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Resource centre on India's rural distress
 
 

Steam Anna

-The Business Standard

 

The controversy surrounding the arrest of Anna Hazare and his team has generated more heat than light about the issues at stake.

Mr Hazare and his supporters not only insisted that their views be taken on board in drafting a Lok Pal Bill, but also demanded that only their version of the Bill be accepted and, in fact, placed in Parliament by the government. No government can accept such dictates from anyone in a parliamentary democracy. Instead of letting off so much steam on their demand that the government table their version of the Bill in Parliament, Team Anna could easily have got any one of the 545 members of the Lok Sabha to introduce the Bill. Indeed, the highly agitated Opposition political parties can step forward even now and table the Team Anna version of the Bill in Parliament. If there have to be two contending drafts, why should the government of the day introduce both? And is there a logic to Mr Hazare’s intended action to go on an indefinite fast on the grounds that the government has not tabled his version of the Bill? The right thing for Mr Hazare to do would have been to get one of the Opposition parties supporting his cause to table the Bill. The lack of a political and communication strategy on the part of the Indian National Congress in meeting the essentially political challenge posed by Mr Hazare and his team seems to have given the moral high ground to a group of protesters whose essential demand is wholly misplaced.

It is quite clear that Team Anna had set itself on a collision course with the UPA government and the government had no choice but to take precipitate action before things got further out of control. However, the problem with the government’s response is that it has so far been largely an administrative response, devoid of political strategy. If the Congress party was convinced that the movement led by Mr Hazare posed a political challenge to it, as it has now claimed, then it should have launched a counteroffensive, and not merely used law and order as a ruse to arrest Mr Hazare and his obviously politically motivated team. The purpose of Mr Hazare and his team’s agitation is not really to find a genuinely workable solution to the problem of corruption in India. The so-called all-powerful Lok Pal they wish to create can turn out to be a bigger “joke pal” than they accuse the government of trying to create. Common sense tells us that no single institution is capable of solving such pervasive social problems. Now that the government has prevented a fast, it will have to move rapidly to prevent things from spinning out of control. Equally, Mr Hazare and his team must realise that their adamant fundamentalism goes against the principle of liberal democracy. It is not just preventive detention by police that threatens democracy, as the government’s critics suggest, but also social activism that adopts fundamentalist postures and ridicules the political institutions of democracy. Having painted itself into a corner, the government has no option but to stay the course. But it can certainly do a better job of winning back public opinion.