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Show The Right Cheek by Saba Naqvi

Why did they attack Team Anna man Prashant Bhushan?

In the twisted mind of Tajinder Pal Singh Bagga, it was some sort of glorious act. “God give us the power to complete our mission,” he tweeted before it. The mission: a coward’s attack on eminent lawyer and human rights activist Prashant Bhushan by Bagga and two of his friends, Inder Verma and Vishnu Gupta. On October 13, the three men walked into the lawyer’s Delhi office and thrashed him, an act that acquired spectacular dimensions because it was captured live by a TV channel that happened to be there to interview Bhushan.

The next day, when the three were remanded to judicial custody in a Delhi court, their supporters viciously attacked some citizens who had come out in support of Bhushan—which was also captured on live TV. A little-known outfit, the Bhagat Singh Kranti Sena, has hence come into the limelight. Inder Verma, one of the men who assaulted Bhushan, also claims to be president, Sri Rama Sene, Delhi unit. The men say they attacked Bhushan because he had supported the idea of a plebiscite in J&K and asked for a repeal of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act. On their Facebook page, they wrote: “If someone breaks my country I will break their head.”

There was a somewhat cruel irony in the fact that Bhushan was physically attacked by right-wing hooligans at a time when the Anna Hazare movement—of which he is a crucial part—is being accused of getting its organisational muscle from the RSS. Which is precisely why several conspiracy theories are doing the rounds about the Bhushan attack. And true or false, such speculation does reveal the confusion that still prevails about the Jan Lokpal movement, particularly now that it has taken on a political dimension with the campaign against the Congress in the Hisar bypolls.

First is the theory that the Sangh parivar sees Prashant Bhushan as the awkward member of Team Anna, the man hardest to manage when said investments have to be encashed. Bhushan has been associated with too many human rights causes, counts too many “comrades” among his friends and is the one Team Anna member unrestrained in his critique of the parivar and Narendra Modi. As far as the right-wing brigade goes, he is the “unpatriotic anti-nationalist” inside Team Anna. The traitor within. Hence goons were sent after him.

Theory number two is that perhaps the powers that be had a hand in instigating the attack as Bhushan has become a real headache, both for members in the ruling dispensation and the corporate sector. Indeed, when news of the attack was first flashed, there was apprehension that some Congress worker angry with the political actions of Team Anna had gone nuts and slapped him around.

There are also murmurs that given the Sangh taint is an embarrassment for Team Anna, an attack by extremists pledging allegiance to an ultra-right ideology can be a face-saver, “evidence” that the movement is not being carried on the shoulders of the RSS. India Against Corruption (which manages the Anna movement) writes on its website: “It is a peoples’ movement and every Indian ought to and is welcome to participate in it. The movement consists of people from all shades of political opinion, including the Left, Right and Centre. But the RSS is not part of the leadership...not connected in any way in running the movement.”

But as the RSS sees it, after years of failure, the Anna initiative is something worth backing. It’s good strategy to prop up something that has already knocked the wind out of the Congress sails. In internal meetings, the assessment is that the BJP is in a position now to take advantage of the disarray in UPA-II. RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat was only being honest when he declared, as part of his Vijayadashami address, that the cadre was told to join the Anna movement. But such proclamations are certainly embarrassing for some individuals in Team Anna.

Meanwhile, one of Bhushan’s assailants has also been linked to the Sri Rama Sene that has in the past vandalised M.F. Husain exhibitions and repeatedly attacked Valentine’s Day celebrations. Leaders of the group have also defended saffron terror planners like Colonel Purohit and Sadhvi Pragya. The three men who attacked Bhushan last week have also in the past disrupted public engagements of Arundhati Roy and Syed Ali Shah Geelani. The RSS, of course, denies any overt association with anyone who goes over the edge, although the kind of hatred such individuals harbour continue to be fed by the Sangh ideology.

But to plan conspiracies, one needs to think, plot and trigger actions. It is unlikely that these individuals who attacked Bhushan could really fathom all the dots being connected here. It probably happened just the way they said it did—‘he needed to be bashed on the head for he was speaking against the nation’. They too saw themselves as self-appointed guardians of the public good.