Anna Team won’t join hands with Irom Sharmila
Core team meet today*No Swami Agnivesh at meet; right to recall elected representatives high on agenda
Right to recall is high on the agenda of the two-day core committee meeting of Team Anna that begins on Saturday at Ralegan Siddhi. Revealing this, Anna Hazare aide and retired IPS officer Kiran Bedi, who was in the city on Friday on her way to Ralegan Siddhi, Hazare’s model village in Ahmednagar district, also ruled out Anna and the Jan Lokpal movement joining hands with Manipuri activist Irom Sharmila, who has been on a fast for 10 years to get the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) repealed. She also ruled out attendance of Swami Agnivesh.
Right to recall MPs, a kind of reverse voting aimed at empowering people to recall an elected representative who does not deliver, will be a major area of discussion at the core committee meeting, Bedi said interacting with students
“Anna has laid a lot of stress on ‘right to recall’... we can expect the focus of the meeting to be around it and other matters pertaining to electoral reform,” she said.
When asked whether Swami Agnivesh will attend, she said there are no such possibilities and added, “I do not want to comment. It is better if he himself answers...”
Replying to a query from a student, if the Anna and the Jan Lokpal team would join hands with Irom Sharmila, she said one cannot just “rent a cause.” “We don’t want to dilute our anti-corruption campaign. If any movement has too many causes, the focus tends to shift and get diluted.” She said Anna wants to focus on rooting out corruption and that will apply even to the north-east.
On the breach of privilege notice issued to her and some other members of Team Anna for showing MPs in poor light, she said, “I have not yet received any written document saying the order is being withdrawn. So far I have heard this only from the media, but I don’t want to assume anything positive or negative at this stage.”
Responding to another question by a student at the Symbiosis Vishwa Bhavan auditorium, she said although the entire movement may have been perceived in many ways by many people, fasting was last resort that was left before Anna.
“We as a nation do not have a system of open public debates. I don’t know why an organisation like Doordarshan cannot be used for that instead of the system of leaving opinion of civil society completely out of the entire process of drafting a bill. We had been trying to hold such discussion with the government since December. Only after repeated efforts failed had Anna taken up the fast in April to awaken the government. I don’t think there is anything ‘extra-constitutional’ in that,” she explained.