The best way to know the self is feeling oneself at the moments of reckoning. The feeling of being alone, just with your senses, may lead you to think more consciously. More and more of such moments may sensitize ‘you towards you’, towards others. We become regular with introspection and retrospection. We get ‘the’ gradual connect to the higher self we may name Spirituality or God or just a Humane Conscious. We tend to get a rhythm again in life. We need to learn the art of being lonely in crowd while being part of the crowd. A multitude of loneliness in mosaic of relations! One needs to feel it severally, with conscience, before making it a way of life. One needs to live several such lonely moments. One needs to live severallyalone.

Wednesday, 4 September 2013

GOVERNMENT NEGATING RTI AND ELECTORAL REFORM DECISIONS: WHERE IS ARVIND KEJRIWAL?

Writing about this problem doesn't make any difference on its state of perpetual apathy. The almost of who are in the fray are beyond redemption. They all are same under the skin, an illicit brotherhood to further their common interests.

Ignoring or maintaining a distance from the epidemic cannot help either. It is heading for a systemic failure and the best fight back to it can be while being in the System, while being a part of it.

And so, the fresh thinking and new entrants with a vow to fight the wrongs in the System are in urgent need.

Sadly, that is not happening. Reform, there, is about rhetoric and empty words and even the beginning of the process, that no one can decide, define or conceptualize, sounds like daydreaming.

The grip of rotten values and insensitive politics has spread so deep and wide that it rapidly co-opts almost of such entrants. Those who still maintain the stand are made ineffective, cornered or wiped out.


If we look back to gather some names in the recent past, when the process of deterioration has frighteningly speeded up, we don’t find any.

Yes, Arvind Kejriwal did raise some hopes, and for many, he still gives hopes to anticipate positively, in spite of his poor handling of the anti-corruption moment of 2011, but his ‘could not rise to the occasion’ performance on two of the recent anti-reform and anti-democratic moves by the politicians, disappoints, like in 2011, when, after a high of April and August 2011, we had seen the sudden fall from grace resulting in a fizzled out anti-corruption movement by the first few months of 2012.

On scouting for his response on government’s amendments in the Representation of the People Act (RPA) and the Right to Information Act (RTI) to negate the pro-reform decisions of the Supreme Court and the Central Information Commission, aimed at keeping detained and convicted politicians away from the electoral process and bringing the political outfits under the public scrutiny on their sources of income and ways of expenditure, there were very few, certainly not qualifying his claims of cleansing the politics of its ills of the day.

Kejriwal was a fearless RTI Activist. He was instrumental in the prolonged fight for the Act. Yet, such a routine response tells otherwise.

Probably his priorities are changing. On googling, I could not come across any fiery ‘trademark Kejriwal’ statement by him than a June 2013 joint statement with Arun Roy opposing the government’s efforts to amend the RTI Act.

I may be wrong but I could not find an RTI activist’s response from Kejriwal on this. Yes, there have been bits and pieces of information on protests by his party workers (Aam Aadmi Party-AAP) but that makes it even more ridiculous. That looks more like a patch work.

Similar is his silence on government’s efforts to negate the Supreme Court’s decision to bar the arrested and convicted politicians from contesting polls. Though the government had filed review petition, it went ahead with introducing the amendment bill in Rajya Sabha and though, today, the Supreme Court rejected the review petition to review its decision on convicted politicians, it cannot be the said the political authoritarianism would not act to subvert it further.

Yes, there were some statements and reactions but that is far from enough. Such a low scale of response makes it sound ridiculous, like it was done just to maintain the countenance of a mask.

The kinds of claims Kejriwal made while taking the political plunge don’t justify his selected response over these two vital-to-democracy issues. 

©/IPR: Santosh Chaubey - http://severallyalone.blogspot.com/