The Iconoclast The epitaph?

Anna Hazare : The pied piper of Ralegaon Sidhi There is all round consensus that the Anna Hazare storm has blown over. 2011 was the year of Anna Hazare who burst on the scene with his fast unto death at Jantar Mantar. Anna Hazare was demanding the enactment of the Lok Pal Act which the parliament had been stalling for as many as four decades. The bill had been introduced in parliament as many as eight times since the mid-1960s and every time it had lapsed without the parliament passing the same. Anna Hazare also wanted not just a Lok Pal but a strong Lok Pal Act and he even presented a draft called the Jan Lok Pal Bill to the government. The fast ended only on government setting up a joint drafting committee with equal representatives from amongst the government ministers and Anna Hazares team. Suddenly, Anna Hazare had emerged as a kind of a super Indian in the footsteps of Mahatma Gandhi, Vinoba Bhave and Jaiprakash Narayan, who could make the mighty government of India bend to his wishes with his sheer moral strength. How did this happen? To understand that, one has to go back to the closing months of 2010. Well, the whole country was engulfed by a sense of shame over the fiasco of the Commonwealth Games where billions were believed to have been siphoned away. The 2G scam involving a loss to the exchequer of Rs.1.76 lakh crore had literally stunned the country into a sense of disbelief. The Adarsh Cooperative Housing Society scam in Mumbai, where the top army generals, politicians and bureaucrats had joined hands to whisk away a priceless piece of prime government land and several other scams had left the people wondering about what was going on around them. The nation was feeling revolted at the misdeeds of those in power. It was ready to entrust the fight against the prevailing corruption to a selfless, relatively unknown entity like Anna Hazare who had shown his willingness to take up cudgels on behalf of the people of India. The people were willing to do his bidding and to follow him where ever he would choose to lead them. Here was a simple old man of 73 from a remote village in Maharashtra, without any material possessions and political ambitions, who was willing to fast unto death so that his countrymen could live a life of dignity and honour. The government went through the motions of discussing the draft with the Anna Hazare team and came up with the proposal which would have resulted in the enactment of some kind of a Lok Pal Act, though not strictly in conformity with Anna Hazares Jan Lok Pal Bill. Anna Hazare cried foul and resumed his fast, this time at Delhis Ramlila ground. The fast went on for nearly two weeks, forcing the parliament to adopt a sense of the House resolution, conceding almost each and every demand made by Anna Hazare.

Yet, the resolution was clothed in verbiage that left room for the government to tweak the draft of the bill in respect of key clauses. When the bill was finally introduced in parliament, it bore very little resemblance to the Jan Lok Pal bill and Anna Hazare announced a three-day fast in Mumbai starting on the day the bill was to be taken up in the Lok Sabha for discussion and voting. The bill collapsed in the Rajya Sabha. So did Anna Hazares fast in Mumbai which failed to attract any significant support or enthusiasm that had been noticed during his earlier fast at the Ramlila ground in Delhi. How and why did this happen? First and foremost, Anna Hazare is no Mahatma Gandhi and his key teammates, Arvind Kejriwal, Kiran Bedi and Prashant Bhushan are not a patch on Gandhis team of Jawaharlal Nehru, Sardar Patel or Maulana Azad. He had got an overwhelming response from the concerned Indians because his timing was right and because he articulated his concern against corruption in high places which was uppermost in every Indian mind during 2011. Secondly, even though most people had been silently supporting him on his demand for a strong Lok Pal bill, the attendance at the venues of his fast was never really overwhelming by Indian standards. His first fast at Jantar Mantar never attracted more than a few thousand supporters at any given time. The crowds at the Ramlila ground did keep swelling as the fast continued beyond the first week and reached a peak of 60 to 70 thousand towards the end. But even that is not a big enough number as compared to the crowds which political rallies addressed by prominent national or state leaders like Mamta Bannerjee or Jailalitha or Karunanidhi or Narendra Modi or Prakash Singh Badal draw in their respective turfs, even if one leaves out the massive crowds that greet national figures like Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi or Atal Behari Vajpayee. Thirdly, Anna Hazare was essentially a creation of the visual media. He was systematically presented as a figure larger than life. The TV studios and their anchors were all the time deferential not only to him but also to his team members and to anyone supporting him in the TV studio debates. His fasts presented interesting visuals and a story continuously evolving over days and weeks and months and the 24/7 news channels could afford to miss it only at their peril. With the crowds refusing to show up in Mumbai, there was no visual merit in whipping up the Anna hysteria. Fourthly, Anna Hazare failed to take into account the full might of a modern state before confronting it almost single handed. When he first burst into the national consciousness, the government thought it politic to engage him politically to see if it could incorporate him into its own half-hearted fight against corruption in high places. When that strategy failed, the government tried to divide the movement by propping up Baba Ramdev as an alternative and then using force to disrupt and destroy the latters rally against black money as well. Simultaneously, the government also unleashed its dirty tricks department on Anna Hazare and his team members, systematically leaking out stories about their own alleged malfeasance to cast doubts about their own integrity in the public mind. The idea was to level the playing field and to show to the people that their new-found messiahs

themselves had feet of clay. The leaks about Kiran Bedis padded-up traveling allowance claims, the land deals of Shanti and Prashant Bhushan and the service record of Arvind Kejriwal, did somewhat succeed in planting doubts in the public mind. Finally, in order to bring the curtain finally down on the entire Anna Hazare saga, if for no other reason, the government decided to get its own Lok Pal bill passed. The government calculated that what the people of India were interested in were some measures, howsoever half-hearted, aimed at reducing corruption and not necessarily the passing of Anna Hazares Jan Lok Pal bill. Anna Hazare, too, seems to have made several strategic mistakes. He should have been content laying down a few red lines which the government would have found difficult to cross. Instead, he chose to present the bill itself to the parliament which argued that, as an institution representing the entire diversity of India, it could not abdicate its functions and its responsibilities to a handful of un-elected social activists. My way or the high way approach is generally seen as arrogance and never works with the people of India. The support that Anna Hazare got from the people, silent as well as vocal, did give Team Anna ideas of the power they had come to wield over the mighty government of India. In television debates they started displaying some kind of obduracy and a totally uncompromising attitude towards the political class. Now, people of India never put up with arrogance of any kind on the part of their leaders. Gandhiji stayed humble all through. Yes, people can be swayed into blind following by leaders like Gandhiji or Jawaharlal Nehru or Indira Gandhi or even Rajiv Gandhi or Atal Bihari Vajpayee or V P Singh. But that happens only when the leader promises them a better life on multiple fronts. Anna Hazare cannot act like a pied piper on the single issue of a Jan Lok Pal bill.