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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | What's in a name? by Mukul Kesavan

What's in a name? by Mukul Kesavan

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

On June 12, Ravi Shankar Ratnam helped Ram Krishna Yadav resume eating after Yadav had fasted for a week. This wouldn’t have made the headlines of every Indian newspaper the next morning if it hadn’t been for the fact that both men had achieved a state of demi-divinity through the tried-and-tested process of Hindu name-inflation. Ram Krishna Yadav became Swami Ramdev when he took sanyas and after his extraordinary success as a yoga teacher and crusading saint, he has morphed into Baba Ramdev. The man who handed him the fruit juice evolved from Ravi Shankar Ratnam into Pandit Ravi Shankar, but the possibility of brand-confusion led to a further name change and he became Sri Sri Ravi Shankar.

It must say something about Indian politics that entrepreneurial holy men (Ramdev runs a yoga and ayurveda business and Ravi Shankar runs the Art of Living foundation) have become mascots of the movement against public corruption. The United Progressive Alliance government did its bit to help: it elevated the swami to cabinet rank by sending every cabinet minister in sight to the airport when the godman flew in, to cringe in person. But the government underestimated Ramdev’s self-esteem: this rank of abject cabinet ministers confirmed him in his suspicion that he was the Hindu primate and the sight of the Ramlila Maidan teeming with the faithful tempted him into going ahead with the fast that he had promised to call off.

What happened afterwards is a useful guide to how politics is done in India. The police raided Ramlila Maidan after midnight and cleared it of people. Ramdev borrowed a salwar-kameez and tried to escape disguised as a woman but even a dupatta couldn’t veil the bearded lady and he was taken into custody. He was banned from entering Delhi for a fortnight and taken to his ashram in Hardwar under police escort where he continued his fast.

The most obvious lesson to be learnt from the clearing of the Ramlila Maidan is that for the government of India, Delhi is the world. Having ejected Ramdev from Delhi, the government made no attempt to persuade him to end his fast. It was perfectly happy for him to starve himself to death so long as he did it off-stage, in the mofussil. Anna Hazare’s brilliant use of the Jantar Mantar to publicize his hunger strike in aid of the lok pal bill, had so spooked the UPA government that it was willing to grovel in the morning to head off Ramdev’s fast and use lathis that same night to disperse his audience. It was carrot-and-stick of the most literal and desperate kind. Anna Hazare has promised us another fast if the government doesn’t pass the lok pal bill by August 15. If that fast happens, I’ll be very surprised if the UPA government allows him a public space in Delhi to stage his protest.

Anna Hazare’s reaction to the events at the Ramlila Maidan told us something about the politics of ‘civil society’ protest. It’s no secret that Hazare and Ramdev are rivals for the leadership of the crusade against corruption. The raid on Ramlila Maidan, however, left Hazare with no option but to come to Ramdev’s aid. He condemned the raid and came up with the most splendid non sequitur in the history of Indian activism: “There was no firing otherwise the eviction was similar to the Jallianwala Bagh massacre.” True. One thousand six hundred and fifty rounds weren’t fired. Three hundred and seventy-nine people did not die. A thousand and more people didn’t suffer bullet wounds in this ruthless re-staging of Jallianwala Bagh. One could go on, but perhaps it’s simpler to say that the Ramlila Maidan lathi charge is as similar to the Jallianwala Bagh massacre as Anna Hazare is to Mahatma Gandhi.

The political question that confronts all of us, activists, politicians and citizens alike, is whether the virtue of being against corruption (instead of for it) is reason enough to ignore political differences to sustain the breadth and solidarity of the anti-corruption front. So should Swami Agnivesh and Prashant Bhushan, core members of Hazare’s lok pal bill ginger group and stalwart pluralists, take issue with Hazare’s stated admiration for Narendra Modi’s governing style, his enthusiasm for capital (and corporal) punishment and his instinctively authoritarian leadership style or should they play down their differences with Anna Hazare on these issues in the larger interest of the anti-corruption struggle?

Acutely aware of the UPA government’s bid to discredit them individually through smear campaigns, the core group has closed ranks. But as Ramdev and other mavericks climb aboard the bandwagon and lunge for the steering wheel, papering over ideological differences is getting harder and harder to do.

When Ramdev invited Sadhvi Ritambhara, one of the accused in the Babri Masjid demolition case and arch-virago of the Hindu Right, to share the stage with him at Ramlila Maidan, he posed the question in the sharpest way possible. The response to this provocation from the lok pal civil society group hasn’t been consistent. Prashant Bhushan said, “I am unhappy with the presence of Sadhvi Ritambhara. You cannot prevent anyone from supporting a cause but the platform should not be allowed to be used by communal forces.” The judge, Santosh Hegde, a member like Prashant Bhushan of the lok pal bill drafting committee, expressed the opposite view. He had no problem with having Ritambhara on the dais: “So far as the presence of Sadhvi Ritambhara is concerned, she may be an accused in the Ayodhya case but we are not supporting that cause. We are supporting only the fight against corruption. If she wants to fight against corruption, I do not see why she should not be allowed to do that.”

Hegde’s position is the classic statement of the organizing principle of self-consciously apolitical, single-issue campaigns. If the cause is just and its supporters sincere, political differences shouldn’t be allowed to fragment the solidarity of the campaign. Bhushan’s discomfort hints at an alternative view: namely, there have to be some political or ideological red lines that the movement’s leaders mustn’t cross because those red lines represent non-negotiable political values. Implicit in Bhushan’s discomfort is the sense that a populist anti-corruption campaign can be hijacked and hitched to disagreeable political agendas.

There is a real disagreement here. The resistance to the Emergency, for example, was politically eclectic. The Janata Party’s necessary struggle against Congress authoritarianism in the election of 1977 involved the participation of the erstwhile Jan Sangh and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. Is this much-touted crusade against corruption as significant as that earlier struggle for democracy and have its constituents subordinated their individual agendas for the sake of the larger cause?

Ramdev, for example, wants to hang people for a multitude of sins, he thinks homosexuals are sick people who need to be hospitalized, he wants to regulate sexuality amongst the young, he wants to build the Ram Mandir, he wants a total boycott of foreign companies and he has recently threatened to raise an armed militia of 11,000 youths. Is it enough for Kiran Bedi or Anna Hazare or individuals like you and me to distance themselves from these bizarre positions or does there come a point where you say, no, I can’t endorse or support a movement that harbours dangerous oddballs and scary political outfits? And if you do the latter do you split the single-issue movement to keep it kosher or do you abandon apolitical single issue mobilization altogether and return to more complex political engagement?

Meanwhile, regardless of the fate of his fast, there’s room for Ramdev to grow. In the self-aggrandizing stakes, Rajneesh went from Acharya to Bhagwan to Osho. Compared to him, the good Baba hasn’t started yet.


The Telegraph, 15 June, 2011, http://www.telegraphindia.com/1110615/jsp/opinion/story_14107063.jsp


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