The new year’s rites of passage

The flaw in the Anna Hazare movement was that though he could inspire many to campaign against corruption, particularly among the youth and the middle classes, he could not sustain it. This was due as much to his tactic of overusing the weapon of fasting as to his own beliefs and personal make-up. Over the months Mr Hazare has been shown as a deeply conservative man close to the Hindu Right with a penchant for opting for simplistic solutions verging on fascist tendencies.
Mr Hazare does not have to make a deal with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. His own opinions are so close to those of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s mentor that they are made for each other. The tragedy is that a man who could fire the imagination of so many has proved to be a false prophet because he harks back to a mythical past and wants to end corruption by sweeping aside the very structure of India’s parliamentary democracy. If the Emergency of the 1970s was the first major assault on the Indian system, the kind of ombudsman or Lokpal envisaged by Mr Hazare and his team is the second.
Strikingly, the political class composed of the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance was sufficiently rattled to force the government first to elevate Anna and his team to the status of an equal negotiating partner and then to scramble to meet the crusader more than half way through the parliamentary mechanism. With the main Opposition BJP bent on playing an opportunistic game by running with the hare and hunting with the hounds, the stage was set for the showdown.
No one had the time to consider how the new Lokpal superstructure would fit into the scheme of parliamentary democracy. The Lokpal Bill passed by the Lok Sabha was a patch-up job while deliberations in the Rajya Sabha were largely an exercise by the Opposition parties in scoring points against the UPA, which had little option but to make sure the debate led nowhere. Somewhat strangely, the BJP was pushing amendments which would make the parliamentary system unworkable with such gay abandon that it seemed it had little hope of coming to power at the Centre for a second stint.
Where does the country go from here? Both the government and the Opposition are publicly resolved to pass a strong Lokpal Bill. With the two sides having gained several months to have second thoughts on how to marry the Lokpal to a functioning parliamentary democracy, will they use the time wisely? The prospect is far from bright because the string of announced state Assembly elections, starting with Uttar Pradesh, will distract the attention of most parties. Depending upon the results, the Lokpal proposal will again be subjected to hurried strategies.
The main problem is that the Lokpal has become a symbol of a panacea for all that is rotten in the Indian political system. Mr Hazare and his team had succeeded in selling the measure as a cure for all ailments. Rationally, either the Lokpal superstructure would become an unaccountable czar that would crush parliamentary democracy or become another army of bureaucrats that would seek to find a role. Everybody knows no Lokpal, however superhuman, can abolish corruption, and Mr Hazare’s cure of arbitrarily beating and imprisoning an army of serving ministers and officials would not fit into the Indian system.
We have witnessed two other interesting phenomena. Riding on the Anna movement, his team members took on a life of their own and embroidered and often exaggerated his propensities. Arvind Kejriwal led the chorus of working against the Congress candidate in the Hisar by-election with his expected defeat even without Anna Team’s help. The irony, of course, was that the winning candidate enjoyed the reputation of being even more corrupt. Mr Hazare has again given the call for a vendetta against the Congress in the Assembly elections. His explanation of why it was necessary for the movement to become a political formation indirectly to support the BJP and its mentor is far from convincing.
For the present, Mr Hazare has painted himself into a corner and one hopes that as he recoups his health, he will seek a way out. Perhaps the fact that his movement has peaked, as the shortened Mumbai fast’s poor showing revealed, will give him time for reflection. The omens are not promising. The themes he emphasises tend to be repetitive: the success of his village development model and methods of converting drunkards into teetotallers, his own frugal living and renunciation of most worldly possessions and his success in having a string of Cabinet ministers sacked. He suggests that the last are the trophies he seeks to multiply manifold.
The BJP’s fallacy is in believing that it can ride on the Anna wave irrespective of the damage it does to the country’s political structure by elevating opportunism to a new level. The main Opposition party has an obvious constituency it is fond of pandering to. But Mr Hazare’s army of mostly middle class young people are forward, not backward, looking and will turn away from a philosophy that emphasises caste and communal divides. Fascist methods of solving political problems could be attractive to a section of people but are hardly likely to become a rallying cry for an anti-corruption crusade.
A major task before the ruling Congress Party is to set its own house in order. More and more, the Trinamul Congress is acting like an opponent, rather than an ally, of the coalition, knocking down major proposed legislation. The unkindest cut was helping the Opposition parties to sabotage the Lokpal Bill after supporting it in the Lok Sabha. If Mamata Banerjee continues to tread on the same path, the UPA might be forced to go for early elections. The temptation will be irresistible if the Congress does well in the Assembly elections. The next few months will be significant in more ways than one and may well determine the longevity of UPA-2.

The writer can be contacted at snihalsingh@gmail.com