Why Janlokpal is a bad idea and why India needs it.

Whenever someone comes to me with the idea of signing the janlokpal bill, I pity at the person with such a sweet and innocent hope that one document is going to solve the problem haunting India for last 200 years and more. Yes well, I don't believe that janlokpal is going to solve the problem anymore than the reservation is actually going to help any stupid backward class person grow in life.

When we look at the whole world in general, there are many skeptical views on janlokpal bill. True believers will go to extreme length forwarding emails to everyone asking them to sign some petition against the corrupt people. The skeptics will then go and ask questions like what will happen if the lokayukt is corrupt etc. etc. etc.

Both these arguments as they amuse me, they also are a cry for help. People are frustrated about corruption and the way it is affecting the country and want to do something about it. People in initial stage of frustration are still having the hope that satyagraha and Janlokpal can actually solve this problem. People in the final stage of frustration have completely given up hope and believe nothing can be done about the corruption and the lokayukt also will become corrupt.

One fails to understand a very fundamental question on corruption, who are corrupt? and why are they corrupt?
These corrupt are people, people like you and me who have walked up there and caused corruption. Then can we say the entire humanity is corrupt? Let us give up hope and dissolve all the systems then.

Researcher and economist Adam Smith, who did a research on cheating and documented them in the theory of moral sentiment, argues that human beings are generally 87% honest. A man can resist the temptation of doing something bad 87% of the time, the factors affecting his moral decision are festivals, environment (weather condition) and in general position of power.
If we believe in what he said, then a serious question hits us, exactly why is it than that we see this new surge on corruption in this country? A article in the book freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner actually provoked this post mentioned the information imbalance. What made this politicians and ministers rob us for the last 40 years was that there was no way the information was made public. The only channel of information for these cases to come out was mass media, which apparently was already inclined to certain political masters. I won't call the media bias for they simply wished to survive. News channel is not a social service, for a smaller fish to survive you have to join the league of a larger fish.

So what has changed now? The information imbalance was taken care of by the internet if we look at the statistics of usage of Internet in India we see out of 1,173,108,018 population, 100,000,000 are on the internet (source: Source: http://www.internetworldstats.com/asia/in.htm). The internet is trying to change what we see

Here again we come to the core point, then what does this all mean? Simply speaking, Janlokpal is come up with a magic formula, implement us and be free of corruption forever.... bullshit. Janlokpal is going to create a hyper mess of things than they are already in the market. Janlokpal is doing what many millions of others did before them in ponzi scheme, job frauds or even chit fund schemes use of human sentiments and emotions for benefit of their own. Why Janlokpal is bad? There are thousands of skeptics out there, I am not one of them, I won't talk about it. In one single line, you cannot remove the flaws in one system by creating another system perpendicular to it.

Then why do we need Janlokpal? For the same reason, we need a traffic cop despite of traffic signals. The concept of janlokpal maybe flawed and all, but never before has the entire population risen up-to something. The flood of the emails and chain mails that are spamming the inbox to join Janlokpal over something is good. People are at-least doing something about it. The corruption monster was sowed by the student who solved previous exam papers for the likely questions to come in exam or by those who paid 100 rs to the police because they didn't bother as they earned 30,000, it was sowed by those who decided that accepting a tip for your service is valid and now the fruits have reaped in a way that someone other that those who sowed the seeds are making fruits out of it.

Janlokpal is again a catalyst for the change that is coming, it simply increased the speed of the distress among the masses. While I don't believe it is going to help fix the current problem, but the two systems(democracy and lokayukt) can nullify each other giving us a cleaner system and a better system.

A system we let rot and corrupt.









P.s. These are my views entirely and are NOT supported by any organization, individual or person. You may feel I am wrong, which is understood, however I expect you to observe moral code of conduct in your language in comments as it is on a public forum.