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Team Anna’s political party and Lok Satta (of Dr JP)

August 3, 2012 lokpal
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Anna’s team should embrace Dr JayaPrakash Narayan’s Lok Satta political party

Anna team’s intention to start a political party is based on extremely noble intentions and everybody is wishing that they can come and change the rules of the game of politics and winning elections.  As of today,  Anna’s team is a group of extremely honest people who just talk straight from the heart and talk common sense.  But running a national political party and winning elections is an extremely complicated task.  It is difficult even for an ideal party with all honest people as no two (even honest) people will agree on everything and India is a huge diverse country and at times, with contradictions.

A political party needs to have

  • a manifesto which talks about their views on important sectors and issues of the nations
  • an organizational structure which scale to a national level while being open and democratic internally
  • charismatic leaders who can capture the imagination of people and motivate them
  • a mechanism of raising and spending funds in a transparent way
  • people with intricate knowledge of the people and bureaucratic systems and experience in dealing with issues of country

In this context, one should seriously consider the Lok Satta party founded by Dr JayaPrakash Narayan.  Dr JP is an extremely honest politician, IAS (top 10 in batch of 1980),  former secretary to CM, had a major role in RTI, electoral reforms and a trained doctor!  He started a political party after initially trying to bring about a change from the outside with his Lok Satta NGO.

Dr JP always insisted that he is building a political platform for all honest and well intentioned people to come and bring about a change in the country.  Some of the salient points about Lok Satta Party is

  • Have a manifesto and a published their views/white paprts on all major issues on the country including health reforms, electoral reforms, nuclear energy, farmers issues etc.
  • Have strong internal democracy
  • Have an organizational based in 4+ states with a relatively strong base in Andhra Pradesh (where Dr JP is an MLA from Kukatpally constituency)
  • They place nation above party and party above individuals
  • Never indulge in caste or religion based politics

Given that Lok Satta has already bootstrapped the first level of a  honest political party and a sound political platform, I think team Anna’s team should embrace join and expand Lok Satta.  This will bring about the power of synergies between these two honest groups and will propel them in the political space quickly and give the required solid footing.

Wishing Anna’s Team and Lok Satta success in their efforts

– gopi

ps: I support Anna’s team in their demand for Jan LokPal and also support  Dr JP and the Lok  Satta political party for the honest political party that he founded.

Jan Lokpal : proposed anti-corruption bill by citizens

April 13, 2011 gov2.0 / lokpal
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LokPal is one of the most important bills that is being debated in post independent India.  The other bill which had wide ramifications and got enacted was the “Right to information act 2005″.

I feel this is one of the most important bill in the history of India and will have an everlasting impact on the way our government functions and will even accelerate our economic progress.

When RTI bill was enacted, some of the my friends said that it will stop corruption.  In the context of CitizenSocial and open government data, some suggested that we use RTI to get data and publish it through citizensocial.  I have  in the past, used RTI both for solving our locality issues and at a personal level, to get our passport renewed !  With this little experience, I always felt that RTI was meant to provide access to information which citizens wanted which is different from acting on corruption. 

This is where Lokpal bill comes into picture.  Lokpal bill, if enacted with all the terms that civil society is demanding, will create  institutions which are

  1. independent
  2. have power to act.
  3. have responsibility to take time-bound action

Currently, we have CBI, CVC at the center, lok-ayuktas, ACBs in states which were responsible for investigating the corruption.  The issues was that these were either not independent (CBI has to take permission from the government to act against MPs) or lacked power.  Justice Venkatachalam of  Lok Ayukta in karnataka unearthed many scams but the government never acted on them nor punished the guilty.

Jan Lokpal bill, the citizen version of the lokpal bill is trying to achieve all the three points mentioned above, taking cognizance of the strengths and weaknesses of the existing anti-corruption institutions.  Next 4 months are extremely important for India when the lokpal draft will be debated by a wide cross section of the society as it goes to parliament for approval.

Let us all be vigilant, participate in the process and ensure that we will have excellent institutions : Lokpal (center) and Lok Ayukta (states)  which will strengthen democracy, reduce corruption and ensure progress of India.

In the next four months, we will be doing various activities around increasing citizen participation and awareness around Lokpal bill .  Watch out http://www.citizensocial.com for updates on  this

– Gopi