In India, Using the Ballot Box to Fight Graft

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/19/world/asia/in-india-using-the-ballot-box-to-fight-graft.html

Version 0 of 1.

NEW DELHI — It is not a photogenic revolution. In fact, it does not look like revolution at all. People are not screaming or burning the effigy of a great foe, but are instead standing in orderly lines waiting to cast their votes. Yet, time and again, independent India has proved that elections, and not melodramatic mass protests, are the true revolutions in a democracy.

It is the direct consequence of one sensational state assembly election this month, and the prospect of general elections next year, that persuaded the Indian Parliament on Wednesday to pass legislation to create an independent agency called Lokpal to combat corruption in public life. For the past five decades, several legislators and reformers had tried to create such a body but were defeated by politicians who closed ranks to protect their way of life.

It may appear that the transformation of Indian politics represents the triumph of public fasts and mass protests against corruption that urban India has witnessed and the news media has magnified in the past two and a half years. But the fact is that those movements failed and their icon, the social reformer Anna Hazare, faced ever-dwindling crowds. People tired of his repeated fasts to the death and his ritual intakes of citrus juice to conclude his demonstrations. But then one of his advisers, Arvind Kejriwal, made a tactical move. He decided to enter electoral politics.

The way of Indian public life is that a leader seated on a stage is constantly approached by his deputies in full view of the audience to whisper things into the master’s ears. Eventually one of the whisperers becomes the leader. Mr. Kejriwal, an engineer and a former government officer, snatched the movement from the rustic reformer. But then, when his own movement began to falter, Mr. Kejriwal realized that the only way to fight politicians was through politics. With the broom as the campaign symbol of his new organization, the Aam Aadmi Party, he ran in the Delhi Legislative Assembly election, going so far as to pit himself directly against the powerful former Delhi chief minister, Sheila Dikshit.

Most political observers expected Mr. Kejriwal to fare poorly. Months before the vote, he told me that most journalists were unable to understand the mood of the people. This month, he defeated Ms. Dikshit, and his party destroyed the governing Indian National Congress to emerge as the second- largest party, behind the conservative Bharatiya Janata Party. But neither Aam Aadmi nor the B.J.P. won a clear mandate. The Congress party, with eight seats, has offered “unconditional” support to Aam Aadmi if it wants to form the government. Mr. Kejriwal has reached out to voters to tell him, through text messages, calls and online comments, if he should accept the offer.

Suddenly he has become a major force in the general elections to Parliament that are due in a few months.

That is what inspired politicians from across the spectrum to come together to create the anticorruption institution. But Mr. Kejriwal wants a more powerful body than the politicians have backed. The paradox is that, for a man who returned from the oblivion of failed revolutions to relevance through electoral politics, Mr. Kejriwal wants the Lokpal to be almost entirely free of politicians.

Mr. Hazare, who has become embittered by the success of Mr. Kejriwal, staged yet another death fast in his village to pressure the Parliament into creating the Lokpal. The last time he attempted a fast outside his village, it was a failure, but in his small pond, he is still a big fish. Mr. Hazare is happy with the Lokpal that the members of Parliament were willing to create, and has ended his fast.

A few days ago Mr. Hazare said that if his former deputy wished for a stronger Lokpal, he could fast for it. But Mr. Kejriwal is now a politician. His measure of success is no longer the number of people willing to watch him starve as a doctor reverently takes his pulse. Mr. Kejriwal’s revolution is democracy itself, where people stand quietly in orderly queues to applaud or to punish.

<em>Manu Joseph is editor of the Indian newsweekly Open and author of the novel “The Illicit Happiness of Other People.”</em>