Daily Times

“I am Anna.” So proclaims the
slogan on thousands of caps and T-shirts at rallies reportedly rocking New Delhi and other major cities of India for over a week now. This slogan of personal identification has replaced the earlier one of prostrate adoration: “Anna is India and India is Anna.”

It is time for a third slogan. It is time for India or the average Indian to announce, “I am not Anna”, on any appropriate part of his or her apparel.

The ‘Anna’ (elder brother) of all these slogans refers, of course, to Anna Hazare, the revered leader of an ‘anti-corruption crusade’ who needs little introduction by now in the country or its neighbourhood. Baburao Hazare acquired the Big Brother’s status after his work as a rural development activist in the village of Ralegan Siddhi of his home state of Maharashtra. This, along with his cap of homespun cotton, gave him a ‘Gandhian’ reputation.

The image has been reinforced by his fasts, a method frequently used by Mahatma Gandhi. Anna’s fast since August 16, the main feature of this movement at the time of writing, has prompted his description by his more ardent devotees as a “modern-day Gandhi”. There are good reasons, however, why Anna does not revive nostalgic memories of the nation’s freedom movement in many sections of the people. No, one cannot become another ‘Father of the Nation’ by fasting alone. Between the Mahatma and the man in a ‘Gandhian’ garb, in fact, the contrast is glaring on major counts.

“The rule of non-violence,” said Gandhi, “allows of no exceptions.” Anna propagated reform of alcoholics in Ralegan by means of public floggings. His ultimate cure for corruption, as he has repeated at several rallies, lies in capital punishment for the corrupt. He has not gone back on this, though he has given up calling for this deadly solution after some current associates voiced their discomfort.

With his vision of ‘village republics’, Gandhi was devoted to the idea of decentralisation. Analysts find Anna’s idea of an ombudsman (Lokpal) for India almost the ultimate in over-centralisation. The Jan Lokpal (people’s ombudsman) Bill, which Team Anna wants parliament to pass with no debate or demur, envisages a potentially tyrannical institution trusted with powers of investigation and prosecution in cases of corruption involving officials from the petty clerk to the prime minister, in areas ranging “from villages to ministries” across the nation. And the ombudsman is to be the nominee of a panel of eminent personalities, none of whom will be accountable to the people like members of a markedly non-elite parliament.

It is the issue of communalism, above all, that makes clear the grossness of any comparison of Anna with Gandhi. The Mahatma fell to a bullet of communal fascism, while Anna claims to be fasting for a very different cause, in the company of the far right. In one of his earlier rallies, he called upon the nation to adopt Narendra Modi’s ‘rural development’ model. This led to more than a murmur of protest from members of his team, anxious to avoid any taint of association with the Gujarat chief minister who presided over the gory anti-minority pogrom of 2002.

Anna beat an awkwardly hurried retreat. But his retraction has not concealed the revival of hopes in the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), badly in need of an issue that promises it political returns. With its staunch belief in the shortness of public memory, the party is striving to clamber on to Anna’s bandwagon, and still retain some credibility. The BJP has held power at the head of coalitions in New Delhi from 1996 to 2004 and as an important component of an alliance during 1977-80. These regimes were no more responsive to the idea of a Lokpal, especially one with the prime minister within its purview, than other dispensations over the past four decades and more.

The party is now busy playing a two-faced role, in which it has proved a past master time and again. While it has officially disapproved of Team Anna’s attempt to truncate the parliamentary process, it has allowed a trio of its leaders — Indira Gandhi’s grandson Varun (noted chiefly for an extraordinary exhibition of communal virulence in an election speech), former External Affairs Minister Yashwant Sinha, and Bollywood actor Shatrughan Sinha — to declare stronger support for the Anna campaign.

The leading opposition party may be hoping for a rich electoral harvest from the movement for an ombudsman under a leader of ‘holy’ lineaments. The constituency of Anna, however, would seem to consist of the largely non-voting middle class, especially its upper echelons. Larger forces, obviously, loom behind the rallies in the capital’s Ramlila Grounds and elsewhere.

At the moment, we may not be able to identify these forces with precision. An answer, however, is suggested by the suspiciously sudden eruption of the campaign, the speed with which Anna was sainted, and the role of major sections of the media as the mouthpiece of the movement. Another indication is provided by the absence of corporate corruption from the ambit of the draft bill that Anna wants to be passed without dilatory parliamentary procedures.

In any case, to say “I am not Anna” is not to say “I am Manmohan Singh”. It is only another way of saying, “I am not — and will not be — a pawn in a power-and-pelf game played in a deceptively ‘Gandhian’ disguise.”

The writer is a journalist based in Chennai, India. A peace activist, he is also the author of a sheaf of poems titled At Gunpoint