Ancient Indians – Satya Samhita

For the Cause : Sleeping on the railway platform : Sisodia and Kejriwal : http://www.facebook.com/aman.mediratta

Something wonderful is happening in India. Like a cholesterol patient who starts jogging to fight too much grease in the blood.. Indians are organising themselves to get rid of the grease in the state machinery. Wow!.

I did a diabetic version of a fast at home.. in support of Anna Hazaare … ie I didn’t eat rice or wheat today.. too scared to attempt a total fast. Not much, but a beginning. The squirrel’s contribution to Rama Sethu. And I said an extra Vishnu Sahasranamam to bless Anna Hazaare and wish him success in eradicating corruption in India.

Then I saw the live coverage on Times Now and for the first time in my life I heard Arvind Kejriwal. He spoke sanely, forcefully, justly. My neighbour heard me waxing eloquently about his speech and gave me the May Issue of Reader’s Digest, which carries an article on Arvind Kejriwal. Wow! Such people are walking the earth in my time! I am so thrilled.

Arvind has a BE in mech from IIT Kharagpur. He cleared IRS exam and worked in the Income tax Department. He served in Mother Teresa’s kalighat ashram, in Ramakrishna mission, in Bodoland and Nehru Yuva Kendra. He won the Ramon Magsasay award for emergent leadership in 2006.

What I admire about him is that he is a pragmatic activist.

He started an organisation called Parivartan which helps ordinary citizens get ordinary benefits like ration cards and electricity connections without having to give any bribes.

He was instrumental in drafting the Jan Lokpal Bill aimed essentially at empowering citizens and fighting corruption.

He says that our system encourages corruption. It has to encourage honesty. He felt that he could not fight corruption by being in the government.

They started parivartan to first help  people with their income tax issues. Then they expanded to the electricity department., and then the PDS (ration) .

Then he realised that people had started relying on Parivartan instead of on touts.. and that this was not a sustainable model. The people were not empowered. So if Parivartan stopped then people would be back to square one. Then RTI was passed by Delhi govt. in Oct 2001. The govt. had passed the law but the depts. were not notified. They did a dharna and wrote letters to the CM and succeeded in getting the departments notified.

They then realised that if they explained the RTI to people, helped them draft their applications and asked them to submit it themselves, then they could stop playing the middleman, empower people and create awareness.

The biggest challenge is to break the cynicism of the people.

They have used the 50,000 dollars of his Magsasay award to start a Foundation that analyses thousands of orders passed by all the information commissioners. They do research on self-governance issues in a big way. They have come out with a book called Swaraj.

It’s on the kind of reforms needed in our governance to transfer decision-making on a day to day basis to the people and in which politicians and bureaucrats only implement those decisions. For eg, the Gram Sabha should decide on appointing school teachers instead of a remote and corrupt body. For details see : http://lokrajandolan.org/

He says, “We thought corruption was a problem and corruption is to be solved but now we feel that corruption is actually a symptom. The real disease is in the lack of complete political empowerment of the people. People are politically dis-empowered. They have absolutely no say.”

He says that corruption and poverty are integrally related – corruption increase poverty which keeps people disempowered which leads to more corruption.

Praying for the political empowerment of our people! Jai Arvind Kejriwal and his friends!

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