Hazare's Lost Cause
The idiotic Facebook, Twitter, and ‘mombatti’ revolutionaries are at it again, getting their high, supporting the cause of Anna Hazare to bring in the Jan Lokpal Bill (JLP) and create the office of Lokpal, the anti-corruption investigator and judge, with constitutional powers. It is like a déjà vu. Do you recall the scenes at the Gateway of India in Mumbai to protest against the Government’s apathy and indifference to the issue of terrorism in the aftermath of the 26/11 Mumbai attacks? What has happened since then? Nothing. The media had called that a revolution too. What happened to that revolution? The then Home Minister of Maharashtra is back in the saddle and we remain as vulnerable as ever to terrorist attacks.
Look at this closely. The faces of celebrity socialites that we see today on TV exhorting fervent support to Anna Hazare, were as vocal at that time as well. I saw Shobha De, well made-up, and blinged, appearing in one of the shows, expressing her support to Hazare. Just a few days ago in her column in a newspaper she was gushing over Dhoni and Poonam Pandey, the streaker who did not streak. There was not a single mention of Anna Hazare or Jan Lokpal Bill in that column, then or ever. Today, she is an anti-corruption revolutionary, so are big time tweeters like Pritish Nandi, Anupam Kher, Shekhar Kapur, and Aamir Khan and a whole lot of them. I am sure many of these neo-revolutionaries have not even read the draft of JLB. Anupam Kher has certainly not read it. And we see this guy in a beehive hairdo called Lord Meghnad Desai, the armchair ideologue, ubiquitous at every TV show, delivering revolutionary homilies. We also watched a lawyer like Harish Salve, termed as a Supreme Court fixer by none other than Ram Jethmalani, pontificating over the issue. And we may soon hear that the ‘super model’ Poonam Pandey will now be streaking on Janpath in support of Hazare’s cause.
Let us see how many more will join this parade and charade. The candle-burners of India Gate were till a few days ago busy dancing on roads with painted faces, carrying Indian flags, cheering Dhoni and his dhurandhars. They could not differentiate between Anna Hazare and Nana Patekar. The issue of corruption was far from their minds. They have come out in support of Hazare now, calling him the new father of India, and a reincarnation of Gandhi. How many more fathers and mothers will this country have? How much more shall we bastardise this ancient nation? And when shall we stop taking cues from TV anchors to form our opinions?
The Indian media, after the ICC World Cup, has found its new TRP booster dose, and is exploiting the opportunity to the hilt, doing everything to turn a serious issue into a farce. And it is a deliberate move. These shenanigans are designed to blunt the attack on the corrupt ruling establishment by branding every political dispensation as corrupt. That is what Manmohan Singh and Sonia tried to do when scams after scams involving thousands of crores came tumbling out of their corruption cupboards. They have assigned the task to the media now. It is the Congress government, its leaders, and allies who are corrupt. It is Sonia, Manmohan, Pawar, Karunanidhi, Mayavati, Sibal, and a host of others who are corrupt. It is the Congress party that has nurtured a corrupt political culture in this country and is actually a fountainhead of corruption. It has formed a nexus of corrupt babus, industrialists, judges, pet election commissioners, pliable CVCs, caste and creed vote bankers, NGOs, media houses, and blatantly pro-establishment journalists like Pranoy Roy, Barkha Dutt, and Rajdeep Sirdesai.
Hazare and Baba Ramdeo, both, seem to have lost an opportunity. Instead of building a strong, well-organised, and coordinated grassroots movement, they have allowed themselves to be turned into symbols of 'sadak chaap' intellectually ludicrous anti-corruption crusade for the benefit of the media, and SMS and social network junkies. They have harmed their great nationalist cause by allowing it to be trivialised and tamashised. They have played into the hands of those who they profess to fight. They have mistaken the media-manipulated mass frenzy as a sign of a great rebellion against a corrupt and insensitive ruling establishment.
The objective of the present movement is extremely limited. This entire ballyhoo and idiot box mass upsurge is about what? It is about forming a committee to draft a bill. What happens if the government decides to form that committee? And it is going to do exactly that. All the tamasha at jantar mantar will come to an end in an instant, just in time for the IPL to begin. Sonia will probably take some time off from her election campaigns and walk down to Jantar Mantar to offer Hazare a glass of juice with a government notification to include ‘civil society’ people in a committee formed to draft the new Lokpal Bill. And that will end all the crusades against corruption. The media may even call it the historic meeting of the Italian ‘Mother India’ and the new ‘Father of The Nation’ from Ralegaon Siddhi, the twin crusaders against the monster of corruption. In fact, Sonia’s and Rahul’s publicists will be working on this now, thinking of ways to milk Hazare's media movement to their advantage. If they did it during the ICC World Cup, sending her out on the streets atop the bonnet of a jeep, they can do it again to convert this fountainhead of corruption into the biggest crusader against it. And the nation will have to suffer this cruel and humiliating joke of a carefully managed and manipulated media establishment.
The new Gandhi, Hazare, is talking about a ‘jail bharo andolan’ now. Baba Ramdeo is mulling over starting a political party around him. Both of them have got carried away by their motley crowds of supporters and have overreached and may get discredited soon. The campaign has already begun. The other day a muslim Congress leader called Anna Hazare a stooge of the RSS. He had his reasons. Hazare's fasting venue has the portrait of Bharat Mata in the backdrop and his followers shout slogans like 'Vande Mataram' and 'Bharat Mata Ki Jai', known RSS cries of nationalism.
There is this news about Anna Hazare’s name being suggested as the chairman of the proposed bill drafting committee. This will be a stupid thing to do. By God's grace, Hazare has rejected the idea. It would have dented this honest and simple man’s credibility and whatever moral authority he has. The degeneration of these icons will be a big loss to the nation. We need people like Anna Hazare and Ramdeo, though they are not in the same league or as credible as JP, yet useful enough to impact the media-crazy morons of the present age who are needed to build a critical mass to add momentum to any movement.
The only credible anti-corruption jihad in the history of India was the JP movement that changed the political map of the country within a few years of its launch. Most of the protesting kids have not even heard of it. Jai Prakash Narayan called it a movement for Total Revolution. It was not him who started it though. He was merely invited to give a speech in Gujarat during the Nav-Nirman agitation. That is when the student activists in Bihar decided to ask him to lead their agitation against corruption in their state. They needed a credible icon to ensure they were taken seriously. The JP movement finally led to the imposition of internal emergency, and the resultant fracture in the electoral arithmetic of the Congress party. It ushered in the era of multi-party rule, which certainly was a positive development for our democratic polity. The idea of establishing a Lokpal got its most serious consideration during the Janata Party regime that was brought down by a conspiracy of the Congress party.
JP was a grassroots activist, an intellectual, and an ideologue, with a definite and grand political and social vision. He was a great advocate of participatory democracy. The main plank of his anti-corruption crusade was the people’s right to recall their corrupt and inept representatives. This probably is the only way to empower the electorate that is disenfranchised for five years after having voted once. The electronic age can make it possible. Nobody is talking about that anyway. And nobdoy challenges the imperious spokespersons of the ruling party who keep harping on the theme of the supremacy of the Parliament and the exclusive rights of the elected representatives to legislate the laws of the land.
JP had to be persuaded to lead the students, and his involvement provided the movement a political gravitas, and the fight against corruption assumed the seriousness it deserved. What is happening today is just the opposite. An establishment-friendly media is trivializing the anti-corruption crusade either in its subtle and devious ways, or else out of its essential stupid character. The fact is that the media is a part of the corrupt nexus of ruling politicians, bureaucrats, and businessmen, and has always advanced their anti-people agenda, be it the Indo-US Nuclear Treaty, or the freeing of Indian markets to let the TNCs and MNCs re-colonize this nation through the back door.
The idiotic kids who are basking in the glory of media attention will not understand this. Someone like Arvind Kejariwal must. This kind of media-driven frenzy leads nowhere. A lot of ground work has to be done. Otherwise, such spontaneous movements tend to fizzle out and with that you lose the opportunity to set in motion the forces that can bring about a real change. The media brands Kejariwal as an RTI activist. What has RTI activism done so far? What has it changed? It may have unearthed a few acts of malfeasance here and there, but has made no difference to the life of ordinary people of this country. It may have provided Kejariwal a raison d'être, but is of no use to those who are at the receiving end of the corrupt system and have neither the energy nor time to turn into full-time ‘RTI Activists’ and perpetual litigants to address the issues of administration that should be resolved in a normal course without breaking heads. The systemic bottlenecks are too many and fighting against them and surviving at the same time is impossible.
We need to change the corrupt political establishment led by the Congress party to deal effectively with these systemic bottlenecks. We must end the permit-quota raj forever that perpetuates the nexus of the corrupt. We must redefine the role of the government and other pillars of democracy as the trustees of the larger public good and the well being of the lay citizenry alone. It can only be done if we have a clearly defined road map and a long-term plan to reform and revolutionise our democracy, governance, and polity. We must also be willing to carry on a long sustained struggle to achieve these ends.
Here is an honest suggestion to film stars like Aamir Khan. If they are truly serious about supporting Anna Hazare's fight against corruption, they should stop twitting, and lead a silent march to the Gateway of India in Mumbai this weekend before the young tony revolutionaries lose interest in their newfound past time.
And I will tell you the reality behind the TV footage of mass upsurge, being shown continuously on various TV news channels, some other day after the return of peace.
RKS
