Arundhati ‘jealous’ of our support: Prashant Bhushan

“When she (Arundhati Roy) sees that this campaign is being supported by the media,this is a campaign also being supported by a section of corporates,this is a campaign being supported by the middle class,she starts to say things,” said Bhushan.

“She says even the World Bank is supporting this anti-corruption campaign,so how can there be anything good in this?” he added.

On Tuesday,writer Arundhati Roy 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 sceptical about the legislation (Jan Lokpal Bill) itself for a good number of reasons. I think the legislation is a dangerous piece of work,” Roy said in an interview.

Alleging that the civil society used public anger in its 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,” 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.”

She 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 worry about it. 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.

Roy also said that commercialisation of media could also be viewed as a form of corruption.

Bhushan,however,voiced his support for the media,and said since media is the fourth pillar of democracy; an independent media counsel would certainly be required to regulate its activities.

“And therefore,it (media) certainly needs to be regulated by an independent authority. The question was whether it should be regulated by the Jan Lokpal or whether it should be regulated by an independent specialised agency and we thought that it’s perhaps better to leave it out of the ambit of the Lokpal and allow it to be regulated by another independent statutory body,like a separate media counsel,” said Bhushan.

Bhushan lauded the role of the media during the campaign and added that the anti-corruption movement gained momentum due to the extensive coverage given to it by the media.

“The campaign is to a large extent a creation of the media and in the same way it has been said that the media has manufactured consent. It is being said that the media can also manufacture a movement of the kind that we have seen today,” he said.