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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Why this sordid surrender? by CL Manoj

Why this sordid surrender? by CL Manoj

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published Published on Apr 13, 2011   modified Modified on Apr 13, 2011
The brief gap between the World Cup and the Indian Premier League would have been painfully boring but for the display on national TV of the collective meekness of the Congress/UPA leadership in the face of the challenge to India's parliamentary system mounted by Anna Hazare and his bandwagon. The bandwagon comprises civil rights activists, RSS/Hindu Mahasabha/Baba Ramdev foot soldiers, ex-bureaucrats in search of a cause, sections of the urban elite and Bollywood celebrities.

The motley crowd succeeded in playing out their fantasy of converting Jantar Mantar into Tahrir Square for four days; they even got away with thumbing their nose at the entire political class that, barring the very honourable exception of veteran samajwadis Mohan Singh and Raghuvansh Prasad Singh, bore the insult, mute and quailing.

Of course, Anna Hazare's main cause, the battle against corruption, is both just and urgent. The recent spate of big-ticket scams involving the politician-bureaucrat-corporate nexus has shaken the people's faith in the system. And the public perception, with reasonable basis, that sections of the political class, especially in the ruling establishment in Delhi, were active participants or passive facilitator in this loot has triggered widespread anger and disgust.

The fact the successive governments have dragged their feet over electoral reforms, instituting a Lokpal, etc, has, rightly, reinforced the anti-politician mood of our metropolitan elite, who, compared to their lower middle class and rural/small town counterparts, are normally more vocal in airing their indignation than in remedial political participation.

The material comfort gifted by post-liberalisation economic boom, aided by the instant political wisdom served daily by television channels directly into drawing rooms, has given the elite a yearning to make up for their traditional indifference to the state of the nation/politics by getting an occasional high of notional involvement. This, indeed, is a welcome development. But the flip side is this section, often driven by hostility to politicians and a jingoistic sense of nationalism, ends up being willing tools in the hands of crafty players with covert plans and ambitions.

And the four-day Jantar Mantar show was an organising marvel in which a group of determined civil rights activists and trained RSS/Hindu Mahasabha cadre brewed a deceptive ideological cocktail that sent a section of urban middle class on a high. While 24A-7 TV news channels and Facebook helped market the reality show as a 'nationwide people's revolution', large parts of the real Bharat chose to down the storm in their cups of tea.

Once they succeeded in creating this frenzy in the national capital, the organisers made a mockery of our democracy by demanding that their show be treated as Parliament itself, and themselves as lawmakers who would deliver the draft of a that very questionable Jan Lokpal Bill for the government to just enact it! What a farce that was, played right under the collective nose of the national political leadership.

Apart from the government's glaring timidity and mismanagement, this dangerous game got a boost from the Opposition's decision, without exception, passively play along with a show whose signature tune was politician-bashing and aim, to help an uncountable and unelected bandwagon to usurp Parliament's role.

The Opposition ignored this danger for two reasons: it wants to exploit the Congress/UPA's discomfort in facing critical Assembly polls amidst this frenzy; secondly, as is evident in L K Advani's lament about the 'absence of a V P Singh', BJP knows it does not have a credible leadership or political credentials to effectively lead an anti-corruption plank. So, it would rather hope to indirectly benefit from this saffron-sprinkled Jantar Mantar multi-starrer.

If the Opposition's fault is opportunism, the Congress/UPA's has been mind-boggling timidity and mismanagement. For full four days, the AICC and government managers displayed how pliant they can be to daylight blackmail at politically-tricky times like elections, how ineffective they can be in countering a hostile propaganda, how unabashedly they reduce the craft of political negotiation into slow-motion surrender. Not even an attempt was made to rally the entire political class against those who challenge them and Parliament itself.

By constituting the National Advisory Council (NAC) in 2004, Sonia Gandhi advertised how the Congress had to now even outsource 'policy-thinking'. The handling of the Jantar Mantar episode now advertises that she and Manmohan Singh need to either outsource their political management, too, or entrust it to the real politicians who still survive within, rather than to their unproductive and apolitical loyalists.


The Economic Times, 13 April, 2011, http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/opinion/guest-writer/why-this-sordid-surrender/articleshow/7968458.cms


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