End of a movement?
Undone by internal contradictions, Anna Hazare’s “India Against Corruption” movement appears to have hit enough roadblocks to suffer an existential threat. Anna has now distanced himself from Arvind Kejriwal’s fledgling political party with a definitive message.
This could have been foreseen: what began as a mass movement against corruption in high places later took a political turn with Mr Kejriwal getting ambitious on seeing the huge initial public response to IAC’s campaign. Anna is so steeped in Gandhian ways that he was never likely to accept this transformation of the social movement he spearheaded into a political party. But a disillusioned former bureaucrat who shaped her image as a corruption fighter, a lawyer with his own agenda and a maverick who saw an opportunity to pursue a path to power were hardly likely to be content with mere non-political social activism.
However idealistic their founders might sound, such public movements even against corruption have not been known to succeed in India, where the venality of power-wielding politicians seems to have almost become the norm. It is indeed a regrettable turn of events for a social movement that began so promisingly in bringing diverse elements together from across the country in the common cause of stopping politicians and bureaucrats from getting away with financial misdeeds as avowedly exposed in a series of major scams of recent vintage, beginning with 2G and spilling over into Coalgate. It appears the death knell has now been sounded for the Anna movement.
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