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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Team spirit?

Team spirit?

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published Published on Oct 15, 2011   modified Modified on Oct 15, 2011

-The Indian Express

 

After the Supreme Court lawyer and leading light of Anna Hazare’s agitation, Prashant Bhushan, was attacked in public view by thuggish “patriots” for his support of a plebiscite in Kashmir, one would have expected some solidarity from his teammates. Or at least common human sympathy, expressed even by those who have deep and running disagreements with Bhushan.

But Anna Hazare offered lukewarm consolation about how it was “wrong to take law and order into one’s own hands” and “this is not our culture”. What he stressed with much greater vehemence, instead, was that links with Bhushan were not endorsements of his ideas; that Bhushan should have clarified it was his own limited opinion; that he, Anna, believed that Kashmir was an integral part of India, and was even willing to die for that cause. Bhushan’s comrade Kiran Bedi also put a safe distance between him and the team. This comes at a time when Team Anna is testing its own electoral saleability in Hisar — obviously, the last thing it needs is to alienate the hyper-nationalist flag-flappers who formed the bulk of the movement.

This incident reveals exactly how brittle their bonds are, and how empty of ideas the movement is. Apart from an open-ended war on corruption and a desire to see their version of the Lokpal bill passed, little unites the team. It has been cobbled together from ideologically disparate parts, and falls apart at the merest sign of anything deeper than a platitude about political venality. This episode only underlines how representative democracy, which Team Anna has repeatedly run down, is the only way to synthesise clashing opinions and far-flung ideological ends. The political sphere is supple enough to accommodate the whole spectrum of opinion, it provides the vital back-and-forth between people and their representatives, determines how beliefs translate into policy. Unlike Team Anna, whose interventions are all about short-circuiting that process. In fact, even their commitment to their own watery ideas is suspect — when Arvind Kejriwal exhorted Hisar voters to defeat the Congress, he told them not to “worry excessively that there are corrupt individuals among the candidates. If they win, the Lokpal bill will send them to jail.” This is only the first display of their discomfort with political complexity — there are bound to be more rifts within this unlikely team.

The Indian Express, 15 October, 2011, http://www.indianexpress.com/news/team-spirit/860020/


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