In
1911, when Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was perfecting his Passive Resistance
movement in South Africa against the apartheid regime, which he later
successively deployed against the British colonial power in India as Satyagraha,
little could he have imagined that 100 years later, an old man wearing his
trademark topi would employ the very
same tactic against the party he forged into an instrument of Indian
independence.
Was
it then, and is it now, merely a case of cometh the hour, cometh the man? Was
the situation ripe, in 1911 and 2011, for the emergence of a symbol of
resistance against an effete government, which both Gandhi and Hazare seized?
In
Gandhi’s case, we have the advantage of hindsight stretching over 100 years. In
Hazare’s it’s but a mere year.
And
what a year it has been!
No
moment in history is a standalone; events are but a cascade, each running into
the other, impelling and influencing the flow. It could hit a plateau and peter
out, or continue its frolic till the very end.
The
events of 2011 were influenced by last year’s misrule, and as the present one
comes to a close there is no sign of the torrent slowing down. Lessons that
ought to have been learnt were ignored, actions that should have been taken
were swept aside, making one wonder at times if there was a government at all
in place. All it had was a prime minister who doesn’t enjoy his party’s
confidence; a party president who has no views on anything; an heir apparent
who doesn’t enjoy the title.
If
that was the United Progressive Alliance, which in 2011 showed little evidence
of being either united or progressive and at times even behaved like a
misalliance, the Opposition’s lot was no better. That the public’s trust and
faith in the government were whittling had been evident for a while. Normally
this should have been manna from heaven for the Opposition, but so badly was it
caught napping that into this vacant space marched Anna Hazare and his merry
men and one woman.
If
you really think about it, Dr Manmohan Singh’s government has done more for
transparency than any other government before it. And if you think about it deeply,
you will also realise that this government has the rare distinction of having
at least one honest person in it.
But
what happens very often is that the forces of change, the forces of
expectations that get unleashed push the bar so high that the very agents of change
are often consumed by it, as Mikhail Gorbachev would testify. This force is the
wind behind the Jasmine Revolution/Arab Spring that is toppling regimes in its
wake.
If
little democracy, it was either all or nothing,
that even democracy, which warts and all remains the best form of governance in
all of human history, has its shortcomings.
In
many ways, UPA the sequel is different from its first avatar in 2004. When it
went to the people for a re-election on the plank of the aam aadmi and transparency and asked for freedom from the Left’s
tyranny, it had the MGNREGS and the RTI as showpieces to back its claim. The
people believed in its claims, and 2009 came about.
Alas,
since that summer two years ago, there has been little evidence of either the aam aadmi or transparency in the
government’s thought and deed. On the contrary, the RTI has been seen to be a
double-edged sword that can equally be wielded against its creator; and the aam aadmi has been buried in homilies in
the face of a raging inflation. And corruption only completed the tragedy.
That
the people were angry was known, but the government didn’t take it seriously
enough.
That
the people were hungry was also known, but the government couldn’t care less,
or at least that was the attitude shown by its arrogant ministers.
The
results from the West Bengal, Tamil Nadu and
elections should have sounded a warning but it was lost in the babel that is
the UPA. In the first two states the people threw out an entrenched
maladministration, while in the third performance and sincerity were resoundingly
rewarded.
What,
me worry? That must have been the UPA’s motto as it saw its principle
opposition, the Bharatiya Janata Party, go through its myriad convulsions over
the question of who will be the next prime minister – the party not only behaving
that the UPA’s days were over but also like it had already won an election slated
for 2014.
The
first sign of civil disobedience came in the form of a saffron-clad yoga guru.
As the televangelist yogi’s hunger strike gathered crowds, the government
initially seemed to prefer kid gloves before revealing its iron fist. That it
could get away with the use of brute force in the wee hours against a peaceful
crowd, in which one protestor was even killed, should have emboldened the
administration when Anna Hazare stepped up to the plate.
Hazare,
after all, doesn’t even have a base to speak of even in his home state of
local bodies, in which his target Sharad Pawar’s Nationalist Congress Party
came up trumps).
However,
six months later, it is the UPA that is on its knees before an old man who,
like Gandhi, is not a politician.
Will
the Lokpal, that Hazare and his India Against Corruption colleagues like Arvind
Kejriwal, Prashant Bhushan and Kiran Bedi have been demanding of the UPA,
change things for the better?
The
jury is out and probably will never return on that one. But one doesn’t need to
be an Einstein to see that creating a new superset of bureaucracy is not the
best way to eliminate corruption by the existing bureaucracy, that there is no
dearth of laws outlawing misdemeanour in
will to implement them.
The
source of the mass anger against the government, and all politicians, is not over
the presence or absence of a Lokpal, but against a callous government that has
forgotten the people who voted it to power. You can pull out rabbits like FDI
in retail and Food Security Act from the hat, but that still won’t make you a
magician. What this government lacks is magic, which is different from sleight
of hand which has been in abundant evidence.
As Annus Horribilis ends with a whimper, the
tantalising question is: In its 100th anniversary as the capital of
colonial
graveyard of yet another dynasty?
