Lessons for Anna and Baba From Their Flop Shows

Lessons for Anna and Baba From Their Flop Shows 

They started by saying they were activists for a cause but could never quite hide their political colours. Mass movements can’t be built like this, especially when there’s no official repression

    Team Anna and Baba Ramdev could be forgiven for projecting fake optimism about what they could do. After all, while they didn’t succeed in their efforts to convert urban craving for quick-fix solutions into a mass movement, they did leave a mark — they did familiarise the new generation of Indians with the country’s political past.
    Anna Hazare, who through decades of rural service has earned a Gandhian image, did invoke Mahatma Gandhi on many occasions since Team Anna launched its agitation demanding a Jan Lokpal last year and an independent probe into ministerial corruption this year. Symbolism of the past was abundant in more ways than one — former armed forces chief VK Singh, who has joined hands with Team Anna, echoed the late Jayaprakash Narayan’s famous speech towards the end of the second installment of the agitation, “Singhasan khaali karo, Janata aati hai” (vacate the throne, the people are going to replace you). The hunger strike itself was a real blast from the past, bringing to the centre stage Gandhi’s most potent weapon against the British Raj. Hazare’s attire also helped in reviving the memories of the freedom movement and the Jayaprakash Narayan ( JP) movement of the early 1970s.
    True, symbolism did help in attracting the attention of India’s city dwellers frustrated with large-scale breakdown of public delivery systems. But it didn’t go much beyond that.
End of a Dream
Sociologist Dipankar Gupta has thought about this. “The support of the middle class, which forms the backbone of any ideological movement, is crucial and that seems to be waning,” he says, emphasising that “what gets the middle class going is when a cause has a policy implication and when issues are in black and white — like colonialism versus freedom, emergency versus democracy”.
    True, it is unwise to compare the Anna movement with the freedom movement or the JP movement. Those were not urban movements. While Anna & Co thrived on TV coverage, the movements of the past had relied on door-to-door campaigning. More importantly, they were led by highly charismatic leaders.
    Gupta says Hazare and Ramdev erred in tactics, too. Team Anna shifted ‘goal posts’ frequently, he says. “When they were part of the drafting committee for the Lokpal Bill,” historian Ram Guha told ETin an earlier interaction, “they lost the opportunity to claim a small victory by seeing the process of drafting to its logical end. The bad blood between the government and Team Anna meant that the drafting committee was a non-starter.” He added, “If you look at Gandhi and India’s freedom movement, he talked about the beauty of compromise and the freedom movement is rife with instances of raising people’s movements on issues and wresting concessions from the imperial government and then returning to fight another day.”
Conceptually Confused
This time around, the focus of the Anna movement was less on creation of Lokpal more on setting up of a special investigative team to look into charges of corruption against several Union ministers. To top it all, Team Anna also announced its imminent political foray, raising suspicion in the minds of many people about the political ambitions of at least a few members of Team Anna.
    A senior Union minister puts it succinctly: “They started off as activists who wanted policy changes which they felt the political class was blocking. The government responded accordingly. When it was clear that the game was political, the government, too, started dealing with them politically. As politicians, their tactics were a failure,” he said. “Now they have declared they are a part of a class they have despised. Let’s see how this pans out,” he said.
    The opposition, however, is still hoping that the diminishing returns of this agitation may still spin off some political gain in terms of fanning anti-incumbency against the UPA government. For that to happen, however, says a socialist leader who has attended Baba Ramdev’s fast at the Ram Lila maidan, “political and ideological forces have to unite and the nature of state oppression have to be highlighted well”.
    Adds he: “Quite frankly the JP movement lasted from 1972-77, and for the first few years it wasn’t the force which it became until the government of the day entered people’s bedrooms with its vasectomy programme,” he says. The situation is different now in that people don’t have the perception that the government is trampling on their freedom. Neither is the government muzzling the press.
Repetition as a Farce
According to social scientist Yogendra Yadav, who favours Team Anna launching a political party, “the question of the crowds has been misunderstood and overplayed by the media”. He goes on, “In recent political memory Delhi has seen a million-plus crowd on two occasions, once when Mahendra Singh Tikait laid siege to Boat Club and second when the CPI(ML) held a rally. The next day’s papers reported this as a traffic disturbance. The moral legitimacy enjoyed by the Lokpal movement among people who do not attend rallies has not been taken into account,” he notes.
    Yadav says being repetitive is suicidal for any movement. “It is a fact that repetition of tactics in politics fails to generate the same fervour.... Gandhi’s mass movements were separated by at least a decade on all occasions. Secondly, in the first round [of the Anna movement] there was a sense of something tangible being achieved; in the second avatar, these tangible goals appeared diffused,” he says.
    Call it a lesson in humility for Team Anna and Baba Ramdev. Before they make a comeback, they had better unlearn old habits.

:: Nistula Hebbar ET120819