During the sultry monsoon months of 2011, the simmering anger of people found expression in street protests organised under the aegis of India Against Corruption (IAC), a civil society formation that has become synonymous with the doughty, at times bumbling, Anna Hazare. Yet again, Delhi is to witness the rumblings of a repressed fury. Weeks before the monsoon provides us respite from the searing summer and the Indian parliament reconvenes, Anna and his band are fervently preparing to sit on an indefinite fast on July 25, unless their new demands are met before the deadline. These include the appointment of a Special Investigation Team (SIT) for probing the charges of corruption against 15 Union Cabinet ministers, including Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, and the establishment of special courts for their time-bound trial on the basis of the report the SIT will have to submit in six months. These demands the Manmohan government will not accept. Nor will it engage Team Anna in desultory negotiations, as it had last year over the passage of the Jan Lokpal Bill, or Citizen’s Ombudsman Bill, which could have paved the way for an independent body to investigate corruption charges against public servants. Failing to estimate the groundswell of support for Anna’s demand on the Jan Lokpal issue, the beleaguered government had then promised to pass the bill to stem the rising tide of resentment. The belying of last year’s promise has prompted Team Anna to ratchet up the pressure on the government through accusations of corruption against the group of 15. It is impossible to quantify the impact Team Anna’s campaign had on the electoral fortunes of the prime minister and his party, the Congress. Psephologists though say the Anna campaign was a contributory factor in the series of shock reversals the Congress encountered in several recent state elections. To have credible social activists sit on an indefinite fast on the issue of corruption anyway is not particularly a fetching sight, more so as 24/7 TV channels invariably parachute onto such sites of protest, influencing opinions and fanning smouldering hostility against the government. This is precisely the reason why the Central government has decided to pick up the gauntlet Team Anna has thrown. The prime minister has directly responded to his civil society opponents, demonstrating his hurt and affront at what he calls baseless charges hurled at him. Taking their cue from him, the Union ministers have accused Team Anna of destabilising the Indian polity at the behest of foreign powers; one of them has named the US as the foreign hand guiding Team Anna, a remark many find anachronistic in these days of bonhomie between India and the US. The government’s other attempt is to drive a wedge between an amenable, even simplistic, Anna and those who have been hailed as rebels without a pause, perpetually in search of a cause. The strategy has its logic: take Anna out of the equation and the movement against corruption will be irreversibly hobbled. The government has opted for confrontation instead of engagement because it knows July 25 is also a litmus test for Team Anna. Riding the crest of popular support for much of last year, the Anna ship ran aground in Mumbai in December. The city cold-shouldered them, suggesting political parties, particularly right-wing, had withdrawn their support from Team Anna, riled at its propensity to speak publicly, under the influence of Leftists, against their communal agenda. More pertinently, what hurt Team Anna was the absence of urban and rural lower middle class families participating in protests on their own, a sight as captivating as it is telegenic. Indeed, Team Anna versus government was and is as much a battle on the streets as it is in the media. Both print and TV journos declared Mumbai a failure, and concluded that people had become tired of Team Anna’s interminable agitations that fail to yield concrete gains. To survive as an effective voice of protest, Team Anna will have to pull in crowds on July 25. Team Anna may have failed in securing the enactment of the Jan Lokpal Bill, but you have to be myopic in not counting the gains accruing from the movement of Anna and his band. For one, they have asserted the right of the people to protest, triggering massive mobilisation against the government as it ham-handedly sought to abort Anna’s fast until death. Protest is the sine qua non of democracy, vital both for its vibrancy and health. Second, the movement, willy-nilly, has redefined the idea of citizenry: he and she have been prompted to become the watchdog of democracy, always alert, shaking off the apathy which turns them into quiescent citizens who mistakenly believe their political responsibility entails casting a vote every five years. In agitating for a stringent anti-corruption bill, Team Anna has implicitly argued against the tendency to curb the citizen’s role in framing laws. Third, it has underscored the possibility of launching protests against the government without necessarily rallying behind the banner of political parties, particularly those in the opposition. From nowhere, in a matter of two years, a bunch of activists, without the patronage of politicians and their outfits, have become household names. Look at the leading luminaries of the movement. Prashant Bhushan is a lawyer, whose mastery of the weapon of public interest litigation has exposed the political system’s underbelly. Arvind Kejriwal opted for premature retirement from the Indian Revenue Service to wade into the choppy waters of activism. Kiran Bedi is the first woman to don the uniform of the Indian Police Service, and Manish Sisodia was once a TV journalist. Two years ago, nobody could have thought that such a cast could have made the government quake, in the process becoming an inspiration for those nursing grievances against the state. Team Anna’s decidedly middle class leadership structure has made critics accuse them of embracing causes serving the interests of a very narrow social base. They say the team does not demand systemic changes in the distribution of power, without which it is impossible to alleviate the plight of teeming millions. It has been pilloried for not raising the issues of poverty and malnutrition, for not questioning the Indian state’s brutal suppression of socio-political movements, as also for rescinding the position of neutrality it is expected to maintain while negotiating between the interests of the already pampered corporate world and those of the impoverished. Some of these criticisms are indeed pertinent. Yet it is puerile to create a hierarchy of protests overlapping a hierarchy of issues, and endowing legitimacy to agitations in accordance with the importance of problems they espouse. It is as good as debarring the opening of universities and research institutes until such time as the country attains the goal of universal education. Our social system is deeply integrated: the rooting out of corruption could help tackle, to some extent, abject poverty, at least until the romantics usher in their revolution. You can scarcely fault someone for talking about corruption and not poverty. Should Team Anna fail to mobilise people on July 25, we can then declare it a middle class movement, which failed to resonate among the masses. The author is a Delhi-based journalist and can be reached at ashrafajaz3@gmail.com