Congress and Anna Hazare’s strange love affair

We are in need of some kind of political psychoanalysis to understand the torturous and tortuous relationship that has emerged between the Congress and Anna Hazare through this year. We are aware of the deep mental ailment when victims fall in love with their torturers in an inexplicable case of inverted perversion. Hazare has been a ruthless torture master, and the Congress has been displaying painful submissiveness. It appears that the sinful Congress wilts and withers at the sight of the supposedly upright Hazare. The righteous man too seems to derive sadistic pleasure in bullying the Congress.

Digvijay Singh, the uninhibited Congress articulator, too hesitates when he says something about Hazare. He never dismisses the man from Ralegan Siddhi out of hand. Singh blames the people around him for misleading the simple social activist. Home minister P Chidambaram, explaining Hazare’s arrest in August in the Lok Sabha, described him as a Gandhian. Other Congress leaders believe that the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh is trying to appropriate him. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and party president Sonia Gandhi write to him whenever they feel it is necessary to do so, addressing his concern over corruption and assuring him that Congress too wants to combat corruption.

It is not surprising then that Hazare and his folk derive maximum advantage from the weak-kneed Congress and bully the good old political party with their silly anti-corruption tirade. Congress people are very sensitive and vulnerable on corruption. They do not want to be seen opposing an anti-corruption crusader like Hazare. So the crusader-agitator knows which nerve to tap to make the Congress writhe in agony.

If the BJP and the communists were to rap the Congress on corruption, the party would have turned its nose up in utter contempt. The party did not ever respect political opposition. But it quakes in its boots when civil society representatives launch an assault.

It will not be right to criticise the Congress for choosing to submit itself to the torture games of Hazare and his team. The party is doing so of its own free will and others have no right to say that the party should not bend its knee to a cranky moralist who has no clue about the complexities of a polity and society. And the political opposition is justified in joining the gang of bullies, which is what the Hazare team is, to have their own little bit of fun at the expense of arch-rival Congress.

While the political class and its civil society partners can freely indulge in their sadomasochistic games, and the media can play the role of an unashamed voyeur, it is not necessary for the people to believe and accept that they are witnessing a great political battle between the forces of elementary good and evil.

It is time the Congress is ticked off for indulging in this private deal with Hazare and other civil society groups as though they are responding to the people’s demand. The people speak to the political parties through the ballot box. The people do not need these civil society intermediaries and their public buffoonery. This political circus does not entertain. The civil society — the Hazare group is only one among many — band of puritan brigands make for a depressing spectacle.

The opposition parties must stop giving their moral and psychological support to civil society — especially the Hazare group’s demand for a Lokpal — to spite the Congress. The BJP and communists must contest the burning issues of the day squarely within the political circle of democratic institutions and constitutional modes. Lokpal is not a burning issue and the country cannot afford to waste time on a subject that needs a change in the polity’s moral fibre.

Hazare is intellectually and morally unequipped to deal with the great challenge of declining values in our public life. It is not his fault that he cannot fathom the magnitude of the challenge or that he and his associates are under the delusion that they are indeed in grips with the issue.

The political pantomime that the Hazare group and the Congress-led government have been playing for the greater part of this year is an unaffordable and unpardonable distraction. The country is faced with the problems concerning economic growth, health and educational needs, the imperatives of livelihoods and new living spaces.

If Hazare and his friends are the well-wishers of the country, they would stop their infantile agit-prop indulgences. The Congress must stop believing that it can take refuge behind tokenism, which it has been doing for decades now. The game is up for both Hazare and the Congress. They have wasted national time in 2011.