Lanka Needs An Anti-Corruption Movement

By Kumar David -March 30, 2014 |

Prof. Kumar David

Lanka needs to take inspiration from India’s Anti-Corruption Movement (ACM). Although corruption in India is horrendous an inspiring movement to combat it has grown up. We in Lanka are quite far behind in our ACM mobilisation. The JVP, groups like transparency and individuals are active, but an organised effort to cull crooks is still absent. A start has to be made and the first step is to build public consciousness and encourage awareness of the need for a systematic, organised, anti-corruption drive. Sleaze is the talking point in nearly every social and political conversation; therefore there is fertile soil for activism.

Recently I had the good fortune to be present at a preliminary brain-storming. A small group from diverse class, political, ethnic and religious backgrounds has started coming together to take up the ACM challenge. There was a clear realisation that although old liberal fogies and leftists dinosaurs can do the initial ideas formatting, eventually a contingent of energetic speaking young people must take over and drive the movement.

The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP)

Though I am aware that readers are familiar with Aam Aadmi, Kejriwal and Hazare it is useful to divert to India before returning to the initiative taking shape here. Anna Hazare (age 77), a retired army truck driver, is the father of the Twenty-first Century anti-corruption drive in India and Arvind Kejriwal, an IIT mechanical engineering graduate, his 45 year old ‘son’. Unfortunately unlike in Christian cosmology, in India’s anti-corruption pantheon, father and son fell out. The issue post-2011 was whether, in taking the Jan Lokpal Bill forward, the movement should be broad and politically non-aligned, Hazare’s preference, or be a political party, Kejriwal’s choice. The parting in November 2012 was amicable and at first Kejriwal seemed right because at its first test, the Delhi legislative assembly elections, AAP won 28 of 70 seats and formed a short-lived minority city government with Congress support – the BJP fell marginally short of a majority. Now Hazare himself seems to imply that he was wrong by joining Mammata Banajee in West Bengal in the Lok Sabahaelections. But easy, it’s not so simple, it is early days and the last laugh may still be with Hazare.  Read More