by JAWED NAQVI
ON April 15, 2008, India’s most televised anti-corruption crusader Anna Hazare received the World Bank’s
Jit Gill memorial award for ‘outstanding public service’.
On April 12, 2006, World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz had claimed in Jakarta that corruption was “one of the biggest threats to development” in the Third World.
A neo-con author of America’s invasion of Iraq, which he justified to the world with a lie, was explaining in his new avatar how his brand of development was threatened by corruption. It “weakens fundamental systems, it distorts markets, and it encourages people to apply their skills and energies in non-productive ways”, Wolfowitz proclaimed.
“Civil society, the private sector, borrowing countries and other multilateral banks all have key interests and responsibilities to tackle corruption,” he said. What is this civil society that the World Bank leans on and how does Anna Hazare fit in?
It is well known that the neoliberal worldview and old fashioned democracy in the Third World do not go together. The prescribed preference is for a free-market democracy. Populist idealism of a Nehru or a Bhutto is required to be filtered out.
Pakistan had previously barred the poor from getting into parliament by a harmless sounding fiat — only graduates are allowed in. Did the state first make provisions for everyone to try and be a graduate so as to get an equal chance? A similar demand to exclude India’s poor for their lack of education came from Hazare’s platform last month. But India in any case offers a good glimpse into how the filtering is done more artfully and virtually overnight.
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