Writer Arundhati Roy on Tuesday cast doubts over Anna Hazare’s anti-graft campaign saying the civil society’s Jan Lokpal Bill is a “dangerous piece of legislation”.
“I am skeptical about the legislation (Jan Lokpal Bill) itself for a good number of reasons. I think the legislation is a dangerous piece of work,” Ms. Roy told CNN-IBN in an interview ( >Click here to view the interview ).
Alleging that the civil society used public anger in their favour, the Booker Prize winner novelist said “You (civil society) used the real and legitimate anger of the people against corruption to push through this specific piece of legislation which is very regressive. It could have turned from something inclusive to destructive and dangerous.”
Calling the Hazare-led movement a “copy book World Bank agenda”, Ms. Roy said “It was an NGO-driven movement by Kiran Bedi, (Arvind) Kejriwal and (Manish) Sisodia.
“Three of them run NGOs and all the three core team members are Magsaysay Award winners... World Bank and Ford Foundation fund the anti-corruption campaigns. This is copy book World Bank agenda though they might have not meant it.”
The writer said “Anna Hazare was picked up and propped up as the saint for the masses. He was not the brain behind the movement. We really need to be worried about it.”
She also said the Hazare-led movement was not the same thing as a people’s movement and accused the media of engineering it.
“Obviously people joined in but all of them were not middle class and many came for a sort of reality show well orchestrated by media campaigns,” she said.
“For a nation of one billion people, the media did not find anything else to report. Certain major TV channels campaigned for said to be doing so. That’s a kind of corruption for me at first place,” she said.
“If it was only for TRP then why not to settle for pornography or something which gives more TRP?” she asked.
