrations. "If people are against the government's Lokpal Bill," he said into the phone, "tell them to tear it in public. Spread the word." 

 

I asked one final question: how long would this movement last? "We can't say," Kejriwal responded. "We are determined for a fight until it finishes." 

 

OVER THE COURSE OF THE SUMMER, like a tiny but committed guerrilla army looking to provoke a powerful adversary, Kejriwal and Team Anna continued their campaign against the government and its Lokpal proposal. Kejriwal did everything possible to keep the campaign alive and solicit further support from the public and opposition parties, hoping to keep up the pressure with a series of press briefings and increasingly combative television appearances. 

 

Criticism that Team Anna's methods and intentions were undemocratic had gathered considerable steam, and it became the semi-official line of the government, which insisted that unelected individuals had no right to force a legislation on a democratic Parliament. 

 

This is a critique that, unsurprisingly, Kejriwal finds entirely unpersuasive, either because he believes the end justifies the means or, as he has sometimes implied, because democracy doesn't work very well to begin with. 

 

Under a barrage of prosecutorial questions from CNN-IBN's Karan Thapar earlier this year, Kejriwal had presented a version of the latter argument: "We are a democratic country?" he said quizzically. "The democracy that we have has been so representative that the people have a right to vote once every five years and that's it." ("The situation in our country is so bad," he added later, for good measure. "It is worse than it used to be in British times.") 

 

But when Thapar accused him of attempting to "blackmail" the government, Kejriwal returned to firmer ground, turning the tables back on his interrogator and providing a preview of the strategy for the coming months. 

 

"How should a person in a democracy protest?" Kejriwal asked.

"By constitutional means," Thapar responded.

"What are those constitutional means?"

 

"By seeking votes, by seeking a campaign, by going petitioning in Parliament with all," Thapar replied, a hint of anger on his face. 

 

Kejriwal's answer—a long one—was particularly revealing. It outlined almost the entirety of his uncompromising political worldview, in which seeking to join what he regards as a corrupt system has no appeal, and in which the opinion of the public deserves tremendous respect—unless, that is, it's being converted into votes for politicians. 

 

"Suppose I don't want to go and fight elections," Kejriwal began, calmly. "I am a citizen of this country and I am feeling, I mean there is injustice and there is so much of corruption, and if I want to raise my voice, I go and petition the politicians. It doesn't work. I go and petition the bureaucrats. It doesn't work. I try to meet them. I meet all of them, and it doesn't work. Then I think building public opinion is a very critical part of a democracy." 

 

The government wanted to fight Team Anna using the force of its own legitimacy, and the crux of Kejriwal's strategy was to attack that legitimacy in the court of public opinion. He called for the public to burn copies of the government's Lokpal Bill at demonstrations in Delhi and Mumbai, and ventured into the constituencies of senior Congressmen in an attempt to prove that their own voters preferred Team Anna's proposal. 

 

In late July, Kejriwal sent his teams to Chandni Chowk in Old Delhi—the constituency of Union Minister for Human Resources Development Kapil Sibal, a prominent Congress spokesman and a member of the drafting committee—where they carried out a 'referendum' on the Lokpal. A week later, Kejriwal announced that 85 percent of voters preferred Team Anna's bill; the result may not have been statistically rigorous, but it landed on the front page of almost every newspaper. In early August, the exercise was repeated in Rahul Gandhi's Amethi constituency, in Uttar Pradesh, with similar results from the voters and media alike. With yet another contentious Parliament session under way—and with it a new barrage of protests and accusations from the elected opposition—the government began to vent its own frustrations. As the date of Hazare's threatened fast drew closer, Congress spokesmen lashed out, accusing Hazare of personal corruption and describing the protest movement as the work of "armchair fascists, overground Maoists, closet anarchists...lurking behind forces of right reaction and funded by invisible donors whose links may go back a long way abroad". 

 

The government, which had unwittingly—and irreversibly—conferred legitimacy on Team Anna by constituting the drafting committee to begin with, appeared to be nervously fumbling for a strategy to turn public opinion back in its favour. Negotiations over the ground rules for Hazare's fast were going nowhere: the deputy commissioner of Delhi Police refused to sanction a gathering of more than 5,000 people or one that lasted more than three days—conditions that Kejriwal's team rejected outright and the government denied having ordered. "Permission or not, we'll sit," Kejriwal said on 14 August, while Hazare volunteered that he would submit to arrest and encouraged supporters to do the same. 

 

On the rainy morning of 16 August, Anna and Kejriwal prepared to leave the apartment in Mayur Vihar to begin the hunger strike in central Delhi's JP Park. Journalists, who had staked out the entrance before dawn, reported that there was no sign of any uniformed police officers before 7 am, although three or four men in plainclothes were seen circling the perimeter of the building at 10-minute intervals, as if waiting for Hazare to emerge. The night before, Kejriwal had alerted about two dozen of his seniormost activists about the possibility he and Hazare would be arrested. 

 

"He told us that if Anna is arrested in the morning, by the evening the number of court arrests should be in the thousands," Kejriwal's associate, Kumar Vishwas, told me the day after. 

 

At around 7:15 am, a large contingent of police in riot gear circled the compound, and one of Hazare's supporters waiting outside phoned Kejriwal with the news. Before leaving the apartment, Kejriwal quickly filmed a statement by Hazare about his impending arrest, calling on supporters to calmly assemble in JP Park, and to volunteer for arrest if confronted by police. 

 

Kejriwal and Hazare walked out of the elevator and into the arms of half-a-dozen plainclothesmen, who arrested Hazare and whisked him off in a white SUV; Kejriwal was driven away in another vehicle. 

 

By early afternoon, the video of Hazare filmed before his arrest was all over Indian television. Thousands of protestors had taken to the streets of Delhi and other major Indian cities. The arrests were condemned by almost every other political party, and the government faced a furious backlash that dominated the Indian airwaves and made headlines the next day in newspapers around the world. 

 

After three days of further wrangling, during which Hazare obstinately refused to leave Delhi's Tihar Jail—where a steady crowd gathered outside and chanted anti-government slogans day and night—the Congress, battered and bruised, essentially surrendered to Team Anna's conditions for the fast, granting 15 days rather than the initial three, though Kejriwal and his colleagues had pushed for an entire month. 

 

In the meantime, the protesting crowds continued to grow, and Kejriwal's strategy—his relentless campaign to deligitimise the government among the public—had been given its most significant push by the Congress's own hand. 

 

ON 12 AUGUST, four days before the scheduled fast, I went to see Kejriwal address a crowd of undergraduate students at an engineering college in Greater Noida. In a vast courtyard, there was a quiet but intense patriotic fervour—the students were holding tricolours, chanting slogans and singing Vande Mataram. Kejriwal was perched on a staircase at one end of the courtyard, and when the crowd quieted, he began to speak about corruption. He looked like a very unhappy crusader; his face had assumed the stiff and unsmiling look that always accompanied his speeches, and he frequently pointed his finger toward the students while enumerating the most depressing examples of corruption he could summon. "An Indian citizen," Kejriwal said, "is asked to pay a bribe even for obtaining a death certificate of his own father." At the end of his talk, he asked the students to chant "Bharat Mata ki Jai" (Long live Mother India). Afterwards, the students formed a chain around Kejriwal and walked him back to his car. 

 

Once inside the car, Kejriwal leaned back and crossed his legs; relaxed and satisfied with the crowd's response, he looked both fresh and happy. He told me that he had tried, during the Lokpal campaign, to draw on as many patriotic symbols as possible; the country, he said, was forgetting the importance of nationalism. "It binds us together." 

 

He focused on the road while talking to me, giving occasional directions to his driver, and our conversation turned from nationalism to movies. Kejriwal, who describes himself as a lover of Indian cinema, said he'd been too busy to watch a movie since January. 

 

He described Aamir Khan—a supporter of Hazare's protests—as his favourite actor. "The kind of films he does have a nationalistic message," Kejriwal said, turning the conversation back toward politics. "For instance, see how good Rang De Basanti was. The film was actually about corruption." 

 

Kejriwal seemed pleased with the success of his campaign strategy. The government's inept attacks on Hazare and the anti-corruption movement in the run-up to the fast left him with the sense that he was winning the war of perceptions. "There is a possibility that Anna may be arrested," Kejriwal told me, no doubt aware that such a move would redound to his benefit. "My only worry," he continued, "is if the government force-feeds Anna. Or what if they poison him?" 

 

He fidgeted for a second while his eyes darted around trying to determine the route. "No, no, no, don't turn right," he told the driver. He was already multitasking—speaking to me, sending text messages and directing the car—but he was loose and energetic, and his optimism about the upcoming fast permeated all of his answers, as if he felt certain that Team Anna would prevail before too much longer. 

 

I asked him why past efforts to curb corruption had failed, and why he thought the Lokpal would do any better. 

 

We need to create a fear," he said, "which is if I do corruption, I will go to jail. The previous acts have failed to punish corrupt officials because they have been implemented by the same officials, and we need an independent institution to guarantee that a corrupt official will get punished, with certainty and swiftness." 

 

Kejriwal received an SMS on his phone, perhaps from one of his family members, and he tapped out a response in between answers to my questions. "Nothing much," it said. "Hopping from one meeting to another." The Constitution Club, where Kejriwal was scheduled to meet some lawyers, was just a few turns away, and I asked him before we arrived what backup plan he had prepared if Anna wasn't allowed to fast. 

 

He turned around from the front seat, and gave a boyish smile. "I don't believe in backup plans," he said. "In a movement, it all depends on day-to-day happenings. That's how revolutions happen."