If Gordon Ramsay’s food magazine can be called F Word, so can the phenomenon to which India is witness these days, at least in two major fields. We are talking about fatigue — of crushing, collective proportions.
It is cricket fatigue, of course, that commentators are talking about, with everyone concerned, including the players, the analysts and members of the public nodding emphatically. Cricket may be a ‘religion’ or a passion for Indians, as we are frequently reminded, but there is a point at which they would prefer even profanity and T20-free placidity. They were dying for tame evenings after what they have been through: the Cricket World Cup from February 19 to April 2 and the Indian Premier League (IPL) 2011 from April 8 to May 28.
It is hardly a surprise that nearly half the seats were empty in the pavilions where the last few matches were played, except the final. No wonder, either, that senior players opted to stay home when a truncated team India left for the West Indies for games between June 4 and July 6.
What few are talking about (but is still a reality) is what we may call the crusade fatigue. It is setting in for sure, even as applause for a series of anti-corruption campaigns is being orchestrated all around. This is not the first of sacred wars on corruption but is threatening to become the most stiffly boring.
The country has seen a lot of scams before, with political campaigns seeking to profit by them electorally and otherwise. The recent series of scandals has been longer and involved much, much larger sums of taxpayers’ money. Curiously, however, they have provided no deadly ammunition to the opposition desperate for issues of this kind. We are not going into the reasons why for now, but one of them is certainly the fact that there is practically no section in the political spectrum that can cast the first stone.
This has led to the sprouting of a seemingly non-political campaign, under two leaders given a larger-than-political image. The on-looking opposition, especially the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) — beginning by now to resemble a lost babe in the woods, is waiting meanwhile to cash in on the avowedly apolitical campaign.
It all began on April 5, when Anna Hazare, known so far only as a rural development activist in the State of Maharashtra, launched one of those ‘fasts unto death’ (few of which prove fatal) in New Delhi to pressurise the government to enact an anti-corruption act and create a Lokpal (protector of the people or an ombudsman). The fast and protests in its support were played up hugely in the media, preparing for the next big story after the IPL.
The fast, however, ended on April 9, with Hazare announcing that the government had conceded to all his demands. It had agreed to set up a joint committee of government and civil society representatives to draft an effective Lokpal Bill. But the committee’s composition raised a controversy among Hazare’s civil society supporters. He created more trouble for himself and the nascent movement by lauding the great developmental work allegedly done by Narendra Modi in Gujarat, thus nearly losing the backing of many civil society celebrities before beating a hurried retreat.
Subsequently, Hazare claimed to have revived his campaign, pointedly including corruption in Gujarat among his targets. By then, however, he had a kind of rival in Baba Ramdev, a ‘god-man’ without whom sacred anti-graft campaigns seemed somehow incomplete to many. The 46-year-old Swami, known for the fabulously large fortune under his control and being the “rocking star of Yoga” as rapturous overseas devotees bill him, had different ideas.
While Swami Ramdev has broadly backed a demand for a Lokpal Bill, his own emphasis has been on black money stashed abroad. He claims that, if this is done, one Indian rupee will fetch no less than $ 50 dollars in the exchange market by 2020! Some detractors may demur about his “swadeshi” (pro-indigenous) commitment, pointing out that his Patanjali Yogpeeth is particularly proud of its base in a Scottish Island, acquired for about £ 2 million. Some others may scoff at his claim about what he can do for the Indian currency, recalling his past claims that his yoga could provide cures for cancer and HIV.
All these, however, have not stopped the Swami from soldiering on. Wooed by both the Congress and the BJP, he has vowed to go on his own “indefinite fast” from June 4. The country is waiting with bated breath for the exponent of breathing exercises to exterminate the evil of black money, even if he may be giving less than total support to Hazare’s Lokpal Bill campaign.
It must be noted, meanwhile, that a draft Lokpal Bill is no startling new brainwave of Hazare and his select band of civil society. The idea is 42 years old. Different versions of Lokpal bills have been introduced in parliament 10 times thus far: 1969, 1971, 1977, 1985, 1989, 1996, 1998, 2001, 2005 and 2008. No less than five times out of these (in 1977, 1989, 1996, 1998 and 2001), the measure was piloted to an ignominious end under governments with a major role for the BJP.
The main sticking point was always about whether the prime minister must be included within the purview of a Lokpal enactment, making possible the ombudsman’s action on allegations against the occupant of the country’s highest executive post. No political party with national-level ambitions has ever agreed to the proposal. Nor is any likely to do so now.
The issue may still not fade away. Big-ticket ‘economic reforms’ have brought bigger money into the country and, consequently, bigger scams than ever before. But the anti-corruption ‘movement’, by which the mainstream, middle-class media sets so much store, may end up as much ado about nothing.
Corruption, which has grown to extra-large proportions, can be ended not by extended fasts or esoteric bodily exercises by the elite-anointed saints. This can be done only by firmly rejecting a path of development, the fruits of which are reserved for the rich and the super-rich.
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