Building a working democracy

GoG, Group of Groups, is a new citizens initiative comprising of 51 citizens groups, non-profits, concerned organizations and so on, who are working towards a four point agenda… transparency, accountability, democratic governance and representative democracy.

The group was convened by Rahul Bose with a group of others who found that the response to the 26/11 attacks was overwhelming yet very disorganized. The GoG in that regard will take things a step further and try to garner a political will amongst people to ensure that the Government is held responsible towards its people.

One of the first moves towards this was (and still is) a signature campaign asking CM of Maharashtra Ashok Chavan and Chief Justice of India K.G. Balakrishnan to ensure that the Maharashtra Govt. implements the directives passed by the Supreme Court in 2006 in the 1996 case of Prakash Singh v/s Union of India regarding police reforms. The police reforms if implemented two years ago would have helped the police deal with the attacks much better. The reforms also ask for a accountability of the police officers themselves.

On the 26th of March, volunteers and members of the GoG stood outside CST getting people to sign letters that will be sent to the Chief Minister of Maharashtra and the Chief Justice of India. One of PUKAR’s youth groups conducting a research topic on ‘Problems of families: Mumbai Police’ volunteered collecting signatures for the campaign. There were 7o f them all young students from Patkar College.