India’s Upper House Approves Anticorruption Agency

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/18/world/asia/indias-upper-house-approves-anticorruption-agency.html

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NEW DELHI — India’s upper house of Parliament passed a measure on Tuesday to create an independent anticorruption agency, after more than four decades of debate and controversy over how to curb corruption. The vote all but ensured that the measure, called the Lokpal and Lokayuktas Bill, would become law.

Setting up such an agency was the central demand of the social activist Anna Hazare in 2011, when his fasts and protests electrified the country and brought thousands of people into the streets. But the bill stalled in the upper house for two years, stymied by squabbling among India’s political parties and by deep uneasiness among senior politicians about creating an agency with broad authority to investigate them. Mr. Hazare drew attention to it again last week with renewed fasts in his village in Maharashtra state.

The political calculus also changed last week when the main governing party, the Indian National Congress, suffered severe defeats in four major state elections at the hands of the Bharatiya Janata Party. The Congress Party got an especially unwelcome surprise in Delhi, the state that includes the capital, where it was also outpolled by an upstart group, the Common Man Party, whose sole issue was a promise to end corruption.

The national governing coalition led by the Congress Party has been buffeted by repeated allegations of corruption, including one involving licenses to mine coal that directly involved Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Other scandals revolved around the allocation of telecommunications spectrum and the construction of facilities for the 2010 Commonwealth Games in New Delhi.

With national elections scheduled for next spring, Congress Party leaders sought to change the party’s image this week by pushing the anticorruption measure through Parliament.

The debate before the vote on Tuesday was unusually cordial and free of disruptions. Arun Jaitley, the leader of the opposition in the upper house, hailed the measure as an effort to “restore the credibility of the political system.”

The bill goes next to the lower house, where it is expected to pass overwhelmingly this week.

After news of the bill’s passage reached him, Mr. Hazare addressed his jubilant supporters and thanked the members of Parliament who helped pass the bill. He promised to continue his fast until the lower house passed the bill.