This week's "Poke Me", invites your comments on whether Arvind Kejriwal is like a Maoist. The feature will be reproduced on the edit page of the Saturday edition of the newspaper with a pick of readers' best comments. (Readers' comments published in ET)



So be poked and fire in your comments to us right away. Comments reproduced in the paper will be the ones that support or oppose the views expressed here intelligently. Feel free to add reference links etc. in support of your comments.

India's biggest internal security threat — that is what Prime Minister Manmohan Singh called the Maoists. But that was before the Comptroller and Auditor General converted 13 digit numbers into the flotsam and jetsam of a sea of political corruption and Team Anna started its guerrilla attacks on the political establishment.



We don't know if the mirror on the PM's wall now shows a different ugliest of all, but all of them share a common trait. Although their specific methods are deeply flawed in every case, each one contributes to the cause of making India's polity a little fairer.



Maoists make news when they bump off their class enemies, mostly police personnel from families in the same social strata whom the Maoists claim to champion. Few would approve of the Maoist glorification of such bloodshed. At the same time, the Maoists have served to focus attention on the black holes of oppression and deprivation that dot the milky way of India's socio-economic development, whose many scintillating points of light tend to obscure, from public attention, the sheer misery that fills those holes.



Andhra Pradesh managed to beat back the Maoists through a combination of tough policing and extension of the state's presence, delivering governance and welfare to those who were the Maoists' support base. A similar strategy is being sought to be implemented in the states where the Maoists fled when they were chased out of Andhra Pradesh. (However, in Chhattisgarh, at least, the state is focused on repression rather than extension of welfare to tackle the Maoists.)



The official Human Development Report makes it clear that all segments of India's diverse population are on a path of convergent social development, except for the tribes. They remain outside the mainstream of growth and development, welfare and governance. Till the Forest Rights Act of UPA 1 came along, colonial vintage forest laws made their very existence criminal.



Their life depended on patronage, extortion and exploitation by officials and plainsmen. The Maoists offered some respite and lowered the level of exploitation. Unless the tribal people's status vis-à-vis the state is brought on par with that of other citizens, the state cannot vanquish Maoists. This makes Maoists a part of the solution to gross social inequality and exploitation, whether you like Maoist violence or not.



The service rendered by the CAG and India Against Corruption is similar. The CAG's scam diagnosis has been as wrongheaded as the Maoists' methods. But it has served to turn angry public attention on corruption. Loss to the exchequer in telecom is a myth. When the CAG made this charge, using flawed 3G auction proceeds as the basis, it did not take into account the consequences of allocating cheap spectrum, of network economics working to produce faster GDP growth and superior, computerised tax collections, which, in turn, combine to yield far more revenue on a recurrent basis than one-time spectrum auctions can. The chargesheet framed by the CBI court against Raja and others dropped the charge of causing loss to the exchequer. But this is not to say that the licence and spectrum allocation process had been fair and devoid of corruption.



The CAG erred in the coal scam as well. The basic flaw here is inefficient state monopoly in coal, which is unable to supply coal fast enough to meet the demands of the economy. This necessitated a policy of allowing captive mines. Every captive mine vests undue benefit on the allottee. This ability to vest undue benefit is a source of monetisable and monetised patronage for the political class, cutting across party lines.



When Manmohan Singh suggested auctions in 2004, his own partymen and those from the BJP and the Left combined to oppose them and managed to put them off till the law was changed in 2010 to enable auctions. When state governments were opposed to auctions, it amounted to gross impropriety for the CAG to suggest that the Centre should have pressed ahead with auctions, ignoring federal niceties, leave alone political compulsions. And without doubt, corruption was rife in the allocation of coal mines via federal consensus in a screening committee. The CAG's estimates of possible loss from coal allocations, while conceptually flawed, again served to turn public focus on corruption in how the affairs of state are conducted.



Team Anna initially spewed contempt and disdain for the democratic process and acted as if a mob could frame laws. Its identified solution for the problem of corruption, a Lokpal, was naïve and missed the root cause of corruption, the almost exclusive funding of Indian democracy by the proceeds of corruption. Reform of political funding and an expanded, efficient judicial system that disposes of cases beyond final appeal within, say, 18 months, are what the battle against corruption needs. Kejirwal's populist embrace of ‘high' power bills and forcible restoration of power connections cut off for not paying the bill are both suspect and damaging. While tariffs in Delhi have gone up 65% in the last 10 years, the cost of power has gone up 300%.



Delhi's private distribution companies have survived, although running huge deficits, only because they could bring down the power that is not paid for as a proportion of the total generation from 50% to about 15%. The previous state electricity regulator's refusal to hike tariffs between 2005 and 2011 has necessitated sharp increase in tariffs now. If people play populist politics with power, the result would be a crippled power sector producing the most costly power of all: no power. So Kejriwal's tactics are wholly out of place. But he has caught on to a genuine problem of wrong billing that the utilities need to address.



Kejriwal's exposure of Robert Vadra's real estate plays is a repetition of an expose by this newspaper in March 14, 2011 in a story by Rohini Singh and Sruthijith KK. That led to no follow-up by the BJP or any other party. Now, it is the talk of the town. All this puts pressure on political parties to abandon their policy of keeping mum on the misconduct of their respective first families, even while trading loud and loutish charges otherwise, and to reform their funding practices, so that corruption in India ceases to be systemic and becomes opportunistic and incidental.



Kejriwal and the Maoists share these following characteristics: they stand outside the establishment and attack it, their methods are wrong, but the overall purpose they achieve is to cleanse the polity and improve society, and, finally, both run the risk of rendering themselves irrelevant once the problems they focus on get resolved.