राकेश मिश्र कानपुर
- 361 Posts
- 196 Comments
Who were the real architects of the Lokpal Movement in India?
About a year ago, the Indian media created the public sensation called Team Anna who represented activists against government corruption. For many weeks, the television networks and newspapers in the country were filled with news about Anna Hazare and his valiant fight against corruption. Most people in India were swept away by the emotional wave that this movement was able to generate and for some time it even created the belief that at last some major changes were happening in India. Only very few journalists dared to question the legitimacy of the movement but most of them were simply ignored by the public as “conspiracy theories”.
To understand the real agents behind any political movement, its necessary to see where the money is going and who is profiting from the movement. Without going into the details about the various persons involved in this movement and their personal aims and agendas, let’s take a look at some media reports about some curious facts surrounding the Anna Hazare movement.
In 1957, the Rockefeller Foundation established the Ramon Magsaysay Prize for community leaders in Asia. It was named after Ramon Magsaysay, president of the Philippines, a crucial ally in the US campaign against Communism in Southeast Asia. In 2000, the Ford Foundation established the Ramon Magsaysay Emergent Leadership Award. The Magsaysay Award is considered a prestigious award among artists, activists and community workers in India. M.S. Subbulakshmi and Satyajit Ray won it, so did Jayaprakash Narayan and one of India’s finest journalists, P. Sainath. But they did more for the Magsaysay award than it did for them. In general, it has become a gentle arbiter of what kind of activism is “acceptable” and what is not.
Interestingly, Anna Hazare’s anti-corruption movement last summer was spearheaded by three Magsaysay Award winners—Anna Hazare, Arvind Kejriwal and Kiran Bedi. One of Arvind Kejriwal’s many NGOs is generously funded by Ford Foundation. Kiran Bedi’s NGO is funded by Coca Cola and Lehman Brothers.
Though Anna Hazare calls himself a Gandhian, the law he called for—the Jan Lokpal Bill—was un-Gandhian, elitist and dangerous. A round-the-clock corporate media campaign proclaimed him to be the voice of “the people”. Unlike the Occupy Wall Street movement in the US, the Hazare movement did not breathe a word against privatisation, corporate power or economic “reforms”. On the contrary, its principal media backers successfully turned the spotlight away from massive corporate corruption scandals (which had exposed high-profile journalists too) and used the public mauling of politicians to call for the further withdrawal of discretionary powers from government, for more reforms, more privatisation. (In 2008, Anna Hazare received a World Bank award for outstanding public service). The World Bank issued a statement from Washington saying the movement “dovetailed” into its policy.
Mr. Sharma said that according to the statement released by Team Anna, the expenditure for its recent agitation on the Ramlila Maidan in New Delhi was Rs. 1.5 crore for organising Mr. Hazare’s sit-in camp; Rs. 52 lakh for public meetings; Rs. 26 lakh for printing pamphlets; Rs. 9.8 lakh towards travel and conveyance, and Rs. 45 lakh for sending over 30 crore SMSes.
Since 2005, the Ford Foundation had allegedly been funding/promoting Team Anna in various agitations through the media under the banner, ‘Fight against corruption,’ the petition said.
On November 1, when Congress leader Digvijay Singh questioned the source of funds, Team Anna declared that it had received Rs. 42 lakh from unknown sources, via bank transfer, in August 2011 and said it was planning to return the money. However, Mr. Sharma said, Team Anna did not reveal the funding allegedly received from the Ford Foundation.
The Congress Wednesday asked the government to probe the source of funds of social activist Anna Hazare’s massive anti-corruption crusade and also wondered why the US suddenly chose to remark on the movement.
‘It needs to be considered whether there is any power which is supporting this movement which wants to destabilize not only the government but the country. We need to take the US statements (on the protest) seriously,’ Congress spokesperson Rashid Alvi told reporters.
‘The US never supported any movement in India since its independence. For the first time, the US said that Anna Hazare’s movement should be allowed and there should be no obstruction to it. What was the need for the US to give this statement,’ he asked.
He said India would exercise ‘appropriate democratic restraint’ in dealing with the peaceful protest.
The RSS on Sunday rapped activist Anna Hazare for his stoic silence in acknowledging the fact that the Sangh workers had actively taken part in the latter’s nationwide crusade against corruption last year.
“It is a fact that the Sangh workers in individual capacity did play an active role in the anti-corruption crusade by the civil society headed by Hazare… it baffles me as to why the former did not acknowledge the fact,” RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat said.
AFFILIATES of the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) have been receiving millions of dollars from corporates in the United States to instigate communal violence and propagate the Hindutva ideology in Gujarat and other parts of the country. This was exposed by the Campaign to Stop Funding Hate (SFH), a group of professionals, students, workers, artists and intellectuals. They have identified the India Development and Relief Fund (IDRF), a Maryland-based charity organisation established in 1989, as the key fund-raiser for the Sangh Parivar in the U.S. SFH says that the IDRF, which was set up to provide funds for `relief and development work’, has been funding RSS-initiated projects all over India. In 2000, around $1.7 million was channelled to Sangh Parivar organisations such as the Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram (VKA), which has been linked with anti-minority violence. Between 1994 and 2000, the IDRF disbursed close to $4 million to Sangh Parivar organisations all over India.
“Three of Anna’s core members ( Arvind Kejriwal, Kiran Bedi and Manish Sisodia) are Magsaysay award winners which are endowed by the Ford Foundation and Rockefeller.” She added that World Bank alone runs 600 anti-corruption programmes in Sub-Saharan countries as a means to increase the penetrations of foreign capital.
So it is pretty obvious that US based NGOs were the chief architects of this movement. Now does that really prove anything? Let’s take a look at another article on the Voltaire Network:
Between 1947 and 1966 the Ford Foundation played a key role in the network of US interference in Europe through the subvention of magazines, scientific programs and non-communist left-wing organizations. The largest philanthropic organization in the world was in fact providing a respectful facade for CIA financial and contact operations. This role was even more possible by the fact that the same persons designed and directed both organizations.
So who were the real forces behind the Lokpal movement?
Was it really the people of India rising up against corruption of the government because they really want to see some change or was it simply media manipulation done on an epic scale in a country where most people still believe the news shown on TV and are mostly ignorant about the larger political forces at work in the world presently?
Do the people of India really believe that creating another layer of bureaucracy over the already heavily burdened and highly inefficient judicial and penal system of India is really going to solve anything or is it only going to make the matters worse?
Are the Indian people even ready to ask such questions or are they going to continue to endlessly debate about the irrelevant issues about celebrities and reality shows?
Read Comments