Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: India, guru annuncia suicidio contro corruzione: protesta bloccata dalla polizia

http://www.tgcom.mediaset.it/mondo/articoli/1011601/india-guru-annuncia-suicidio-contro-corruzione-protesta-bloccata-dalla-polizia.shtml
India, guru annuncia suicidio contro corruzione: protesta bloccata
dalla polizia
Davanti a centinaia di suoi seguaci Baba Ramdev voleva morire di fame:
"esibizione" durata 14 ore
La polizia indiana ha messo fine allo "sciopero della fame fino alla
morte" contro la corruzione avviato a New Delhi dal guru indiano Baba
Ramdev, nel quadro di polemiche e di reciproche accuse fra i suoi
seguaci ed il governo. Gli agenti hanno sfollato il Ramlila Maidan
dove centinaia di seguaci si erano riuniti al loro guru. Lo stesso
santone è stato poi portato via dalle forze dell'ordine.
Gli agenti hanno usato anche gas lacrimogeni e sfollagente, in
esecuzione di un decreto del governo con cui, di fronte allo
svolgimento di una manifestazione dai contorni politici, si revocava
l'autorizzazione concessa a Ramdev di tenere "una sessione di yoga"
pubblica.
Gruppi di persone hanno tentato invano di opporsi all'azione degli
agenti utilizzando, secondo la Ians, pietre e bastoni e provocando
piccoli incendi.
"La repressione in India è peggiore di quella nel mondo arabo - ha
detto ai giornalisti una giovane donna - ed in Egitto la gente ha
potuto manifestare molto più a lungo di quanto è stato permesso a noi".

Solo in inglese, purtroppo, queste due opinioni del giornale The
Hindu.
A proposito, dov' è Lord Curzon (nostro, intendo)?
--
http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/editorial/article2079404.ece
The UPA's political bankruptcy
The midnight police swoop on yoga exponent and telestar ‘Baba' Ramdev
and his supporters was arbitrary, brutal, and anti-democratic. A
peaceful assembly had suddenly been set upon and tens of innocent
people injured for no fault of their own. “No government has reached
out as much as ours,” negotiating Minister Kapil Sibal had boasted on
the eve of the action. “But if we can reach out, we can also rein in.”
Mr. Sibal mis-spoke: what he meant perhaps was ‘No government has the
capacity to lurch from one extreme to the other as our government.'
First, it reached out to Shri Ramdev in a way that was
indistinguishable from obsequiousness, with four Ministers led by the
second-ranking Cabinet Minister, Pranab Mukherjee, abandoning all
semblance of dignity by going to the airport to receive a man who has
since been denounced as a ‘cheat' and a ‘thug' by a senior Congress
leader, Digvijay Singh. The message that immediately went out was that
given the anti-corruption mood in the country, the Manmohan Singh
government was desperate to fend off further political trouble. It
then negotiated in secret with Shri Ramdev, supposedly to get on top
of the huge and complex issue of India's black or dirty money — which
is parked in tax havens, exploits the offshore system that is analysed
powerfully in Nicholas Shaxson's book, Treasure Islands: Tax Havens
and the Men Who Stole the World (The Bodley Head, London, 2011), and
has figured in global reports and in releases of secret banking
records by WikiLeaks that provide a foretaste of what is to come. The
message sent out by the midnight police action at New Delhi's Ramlila
Maidan was profoundly anti-democratic: for those who won't ‘reach out'
to the government by doing a backroom deal, the ‘reining in' will be
by teargas and police lathis, fists, and boots.
A quick look at Shri Ramdev's charter of demands reveals that many of
them are bizarre or over-the-top or don't fit into India's
constitutional scheme. His mobilisation has brought in large numbers
of people who are sincere in their detestation of corruption — and
also communal elements and reactionaries. But every Act and Scene of
the tragicomedy, L'affaire Ramdev, has exposed the political
bankruptcy of the United Progressive Alliance government when it comes
to dealing with the issues of corruption, ministerial misconduct, and
abuse of power. Beleaguered by a multitude of corruption scandals
dominated by the 2G-spectrum allocation scam, it has earned the
reputation for being the most corrupt dispensation independent India
has seen. On top of this, by lurching from one extreme to another in
unprincipled and anti-democratic fashion, it has miscalculated badly
and landed in a deeper mess.
http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/columns/siddharth-varadarajan/article2079406.ece
A weakness born of bad intent
The UPA government's unwillingness to act against the abuse of
political and corporate power has created a vacuum which others are
rushing to fill.
Like millions of others across India, I have spent the past week
repelled by the spectacle of a weak government entering into
improbable contortions over the naive and somewhat bizarre demands of
Baba Ramdev. And when the “toughness” followed in the early hours of
Sunday, it came in a typically cowardly fashion — with police action
in the dead of the night against unarmed supporters who did not pose
an immediate or even potential threat to law and order in Delhi. Kapil
Sibal, the government's chief negotiator, said permission to assemble
at the Ram Lila grounds had been granted for yoga exercises and not
politics. But people in India have the right to assemble peacefully
and to put forward political demands if they so wish. If tomorrow, the
organisers of a classical music concert in Nehru Park put up a banner
demanding a strong Lokpal Bill, will it be OK for the police to wade
in?
The fact that the Manmohan Singh government swung from abject
capitulation to unnecessary confrontation in less than 48 hours does
not surprise me. Its credibility on the issue of corruption is at an
all time low. The pressure it is under has blunted its political
instincts. However, sending four senior ministers to the airport to
welcome the yoga instructor-turned-upstart politician and then
hundreds of policemen to extern him were both acts of gutlessness
which the Congress party will find hard to live down. Particularly
when the Baba was not even serious about the issue of black money.
Everybody with any sense agrees that corruption is a serious issue and
that all efforts must be made to end the curse of black money. But it
is meaningless and even nonsensical to demand the framing of a new law
to confiscate black money when we do not know where this money is, how
much it consists of and who it belongs to. If the authorities had this
information, they would be legally empowered to seize the funds and
place their owners behind bars. But the passage of a new law will not
make the gathering of this information any easier. Either the Baba is
not a very serious person or he has allowed emotion and his broader
political ambitions to cloud his judgment. Which is surely not a good
thing for someone well versed in yoga.
The problem of corruption is not simply one of law but of will. The
hold of black money over the economic and political system of India
cannot be ended so long as the government lacks the political will to
actually crack down on the printing press which generates it:
corruption. Defined broadly as the abuse of political and corporate
power for personal gain, corruption is the glue which binds this
country's political and economic elite at every level of governance
from the block and district up to the Union. Corruption is not an
abstraction. Every crore that a politician or bureaucrat may have
secreted away as “black money” in Switzerland or elsewhere is
organically linked to the tens of crores of rupees in both “black” and
“white” money outside and inside India that businessmen generate by
getting favourable treatment. Corruption was an integral part of the
“license-permit raj” of Nehruvian socialism. But it has grown to
frightening proportions in our liberalised free market economy.
Politics and business have come so close together today that it is
sometimes hard to tell the two apart.
Any serious campaign against corruption by civil society or
politicians, Babas or babalog must zero in on the system which
generates illegal gains for those with power, influence and money.
Such a campaign must demand that action be taken against those
individuals who have abused their authority or sought to subvert laws
and procedures for personal gain. But Ramdev's campaign was not about
this at all. Which was why the government was also quite happy to
engage with him in what it knew would be a meaningless exercise.
While there is always room for legislative clarity in the definition
of offences, the implementation of any new law will remain a prisoner
to this lack of political will unless it allows for independent
investigation and prosecution. A strong Lokpal Bill may help remedy
the situation somewhat but only if the ability of the government to
interfere with the investigation or punishment of well-connected
individuals is ended. Here, it is instructive to see what happened in
a recent case decided by the Lokayukta for the Delhi government,
Justice Manmohan Sarin.
In the same week that the UPA government agreed to discuss the entire
system of taxation, finance, administration and education in the
country with Baba Ramdev, its stiffness of resolve in protecting a
junior politician accused by the Lokayukta of abusing his authority
seems to have passed almost unnoticed.
The case concerned a Delhi minister, Raj Kumar Chauhan, who sought to
interfere with the tax inspectors even as they were conducting a raid
at the premises of a private establishment. A complaint against the
minister was filed by a senior IAS officer, Jalaj Shrivastava, who was
a tax commissioner at the time. After conducting an inquiry, which
included collecting testimony on oath from the officers concerned,
Justice Sarin found that the minister had indeed abused his authority
on behalf of a private party. But his recommendation that Mr. Chauhan
be sacked and proceeded against was rejected by the President of India
on the advice of the Union Ministry of Home Affairs. Evidently, the
MHA found Mr. Chauhan's explanation — that the telephone call he
placed during the raid was nothing other than the routine expression
of concern for a constituent — to be more credible than the exertions
of the Lokayukta or of the upright bureaucrats who put their future
career prospects on the line by becoming whistle-blowers.
The protection afforded to the Delhi minister, who is fairly low down
in the Congress party's food chain, shows the extent to which the
“system” is programmed to circle its wagons at the first sign of
trouble. Even if one dismisses this example because the Lokayukta is
still a young institution, what explains the continuation of Vilasrao
Deshmukh in the Union Cabinet despite the Supreme Court holding him
guilty of abusing his authority when he was Chief Minister of
Maharashtra? Mr. Deshmukh had intervened on behalf of a usurious
moneylender against whom some peasants wished to file a police
complaint. Instructions to go easy were phoned in to the police
station concerned, which diligently made a record of the call in its
daily log book. A system that is keen to stamp out the abuse of
authority — which lies at the root of all corruption — would ask Mr.
Deshmukh to leave the Cabinet now that his culpability has been
confirmed by the highest court. But, alas, the UPA does not run such a
system. Mr. Deshmukh got promoted to a more powerful ministry. And
instructions have been sent out to all police stations in Maharashtra
that they should no longer make a record of every phone call they
receive from ministers.
If Baba Ramdev were really serious about fighting corruption, he would
have hit the UPA hard at the places it was most vulnerable instead of
trying to build his own political constituency through shadow boxing
against imaginary foes like the Cayman Islands and the 1000 rupee
note. As for the Bharatiya Janata Party and RSS, which have tried to
fire from the Baba's shoulder, the less said the better. Why is it
that L.K. Advani, who was the second most powerful man in India for
six years from 1998 to 2004, woke up to the problem of black money
only after his government was voted out of power? If there is a lesson
from the farce that has been enacted in Delhi this past week, it is
this: there is no room for abstraction. Instead of demanding the
“return of black money,” let us ask the government why it has not
signed an agreement with Switzerland of the kind the European Union
has for the repatriation of taxes that the Swiss levy on interest
earned by foreign account holders. Instead of the death penalty for
the “corrupt,” let us ask why the Prime Minister is so slow to act
against ministers who abuse their authority. Let us push for a strong
and empowered Lokpal whose recommendations cannot be thrown into the
dustbin.