India Against Corruption, the platform that was created under the
initiative of Arvind Kejriwal in association with nine others, and its
assets are now in danger of being torn asunder between the supporters of
Arvind Kejriwal and those who back Anna Hazare. The assets include the
name India Against Corruption, its Facebook page, the lakhs of rupees
collected as donations in the name of IAC and now, an NGO started by
Kejriwal.
The donations received by IAC during 2011 and 2012 amount to Rs 1.48
crore. These remain with the Public Cause Research Foundation.
An accounts statement by PCRF about the money received and spent till
September 2011 shows that while the IAC received donations worth Rs 2.5
crore, half of it got spent.
Kiran Bedi has been tweeting that she was looking for a new office for
IAC, now that the IAC movement was free and so on. This has angered many
in the Kejriwal camp.
“I am a member of the IAC from the beginning and I have worked for it. I
am not going to join any political party or fight elections but I also
don’t consider Kiran Bedi as my leader. So why should she look for a new
office for IAC?” asks Bibhav Kumar, a member of the IAC.
Devender Sharma, one of the earliest of the ten people, who joined
Kejriwal to form the IAC says that there is no denying the fact Arvind
Kejriwal initiated the process and built the movement. But now that he
has chosen a political option he should let go of the movement.
Another former member says that Kiran Bedi is right when she says that
the IAC and its money now belong to Anna and the movement that is being
led by Anna.
Sources said that Kiran Bedi had openly said at a meeting with the rest
of the team that the money should come to Anna. When asked about
the fate of IAC’s assets, she said she did not know.
But what is clear is that Kejriwal is not going to let go IAC, a
movement he conceived and nursed for over two years, so easily.
Kejriwal gets back Facebook page but content lost
Arvind Kejriwal controls the Facebook page that was taken away by its
maker Shivendra Singh Chauhan. Soon the matter is to be battled out in
courts, says Chauhan. Three days ago the Facebook page of IAC just
vanished into thin air. He had managed to retain control on the page
saying that he started it much before the movement took off.
But three days ago, through a unique strategy, the Kejriwal camp merged
the page to the new IAC page that Kejriwal had recently started.
Facebook has a provision for merging smaller and similar pages with a
bigger page. But in this case, with the connivance of a government
agency, Kejriwal got a bigger page merged into his new Facebook page.
The result is that all the 500,000-odd followers on the original
Facebook page of IAC are now seen on the recent page of Kejriwal called
Final War Against Corruption. The latter had only 60,000 followers till
the merger of the two pages.
“This is betrayal of the privacy and freedom of the lakhs of people who
found themselves herded into another page without their knowledge,” says
Chauhan. “We are consulting lawyers and a criminal case can be filed
against Kejriwal for this.”
“But the worst part of this is the fact that the original IAC Facebook
page which documented the entire history of the movement is now
destroyed forever. It cannot ever be retrieved. All they got were its
followers. The data is lost as a small page cannot accommodate a bigger
page,” says Chauhan who has already launched a new page today for Anna’s
movement called www.facebook.com/Janlokpaal.
“We worked for two years to get those followers. Now they are lost
forever,” says Chauhan. When told that Kejriwal also lost the fruits of
his labour, he said that it was his choice.
Says a former founding member of IAC: It is a classic case of one man starting something so brilliant and destroying it himself. Source-
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