The government rode its luck in dealing with the yoga manipulator Ramdev and is lucky to have come through, if a little bruised. But its first instincts in dealing with Ramdev were unbecoming and worrisome. The Manmohan regime could scrape through this past week only because the yoga teacher rapidly revealed his true colours.
He made his aide-de-camp Balakrishna (an acharya who collects licensed weapons) give the government an insincere written undertaking that the Ramlila show would be wound up in a day. He occupied the Ramlila stage with arch communal trouble-maker Sadhvi Rithambara, who had canvassed poisonous ideas in the language of fire and blood on the eve of the Babri demolition. Later, he fled the scene in woman’s disguise when the police came. And now the “Baba” speaks of raising an army — to be instructed in shaastra (scriptures) and shastra (weapons) — in order to confront the government.
No amount of justifying by the BJP of Ramdev’s putative cause of eliminating black money can be convincing in the light of what we now know of the man. He runs a business empire in herbal products (do such people deal in unaccounted cash?), collects virtual land grants in BJP-run states, jets about in private aircraft, and holidays on his own island — all the while attired in saffron robes, cynically deployed to lure unsuspecting Hindu masses into reposing trust in him.
The government could not but have figured the orientation of the “Baba”. Then why did it despatch ministers to receive him at the airport? Why did it hold negotiations with him? Why was Ramdev afforded the opportunity to assemble a significant crowd under false pretexts — a crowd which could have been ignited by a manipulator’s spark? Remember the crowds at Ayodhya?
The government’s foremost failing was its non-political reading of the situation. It thought appeasement might work if Mr Ramdev’s ego was massaged with exaggerated protocol. It reckoned it needed to appease in order to ward off potential trouble because its authority has been fading, eroded by 36 months of sustained price increase that is crushing the poor, and by a spate of corruption cases disturbing the opinion-making middle class.
It is remarkable that the government’s Ramdev strategy was executed behind the back of the Congress. No wonder the party went ballistic when it learned of ministers arriving at the airport to put a halo around the “Baba”, and its general secretary Digvijay Singh began to shoot rapid fire — against Mr Ramdev, and members of the government.