POLITICIANS AND PEOPLE'S TEMPLE

Politicians fume when shown the mirror,
But will not fumigate Parliament ever;
We are supreme! they scream in horror,
Even thieves, rapists and criminals clever.

Unelected tyrants! challenge us not,
We are the voice of the indigent lot;
Ask not why the PM hasn't fought,
Or even the opposition’s main mascot!

Parliament, recall, is the people’s temple,
Their will outsiders have no right to tamper;
We high priests can loot and trample,
You keep voting us, so shut up and scamper.

Join us, they taunt, if you want to see change,
Coming from them it does sound strange.
Their game is of power and  the play is of gain;
The Church has appropriated God again.
'

ADVANI'S VYARTH YATRA

It is not Sonia Gandhi alone who has returned to a changed India after spending five weeks at an undisclosed location for an unknown surgery. Lal Krishna Advani too is in the same boat, despite having been in Delhi all the time.

Whether Sonia Gandhi will be allowed to see the clear writing on the wall by the wall of advisors who have kept her insulated from the people for all these years, will only be known in the days and months, not years, to come. But there is clear evidence that Advani’s advisors are hell bent on guiding him into cuckoo land.

The grand old man of the Bharatiya Janata Party, manifestly enthused by the unexpected popular upsurge against UPA's corruption, -- and sensing an early collapse of Sonia’s government-- wants to drive his Rath into it, in the hope that he will be able to capture the imagination of the people once again, and ride on the tidal wave that Anna has generated, to 7 Race Course Road, at long last.

Perhaps he needs a badly needed reality check, to finally realise that he is Mr. Rip Wan Winkle waking up in a new, restless India, impatient with and unaccepting of the ways and intentions of politicians, and the slow pace at which most of them are delivering less than satisfactory results. No longer can Indians be fooled with worn out clichés and excuses; dramatically better results of good, clean governance are there for all to see in some states, and there is no place for the rest to hide. Series of scams have only heightened the culpability of the corrupt and the inefficient focused on making quick mega bucks.

Advani is a pillar of the old guard, of continuation of the old ways, of status quo -- anti-change. Ironically, that is precisely what a man half his age also symbolises, despite perfunctory and half-baked noises to the contrary. That is mainly why Rahul Gandhi has failed to enthuse India despite seven years of perhaps the most sustained and carefully calibrated media campaign to project him as a modern youth icon, as the great new hope for India. Neither Advani nor Rahul have anything new to offer to India; neither of them carry the credibility that is needed to carry the masses with conviction. For different reasons, both are trapped in and bound to the past, both have skeletons on their backs.

Surprisingly, it has taken a 73 year old man to awaken We The People -- the youth, the poor and even the privileged -- to the realisation that politicians across the spectrum are retarding India’s growth. Army man and Gandhian Anna Hazare has most unexpectedly emerged from a small village in Maharashtra to shake Delhi’s politicians like no has since 1947, like no politician thought was possible before August 16, 2011. In 13 days flat, he has forever changed India, and there is no going back. Unless, of course, Anna’s advisors too fall prey to inducements of different kinds and corrupt the purity of the energy that he has generated and spread across India.

The stench of corruption emanates from all parties. The Congress smells the foulest because it is in power and also because its government, micro-managed by a paranoid Sonia Gandhi, has broken all records of plunder with an air of arrogance and shamelessness that has sent shudders down India’s spine. The BJP too now looks no better than a clone of the Congress. Its dramatics in Jharkhand, Karnataka and Uttarakhand have been as bad as those of the Congress anywhere. The manner in which its central leadership has scored self-goals repeatedly and made the party look even worse than an exposed Congress, has not escaped attention of the people.

In this light, for Advani to undertake a a rath yatra against corruption is akin to a corrupt man protesting against his own corruption! That he has manifestly been motivated to do so by the caucus that has his ear exposes another yawning hole in BJP’s armour: it has no other leader who believes he/she can connect to the people and carry them along his/her rath, much less to the voting booth – the real reason for the nautanki no one is going to buy any longer.

Does anyone believe Sonia Gandhi when she says she will fight corruption? Similarly, it seems they don't believe Sushma Swaraj or Arun Jaitley, BJP's self-appointed prime contenders for the Prime Minister’s chair. The duo tested their ability to convince and lead people in two popular causes they thought they would be able to: protest against price-rise and the Tiranga Yatra to Lal Chowk. They know they cannot connect and that people will most likely boo them should they lead a copy-cat anti-corruption campaign. Hence they have put Advani’s head on the block; if he succeeds, they get the spoils; if he fails, the brickbats will be his alone. Win-win.

Yes, some surveys show that there is a huge swing away from the Congress. But Advani should not mistake it as a swing for the BJP. The swing is for real change, not for BJP, not for continuation of the old ways, no matter which political party is in power. If people are punishing Congress today, they will doubly and even more swiftly punish BJP tomorrow if it continues to remain no more than ‘B’ team of the Congress.

Advani needs to realise that the wind of the anti-corruption movement is in Anna’s sails, not his. He is only becoming a fall guy for BJP’s self-goal scoring, self-centered caucus. People of Anna’s India are not going to vote for Advani as PM now. They are yearning for change; he represents stasis. He will, therefore, do well to put his personal ambitions aside, call off his Vyarth Yatra and deploy his energies to get his party rid of dead wood and worse.
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INDIAN DEMOCRACY: CHANGE IS HERE

Well before Change arrives, discrete signs of the impending tumult start appearing, with increasing frequency and magnitude. Unfortunately, it is often in hindsight that seemingly stray straws are seen for what they really are: pearls on one string.

In 1947, we inherited -- and have persisted with -- 19th century colonial laws, administration, judiciary, police and other institutions of governance. In 1950, we gave ourselves a constitution that promised democracy to the people, but through a copy-pasted model that was developed over centuries by and for a tiny, almost-unitary, and culturally very different society for itself.

In sum, for creating an India of tomorrow, we placed our trust in instruments of yesterday.

The constitution has held till now, as have the electoral process and other institutions of state. And this achievement, more than anything else, is being used by those who have most benefitted from it to resist sorely needed changes which will, and must, pull them down from the colonial perches they seamlessly slid into after Independence.

Ironically, the Change that is threatening them was actually unleashed by them to shape public opinion and discourse to suit their requirements.

The completely unexpected and unprecedented support that Anna Hazare’s fight against corruption has generated contains some extremely important lessons, some of which I had discussed in the previous post. Perhaps the most fundamental message that the hundreds of thousands of young men and women out on the streets today are conveying is that they are no longer ready to wait indefinitely for politicians to deliver on issues that affect them directly, and are ready to force Change, if required.

Supremacy of Parliament and sanctity of the electoral process are the two arguments that opponents of Change offer to deride this upsurge, if not uprising. MPs are elected by the people to frame laws, win elections if you have a problem with what they are doing: this is their standard line.

Unfortunately for them, this is not 1947 or 1950, when a long oppressed, diffident people, led by outstanding, unelected leaders, were elated with the first flushes of freedom. The world has changed beyond imagination in the last six decades, and two generations later, the youth are not timorous like their grand parents -- they have as direct a memory of colonial rule as they have of other periods long past – and they see leaders of today as plunderers disinterested in, and disconnected from, them.

But above all, the most profound change that is driving the Change we are beginning to experience is the information revolution. 850 million mobile phones and a rapidly growing access to the internet have ushered in a social media revolution whose impact and power is re-writing the rules of democracy itself.

There were huge expectations when visual media was freed of government control. People were fed up of tightly controlled government manipulation of news and discussions, and were excited by the prospect of getting ‘real’ news from a free media. Daily voting on questions picked and debated by various news channels empowered them for the first time beyond the ballot box, and gave them a sense of participation like they had never experienced. Every day they got a real idea of the views of a significant section the population on live issues.

Politicians quickly realised that they could use free media by a mix of inducements and threats to shape and distort public opinion enough to alter voting choices of a critical numbers, to change defeat into victory. The people would never get to know, they reckoned, that it was almost DD all over again, without the give-away logo.

Tehelka's sting operation of 2001 and the Pink Chaddi drama of 2009 were two politically motivated campaigns that successfully achieved their objectives of damaging the BJP, and underlined the enormous power of the visual media in influencing, even determining, electoral outcomes.

Media business in India has been slave to the government of the day, and is now even more so, because the stakes are higher than ever before, making paid news and worse extremely lucrative. Media is, therefore, as status quo loving as politicians. The Anna phenomenon would have been successfully discredited and buried by it had a new 'media moghul’ not burst upon the scene from nowhere and fundamentally altered the rules of the information and opinion-making game.

Almost a crore and a half missed calls to Anna’s anti-corruption team, crores of sms messages exchanged about Anna and his anti-corruption campaign, and a free, informed, unbiased debate by well-informed netizens -- 21st century, often-ahead-of-the-curve reporters and opinion makers whom people trust – are the prime drivers of the revolution that we are seeing at Ramlila Maidan and all over the country.

The media – honorable exceptions apart – is being compelled to cover Anna; for the first time, it is following, not leading a campaign. Even more importantly, for the first time, people are not being influenced by the propaganda regularly unleashed by ‘experts’ and shallow, opinionated anchors who have held sway till now: the fast-growing web of social media is their new voice, one that will only grow louder. In fact so stung are some media stars by the almost brutal manner in which they have been sidelined, and their ‘Radia’ agenda lit up, that they have refused to cover this unfolding of history from Ground Zero right outside their doorstep.

What we are seeing on the streets is, at one level, the largest ever ‘opinion poll’ or survey ever conducted in India on an issue. Till now, the media was setting the agenda, quoting votes, blogs, tweets etc. of a few thousand – sometimes ever creating false handles to fake results/trends – to tell a believing India as to what its 'real' opinion was on various socio-political issues. Aided by unprecedented connectivity, Anna and his team have snatched that initiative from the middlemen-messengers by reaching people direct with their message.

Elections are a lot less about issues than they are about arithmetic. That is why politicians have become so arrogant and dismissive of the people. They have gamed this deeply flawed process to near-perfection by dividing themselves and voters along every usable fault line. This has effectively removed people from the process of governance and turned them into subjects who, even if they vent their anger after five years, can do little more than choose from among the small pool of the ruling elite that has realised that it can keep doing what it wants to, till election time, and that an election loss is temporary; no matter what they do, their opponents will do no better, and a helpless minority of voters will swing back and give them one more chance.

It is this effective disenfranchisement of the people that emboldened the government to do what it did to Anna Hazare in April, to Baba Ramdev in June and again to Anna now. It is this dis-empowerment that people are revolting against. It is this Change that politicians are either unable to grasp or unwilling to submit to.

The age of real-time connectivity and dissemination of information is here. And it is not one-way. A citizen with a mobile phone or an internet connection is no longer a passive, isolated recipient of news; he is also a creator and disseminator of it. He is an independent, one-man media house. He is not going to wait for five years to express his opinion through a vote that, for 65 years, has not addressed issues that touch him. He is not going to accept the argument that a ‘supreme’ Parliament is the private property of a few hundred individuals between elections.

These are ideas and instruments that were developed in, and were suited to, the age of pigeon carriers, horse-driven carriages and ships powered by oars and wind, by societies tentatively breaking free of the clutches of absolute monarchy. In 21st century, politicians cannot hide behind them and deny to people the power that should be theirs in a democracy. People have a right to demand day-to-day accountability from the people they have chosen to govern their nation. Thanks to technology, they now can.

Anna's movement may be crushed again by politicians. But what is of real significance is that, for the first time, people have come together, and experienced and expressed their power, without latching onto a political leader or party. They will come back again and again, stronger, better organised. If politicians do not learn, at some point they will turn violent too, with unpredictable results.

The days of treating a distorted democracy like a fixed-term dictatorship are over. Change is here. The sooner our politicians get a fix on this, the better.
'

ANNA AWAKENS 'WE THE PEOPLE'

Anna is everywhere. Everyone has something to say about him. And almost no one has read the anti-corruption Jan Lok Pal Bill (JLPB) they are supporting or savaging. The debate, therefore, is, for most part, along the same ideological, political, religious and social fault lines that emerge in their ugliness whenever any contentious issue comes to the fore.

This time, however, another participant has entered the arena. And he is not another op-ed writer or a member of a handpicked studio audience taking part in a motivated and tightly controlled discussion. He is -- many differ—the real “We the People.”

Why has Anna Hazare, a soldier and a Gandhian who was barely known beyond Maharashtra till April this year, so caught the imagination of the people?

We are possibly witnessing and are part of a rare moment when a core issue has got the just the right amount of Oxygen it needs, in the form of a spotless leader who can keep it aflame without burning down everything and also not let those who have successfully extinguished it in the past do so again. In such moments history is made; in such moments events occur that seemed impossible just a few days back; in such moments cynics, critics and collaborators are swept by a Tsunami in their pajamas.

Government corruption is an issue that has touched almost every one -- even the destitute -- who has had some contact with someone from the government. Yes, we have all paid bribes at some point of time; some of us have even taken them.

Is, then, this unprecedented outpouring of support for Anna’s war against corruption a reflection of our hypocrisy, as some are suggesting with naked derision? Or has Anna struck a deeper chord in the collective consciousness of India because of the kind of man he is being seen as, because of the very Spartan life he has lived, because of the energy that only a spiritually cleansed ascetic karma yogi can emit?

Is Anna awakening a set of values that we as a people had forgotten, resigned as we were to the rot of corruption because, till April this year, there was not even a ray of hope that things would ever improve? Is Anna giving vent to a primordial anger, even curse, that has been long buried in us against our elected representatives who have not only failed us but mocked us by their increasingly obscene abuse of power and a plunder, nay rape, of their motherland, the one they, for good reason, flinch from calling Bharat Mata anymore?

Never before has India so spontaneously rallied together like this against its rulers – and that includes politicians presently in opposition – since they they took on the British. Now, as then, collaborators of the regime who have benefitted from it are staying loyal to their masters, aided by vocal and visible ideologues obsessed with alien theoretic constructs that sound very impressive but work very poorly, if at all, in India's civilisational and cultural cauldron. Like then, arrogant and disconnected rulers are confident they can once again beat back the surge by deceit.

In April 2011, Congress leaders easily succeeded in diffusing the situation when they broke Anna Hazare’s protest with a last-minute personal appeal from Sonia Gandhi that led Anna and his team to believe that she was on the side of those fighting the most brazen plunder India has ever seen, under her protective eye and pallu. In June, again they managed a repeat, this time with brutal force against sleeping men, women and children, after leading Baba Ramdev up the same path and agreeing to most of his demands, only to break them with lathis, and completely forget them thereafter.

This is the third time Sonia’s lieutenants tried the same trick. But this time, the people, prepared for their deceit, have not let them get away. The old cliché about not being able to fool all the people all the time has caught up with them, and they have nowhere to hide. The sordid drama of Anna’s arrest and release has not shown the government’s ineptitude in the absence of Sonia Gandhi but the determination of a people who refused to let it suppress their voice against its arrogance and high-handedness again.

The action has since shifted to Ramlila Maidan, where Anna has continued his fast, and spread like a prairie fire to cities, towns and villages across the length and breadth of India. As the flames are leaping higher and higher, so are voices against Anna and his team, most from usual suspects and a few from most unexpected quarters. But that is only to be expected, and their fury is only going to increase. Till it is consumed in the non-violent flames that Anna has fanned or till it suppresses and extinguishing them, one more time.

Parts of the JLPB may be flawed. But all of those who have read it – and also have real experience of the working of the government – know in their hearts that, at the core, the bill attacks a significant dimension of an enormous problem with the focus and sincerity needed to deal with it. Arvind Kejriwal and Kiran Bedi, the two brains behind the bill, have detailed insider information about the functioning of the well-oiled machine of government corruption and, therefore, know well the right instruments that are needed to tackle it.

On the other hand, the government’s Lok Pal Bill, drafted by the likes of Kapil Sibal – more need not be said – is, 64 years after Independence and 42 years after it was first mooted, an instrument designed to actually encourage corruption, making prosecution virtually impossible, particularly of big ticket offenders like ministers, politicians and bureaucrats. Every one knows that the real, almost unbridgeable gap between Anna's team and the Sonia's government is of intentions, not provisions of the two bills. Therefore, no one out there with any sense is buying the government’s line anymore.

Anna has undoubtedly roused the people from some sort of a deep slumber. It cannot be an accident that since he has started fasting, there has not been even one murder or rape in India’s rape capital, Delhi. A collective catharsis is taking place; people are again connecting with the Law of Karma, shaken from a Kumbhkaran-like sleep by Anna’s chants of ‘Vande Matram,’ and ‘Bharat Mata Ki Jai.’ Non-Hindus too have been similarly inspired by his Gandhian-type secularism, his motivational call ‘Inquilab Zindabad,’ and his powerful evocation of the sacrifices of Bhagat Singh, Raj Guru and Sukhdev. This is inclusive secularism at its pristine best.

The protests are growing, the crowds are swelling, the writing is on the wall. Yet, it is quite possible that those who have mastered the art of tricking and disempowering people by gaming the electoral process and converting it into a cynical game of numbers by dividing people along every conceivable and possible dimension, are not reading it right even now, and may once again succeed in suppressing this uprising, this Second War of Independence, as Anna calls it, with some justification. It is possible that some of them may again enjoy wine like they did after Baba Ramdev was bundled out of Delhi by the police.

If that happens, politicians would do well to remember that the non-violent fuse that Anna, Baba Ramdev, Kejriwal, Bedi, others and 'We The People' have lit is burning rapidly, and getting shorter. The bomb of corruption that politicians have fashioned is now simply too big to be wished away. It has to be burst. Politicians will do well to heed to Anna's fatherly warning that carries the energy of a true Gandhian and India's youth; it is not to be trifled with, and they should to do it before it blows in their face and unleashes destructive energies that may be very difficult to control. They owe at least this to India.
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ANNA, RAMDEV: DIVIDED THEY FELL

Flattery can fool the best of them. What to talk of a naïve Yog Guru and a simple villager surfing into the murky, merciless world of Indian politics on the wave of popular support and truth. In retrospect, it is evident that a great deal of thought -- and equal or more misinformation -- went into the strategy adopted by the Congress party to defeat an anti-corruption movement that had energised Indians across all classes and castes.

Baba Ramdev, before he made a triumphant entry into Delhi airport, had done nine months and one lakh kilometers across India to enlighten people about the abyss of corruption that the country had fallen into and muster their support for his fight against it. That heady feeling clearly got the better of commonsense. And led him to make a few elementary blunders that quickly deflated him and his campaign, and enabled the Congress to turn the table he was standing on.

The first mistake Ramdev made was about the timing. Anna Hazare had launched a similar movement at Jantar Mantar in April and had achieved a fair degree of success. The Congress, after attacking him viciously, had capitulated, rattled by the popular support his fast had generated. Negotiations were going on between his team and the government for a preparing a joint Lok Pal Bill to tackle political and bureaucratic corruption. In the beginning of June, the impression generated, deliberately it is now evident, was that Anna’s civil society would have its way. The energy and support for Anna had not waned; he had not yet failed. Therefore, for Baba Ramdev to start his own show then was a clear sign that he was, to an extent, motivated more by the desire to take the limelight and credit away from Anna Hazare than by commonsense. Even if he had planned his satyagraha earlier, he should have postponed it.

Ramdev may have been right in his belief that Anna enjoyed little popular support beyond a small section of the TV-friendly urban middle class, and that he was the one with the weight of masses and money behind him. But, he failed to realise that his hunger to be seen as the real leader of the anti-corruption movement was just the weakness that the Congress party was waiting to exploit in order to slice the movement in two and kill its momentum.

When Pranab Mukherjee and three other ministers landed up at Delhi airport to receive him, – an honour not given even to the US President – Ramdev should have smelled a rat. They even held it to his nose: keep Anna Hazare away from your stage. But he smelled the scent of victory instead, a ridiculously easy victory that made him foolishly feel that he was a real Maharaja and Anna a tiny speck of no consequence getting attention it did not deserve.

That is precisely what Mukherjee and Co. had calculated. Their best hope of victory lay in ensuring that these two sections of “civil society” that had got together for the possibly the first time ever were separated and made to turn hostile to each other again. United, they would have been impossible to defeat; divided, they could be taken apart easily. Baba fell straight into the simple trap. As did the members of Anna's team.

Emboldened by the grand reception and imagining that Delhi was already his, Baba Ramdev added fuel to the fire lit at the airport. He got Sadhvi Rithambara on his stage. This was like showing a red rag to a herd of bulls. There is no doubt that the Sadhvi is now engaged solely in social work. But during the Ram Janmabhoomi movement, she had delivered many strident speeches bordering on hate. No one was looking at the present; for Congress and media, only the past mattered. That sealed it for Ramdev. With the media turning openly hostile, Anna’s team had a similar and stupid reflex reaction, blinded to the larger game plan of the Congress, just as the baba was. The split in the movement was complete. The downhill journey had begun.

Mocking the merits of some demands made by Baba Ramdev, just to run him down, was also part of that game plan. His views on homosexuality, for example, are identical to those held by religious leaders of all religions, but no one mentioned that. Similarly, his views about giving death penalty (changed to life sentence) to those guilty of corruption are little different from those of the ‘civilised’ who demand death for rapists in TV studios and newspaper columns. He made some terrific suggestions too, like having world class educational institutions in India, couched in simple words that everyone understands. But, no surprise, you didn’t get to hear about them much, if at all.

Notwithstanding the negative blitz, the fact of the matter is that the government, by its own admission, agreed to almost all his demands, a fact that even he acknowledged on TV.

That is where Ramdev made his biggest mistake. It did not occur to him that with the Anna camp having deserted him and embedded media having turned hostile, Sonia Gandhi would not hesitate to use brutal force to evict him from Ramlila ground. Having got even more than he expected and that too so easily, he probably got carried away. Instead of calling off the satyagraha at that point of time, he dug in. And dug his grave in the process. The police, in a midnight swoop, arrested him and attacked 60,000 peaceful satyagrahis, women and children among them, forcing them to flee.

Packed off to his Ashram in Hardwar, Ramdev called of his fast unto death after nine days, beaten blue by a cleverer and far more devious Congress that not only refused to negotiate with him any further but went back on the agreement it had reached with him in Delhi.

Isolated and weakened, Anna Hazare has now met the same fate. After many solemn assurances that a joint draft of the Lok Pal Bill will be presented in Parliament during the monsoon session, the government has shown him the middle finger. Two drafts will now go to the cabinet; one prepared by the government, the other by Anna’s team. No prizes for guessing which one will go through, if at all.

As of now, the anti-corruption movement stands divided, defeated. The Congress has again hit the fail-safe nerve that has thus far seen it through many difficulties: the RSS card to discredit and dissipate any opposition to it. Both Ramdev and Anna are accused of being RSS agents and worse. The “non-communal” members of civil society have been left stranded in their ivory towers without popular support of even “secular” urban Indians.

The war on corruption has successfully been turned into a war between communal Hindus and the rest represented by the Congress. You are now being asked to make a simple choice: do you prefer RSS/”Hindu communalism” or corruption that is endemic to all parties?

No one is telling you that with Sonia’s Congress openly wooing only Muslims and Christians, with the NAC unleashing a draconian anti-Hindu Communal Bill etc. the only Indians who will oppose it for poor governance and its unprecedented plunder of India are Hindus, exceptions apart. The communal bogey is, thus, ready for the Congress to exploit. Slandering and splitting those who raise their voice against its misdeeds and failures has been and will remain its prime weapon.

No matter how hard the BJP tries, no matter which face it projects as leader, the communities being courted by the Congress are not going to desert it en masse for the BJP. Since Sonia's Congress is leaving little doubt in anyone's mind that its pro-minority stance is fundamentally anti-Hindu, the way to counter it politically is not by being even more pro-minority but by actively protecting the interests of the majority and consolidating it without feeling guilty and without being anti-minority, the last bit being vital.

Unless the “unite minorities, divide Hindus” strategy of the Congress is defeated decisively, what happened at Ramlila grounds and to the Anna camp will happen again and again. This is the first real defeat that Baba Ramdev, the Yog Guru from a small village in Haryana has faced. In the whole drama, he has undoubtedly lost a lot of his luster. Regaining it will take a lot of doing. The swell of anger against the Congress for its brutality can be used to take the anti-corruption struggle to great heights. The slighting of Anna Hazare will also help reinforce the belief that Sonia Gandhi will go to any length to protect corrupt leaders.

But for a new momentum to be built up, Ramdev and Anna will have to come together. The civil society members surrounding Anna will also have stop playing into the hands of the Congress by showing their allergy to anything that is dubbed by it as Hindu/RSS, both being synonymous for Congress. Ramdev will also need to completely shed personal political ambitions that will, invariably, cloud his judgment again.

It has to be a totally united effort for a common objective; all have to be welcomed from every religion, political party and section of society. At stake is the very future of India being mortgaged by an arrogant political class that has got used to blatant abuse of power, limitless corruption and worse. Anna and Ramdev and others must not allow themselves to be divided again.
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Related: Anna Hazare, listen to the rage
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ANNA HAZARE, LISTEN TO THE RAGE

Anna Hazare. Who had heard of this soldier before the Great Jantar Mantar Tantar rattled an arrogant government that thought it had everything under firm control, right from the media to the BJP?

I have not read the Jan Lokpal Bill that started the churn, the first stirring of a long delayed revolution. Nor do I intend to waste my time going through it. Many analysts on both sides of the divide have written copiously about it, and will continue to do so. Like millions of other Indians I do not want to get lost in a debate that misses, or deliberately deflects from, the real point.

Our collective rage is against a democracy that is being destroyed, a government – I use the term for state as well as central governments -- that has abdicated its responsibility to govern, and politicians who have become plunderers of their own nation.

Till Anna Hazare began his fast to death against the mischievous efforts of the political class as a whole to keep itself and the babus whose guidance and collaboration makes plunder possible, literally beyond the reach of law, the enormous energy of this seething rage was getting dissipated due to lack of point or leader of focus. The present government in Delhi was, not surprisingly, smug and disdainfully dismissive of all talk of reigning in unbridled corruption that has now reached levels that cannot be sustained without a serious blowout that might even lead to the demise of the First republic.

Anna Hazare gave the explosive charge of public anger the shape it needed. The resultant Munroe effect blasted a hole through the impenetrable armour of a devious government that, till the explosive shocked and burned it, was ridiculing and mocking the diminutive Gandhian and those supporting him. This hole in the hull is not symbolic, nor can anyone plug it with a rag and drive the tank back into battle. The Lok Pal Bill represents only the first exchange of fire between the people and a government that claims to represent them but has effectively ceased to. For 43 years, people may have kept quiet. No longer. No matter how hard politicians and babus may try now, an appropriate law will be put in place sooner or later, with or without them. But that will be only the beginning, not the end.

Expectedly, government forces are hitting back with all the heavy weapons at their disposal. Their target, no surprise, is the Teflon-protected complete outsider Anna Hazare. This non-English speaking, soft-spoken leader has, to the amazement of all, connected not only to the masses but also to young, educated urban Indians who, till he appeared on the scene, were being channeled to draw bubble gum ‘inspiration’ from cricketers, Bollywood stars and Rahul Gandhi. There was no real leader who had it in him to draw their attention back to where it should have been and galvanise them into action in the manner that Anna has done.

What has disturbed government troops the most is the fact that behind the members of civil society who are drafting the Lok Pal Bill are leaders and people they had all but rendered invisible and irrelevant. Baba Ramdev, Sri Sri Ravishankar and the like bring with them numbers that can drastically change the equations of elections that have been solved by politicians who have figured out that democracy is not about getting the people’s mandate, but about getting to power without it. With Anna Hazare praising Narendra Modi, arguably the only incorruptible political leader who is also a doer and deliverer without peer, and the latter too putting his weight behind the voice of the people, the balance of power has shifted quite substantially in favour of the people. When leaders of other religions too join Anna, as they should, it will become a no-contest.

Suddenly, the “idea of India” that uproots India from India, that does not recognise a timeless India as anything more a creation of the British, that disparages and mocks at everything Hindu, is in danger of being thrown into the only place it should always have been: the dustbin. The cocooned English-speaking elite and the secular brigade which is infested with parasites, thought -- just like the politicians did -- that they had it all covered with the help of a few missionaries, mullahs and media. Patriotic scenes reminiscent of the freedom struggle, starting from Bharat Mata on Anna Hazare’s stage, to the enthusiastic singing of Vande Matram, the national song they thought they had all but buried, has given them a rude reality check and woken them to a vast India beyond and very different from the soulless caricature they have reduced it to under the guise of ‘secularism.’

Anna Hazare is under attack not only from sarkari soldiers but also from deserters who did not get their free deserts from the government. The pressure being generated on him and other leaders like him to conform to their idea of India, one that has been built solely around the political objective of keeping Congress in power, is immense. They manifestly want to reduce him to a nominal head, a Manmohan Singh if you like, so that the corroded and hollowed edifice that they have all helped build and sustain remains intact. It is not going to be easy for him and those truly interested in rebuilding India to take the pressure.

No matter what people might say, I believe that a soldier who took a Pakistani bullet in 1965, will not run away from this battle, the greatest one that he has fought in his life. He will take all the bullets that are being fired at him now, achieve victory and pass the command to someone worthy of it.

But what Anna may not be able to take is the pressure from fifth columnists in his camp. They have no followers, no following, no rage. They need him and other leaders in the movement who have energised the masses, not the other way round. He must not let them set the agenda, the shape and the pace of the movement.They will only kill it. They are agents of status quo, not change.

Anna Hazare must listen to the rage of the people and remember the faith they have reposed in him. If he does and continues to give shape to it, he will remembered as the icon of the change that India desperately needed; if he doesn’t, he will be replaced and forgotten.
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