Lokpal: Anti Corruption Agency to Be Built on Existing Practical Experience

Abstract

The all too shrill 'civil society' discourse on corruption, led by Anna Hazare's team, has rekindled public debate on the need for a Lokpal. Corruption and maladministration have become an integral part of our ‘celebrated democracy’. Corruption is one of the prime causes of poverty in India. India’s shining economic growth keeps ironically the largest number of impoverished people in the world. The debate on policy choices and the institutional design for a new anti-corruption agency at the Union and State levels has pervaded every public fora. The ubiquitous debate is characterized by passionate disagreement between familiar opponents who never tire of restating and rehashing their adopted positions informed by their moral or political commitments. Despite the polarized debate there is agreement on the core moral imperative to tackle corruption seriously. However, the debate has quickly moved from this agreed premise to the questionable conclusion that we need a powerful national institution to prosecute and convict the corrupt under the criminal law. In this working paper we hope to bring new insights to this debate by engaging with law in action. While my final analysis and conclusions will follow shortly, I hope to contribute to the present debates with our preliminary findings through this working paper. My analysis suggests that the policy debate on the Lokpal has focused on issues that have been anticipated and largely resolved by existing legislation and institutional design of the Lokayukta in, say, Karnataka and has ignored critical issues that may have little or nothing to do with the design of the Lokpal itself but affect its performance. I conclude that a bill that does not assimilate the experience of existing anti-corruption agencies in states is doomed to fail. Rest of the discussion is organized around discrete themes that have been highlighted in the current Lokpal debate.