We’ll attend meet, says Team Anna

Softening their stand, the civil society members in the joint drafting panel on the Lokpal Bill decided to join talks a day after the Centre conducted the meeting without them.

Updated on: Jun 8, 2011, 02:28:10 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Softening their stand, the civil society members in the joint drafting panel on the Lokpal Bill decided to join talks a day after the Centre conducted the meeting without them. “We’ve no intention to leave the joint drafting committee,” RTI activist and member of the joint drafting panel Arvind Kejriwal said after a meeting of Team Anna Hazare.

On Sunday, Hazare annou-nced boycotting the meetings saying they will not join the meet till the Centre clarified its stand on inclusion of the Prime Minister’s Office and judiciary in the ambit of the Lokpal and live telecast of the meetings.

The U-turn came after HRD minister and a member of the joint drafting panel Kapil Sibal said the panel would finalise the draft of the bill by the end of June, with or without the civil society members.

Kejriwal said they boycotted Monday’s meeting to protest the forceful eviction of Baba Ramdev and accused Sibal of being arrogant for saying they will not cajole the civil society members anymore.

Hazare’s team was also furious at the denial of permission to hold protest at Jantar Mantar on Wednesday and described it violation of citizen’s right granted under the Constitution. Instead, the police allowed them to hold a protest at Rajghat.

The day-long hunger strike is to protest the crackdown against Baba Ramdev. “We are not fighting with them (police),” Prashant Bhushan, another member of the team said.

In the evening, committee’s co-chairperson Shanti Bhushan wrote to finance minister Pranab Mukerjee, the other co-chairperson of the joint panel, on differences between the Centre and civil society.

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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