Anna: We need right to reject and right to recall

Ending his 13-day fast today, social activist Anna Hazare declared his next line of action -- campaign for electoral reforms and people’s participation in allocation of land resources, considered key to fight corruption. Chetan Chauhan reports.

Updated on: Aug 28, 2011, 23:32:20 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Ending his 13-day fast on Sunday, social activist Anna Hazare declared his next line of action -- campaign for electoral reforms and people’s participation in allocation of land resources, considered key to fight corruption.

"I am glad that Annaji took up these issues," said Trilochan Sastry, former dean of Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, and founder member of civil society group Association for Democratic Reforms. "We need a comprehensive bill on electoral reforms like the Lokpal Bill to check electoral corruption."

Sastry’s sentiments were amply portrayed by Hazare in the morning when he said electoral reforms are need of the hour to weed out corruption. "We have to reform electoral system. We need 'right to reject' and 'right to recall'," Hazare said.

He outlined what it meant when he said that right to recall would be for those elected and right to reject will be a column in a ballot paper which would ensure that the voter has a right to say that he does not like any of the listed candidates.

Right to recall is applicable in some states such as Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh in case of elected representatives in the Panchayati Raj bodies but is not applicable in case of MPs and MLAs.

Although the Election Commission of India provide a register where a voter can lodge his or her dislike for listed candidates but having a Right to Reject would mean declaring an election void, if more than half of the votes polled are in the category none of the above.

"If the majority in a constituency says that they reject a candidate, even then the election should be cancelled. How much money they (candidates) will distribute? Once the candidate spends Rs 10 crore for one election and if the election is cancelled, then right sense will dawn upon them," Hazare said.

Hazare even has Election Commission’s support on the issue of right to reject. "Currently there is no way for voters to express their dislike for all candidates," said the commission’s note on electoral reforms in 2010.

"In such a system there could be a provision whereas if a certain percentage of the vote is negative/neutral, then the election results could be nullified and a new election conducted,” the commission said.

Hazare’s call for listening to voice of gram sabha (village body), where allowing extraction of natural resources is already a matter of concern for the government. "We are coming with land acquisition law providing for consent of gram sabha," said rural development minister Jairam Ramesh. There is Forest Rights Law, which makes consent of gram sabha mandatory to allowing any mining and industrial activity on forest land inhabited by tribal communities.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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