By Amulya Ganguli
Anna Hazare’s appeal to the Supreme Court to prevent the government from trying to stop his fast is one of the weirdest petitions which the judiciary may have heard. His apprehension that the government will intervene in his case as it had done to scuttle Baba Ramdev agitation may be justified. But what these unusual moves by the civil society activists show is that they are probably reaching a dead end where their campaign is concerned. The first sign of the loss of momentum was when Anna Hazare and his colleagues forsook their earlier antipathy towards politicians and went around meeting them to enlist their support on the Lokpal bill. Considering that the Gandhian satyagrahi had disallowed politicians from sharing his stage during his fast in Jantar Mantar, the subsequent climbdown underlined a humble retreat rather than a change of mind after due deliberation. The backtracking was all the more abject since Anna Hazare had earlier equated the politicians with cheats and liars and alleged that they won elections by distributing liquor and sarees. That the same person forgot his earlier abuses and sought support from the very targets of his diatribes showed his awareness that the wind was no longer favourable to his cause. The approach to politicians was all the more curious considering that the civil society activists could not be unaware that where it came to the basic views on the Lokpal bill, there was little difference between their prime target, the Congress, and the other parties. The reason why the bill could not pass muster for more than four decades was that the entire political class was united in its opposition to a powerful ombudsman who would sit in judgment over the conduct of the politicians and their henchmen, the bureaucrats. It is not clear if the activists realized this harsh fact during their interaction with the politicians. In all probability, the latter let the activists believe that they were with them “in principle”, but kept clear of specific details. As for some of the details, like bringing the prime minister under the Lokpal, the views of a few parties are already known apart from those of the Congress. While the latter is seemingly of two minds, especially because Manmohan Singh himself, like Atal Behari Vajpayee before him, does not mind being under the Lokpal, there are others, such as the AIADMK and the Akali Dal, which have a different opinion. But, it isn’t the case of the prime minister or the higher judiciary alone which is bothering the activists. Their grouse is that the powers of the Lokpal will be diluted by the government. What is more, it is the tepid version which will go through parliament because of what the activists are bound to regard as the perfidy of the political class. It is this belief that they will be ultimately betrayed which has made Anna Hazare announce his date for what will be his second major fast. Since a hunger strike is obviously an extreme step, the fact that it is being used right at the beginning of a movement, and not at its end, means that the organizers are already despairing of its success. If the meeting with politicians was the first sign of their feeling of hopelessness, the threatened fast is the second one. However, being new to the game of politics, Anna Hazare and Co do not seem to realize that the repetition of the same trick can rarely produce the original effect. The activists had started off well because of the widespread dissatisfaction with the government’s unwillingness to act against the corrupt either in the various scams or in the matter of setting up a credible Lokpal. But their mistake was that instead of focussing on corruption, they began to trash the entire system. Even now, they are peddling this line, as can be seen from the views of Prashant Bhushan, one of the leading lights of the movement who is known for his support for the Maoists, that the time has come for “participatory” democracy. Like Jayaprakash Narayan’s partyless democracy, which spawned the likes of Lalu and Sharad Yadav and gave a boost to caste-based politics, participatory democracy is another of those vacuous ideas which sound good on paper and but mean little in real life. To carry forward this idea of popular participation, the activists are planning to hold a series of referendums in various constituencies. But, like the opinion and exit polls which are published by the media, all that the referendums can do is to indicate a trend. It can also be asked that since the activists do not trust the voters because they are supposed to be bikaau or purchasable, as Anna Hazare is in the habit of saying, how reliable will be those who participate in the referendums. (IPA Service)